aside. In a typical gallery, ten or twenty gold-framed windows are blowing holes through the four walls.

They say that the roots of a tree are every bit as extensive as the branches. The Met is like this, too, with two floors below the galleries exactly as endless as the areas the public knows.

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge.

literally unimaginable in that our brains aren’t adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know.

Johannes Vermeer, precious things of which the world has perhaps only thirty-four.

Such a maneuver was a means of moving past my perception of soundless beauty and finding a language that might allow me to move and to shake out in the real world.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves.

The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there. We shouldn’t think “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or “This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, and Z.” Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.