All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick BringleyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
“The picture is so beautiful, so tenderly flush with life that it seems to be itself living… it looks as whole, bright, irreducible, and unfading as I would wish the human soul to be.”
Patrick Bringley lost his brother to cancer. To cope with the grief, he became a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Then he wrote a book about it, which has now been turned into a one-man play.
Books truly find us at the right time.
I read “All the Beauty in the World” in bits and pieces through an incredibly busy, historic week. And if I had read it any other time with greater leisure, I suspect it would have had less of an impact.
But as it was, I took greedy gulps from its waters of calm and introspection, finding it both wise and urgent.
I am a teacher running out of time.
One of the subjects I have handled (for a decade now!) is Contemporary Philippine Art in the Regions (CPAR). There’s a chance I won’t be teaching it next school year, due to an impending curriculum change.
And honestly, I have not had time to mourn.
All I know is, on what could very well be the final semester that I am handling the subject, I am filled with a sort of urgency, bordering on despair, but overwhelmingly still aflame to prove that the arts matter. That studying the legacy of our National Artists matter. That bringing our students to the theater, that helping them sing and dance, and act in the annual school play matters.
Next week, I shall be with our school’s senior high students on a field trip to two museums, and I wish I had author Patrick Bringley’s knowledge to share. I hope love (and my own imperfect knowledge) will suffice.
For Bringley, art is “an Adoration… How useful a name for a kind of tender worship that arises in such a moment. We are silenced by such a vision, softened, made penetrable by what is vibrant and unhidden but felt only weakly amid the clamor of everyday life.”
He has a favorite kind of museum visitor, the “rare person, one who doesn’t pretend knowledge or fear ridicule, who throws the gates of his mind wide open and invites a battalion of new ideas to crash in.”
The memoir takes us through ten years of making a living being with art, and making a life and a family afterwards. Struggling with his newborn as a first time dad, Bringley writes: “I marvel at the moment’s vibrancy. Not only is this beautiful, I think, this is good, its goodness subsuming the struggles… I am building two little humans; and I am making the little world I would wish them to live in.”
He writes of what he reads the masters do, and takes heart that the great Michelangelo struggled with the Sistine Chapel, even writing down: “I am not in a good place. And I am no painter.”
When I think of the impact that great books, paintings, songs, and plays have had on me, I come away with a sense of gratitude, and an overwhelming desire to pass it on. To infect others with this deep, profound joy.
Why post about what we read or watch, or see? For this simple reason: to spread our immense happiness. The Lord knows the world desperately needs more of it.
View all my reviews
