All the Beauty
in the World

watching the houselights go down and the stage lights go up and learning there was room enough in the world for this sacred little playing space indifferent to the honking traffic outside

You dissolve almost—dissolve into streetlights and puddles, bridges and churches, scenes you glimpse through first-story windows.

The picture is so beautiful, so tenderly flush with life that it seems to be itself living—living memory, living magic, living art, whatever you'll consent to call it, it looks as whole, bright, irreducible, and unfading as I would wish the human soul to be.

It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives.

Could it be as simple as that? Could there really be this loophole by which I could drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day tarrying in an entirely beautiful one?

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. We need no explanation of our adored object. Adding context could only obscure its plain and somehow unmysterious mystery. No doubt you have felt this way about a sleeping child or lover, or maybe about the rising sun or the pounding surf, or maybe about a holy relic or a sweetly painted picture by a long-dead Italian.

Greece is on my right. Rome is on my left

I experience a rush of gratitude for museums as places to return to and remember.

A work of art tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all.

Here in the big leagues, however, my thoughts were cramped and my ambitions were curiously small

This was a really hollowing disappointment. I don't know exactly what I expected upon entering the "real world" after college, but I expected that it would feel real. But now here I was with a seat in a gleaming skyscraper, midtown Manhattan roaring below, and my prestigious job amounted mostly to playing a kind of computer game: in-box, out-box, sent.

What might be excruciating if suffered for an hour or two is oddly easy to bear in large doses

I surrender to the idea that I am having one of those experiences that arise when you put away your expectations and simply absorb what is happening.

Monet's picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters—the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters—and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment.

We want possession, something to put in our pocket, so to speak, and carry away. Except what if nothing very beautiful fits in our pockets, and only the tiniest sliver of what we see or experience can be possessed?

I look for meaning in the way people wear their clothes and carry their weight, hold hands with their boyfriends and girlfriends or don't, style their hair, cut their beards, meet or avoid my eye, show pleasure or impatience or boredom or distraction on their face or in their posture or through their gait.

I have spent my hours absorbing art, but what if instead I actively wrestle with it, trying to bring all different aspects of myself to bear on the questions it raises? It seems to me that this is a worthy mission for anybody entering an art museum. After we quiet our thinking mind to experience art, we will want to switch it back on, reassert ourselves, and in that way learn even more.

In its basic form, it is "a tying back," a return of one's focus to certain elementary truths as a community perceives them

Why am I then obliged to heaven that it has given me a soul? For it has created within me a source of sorrows from which that soul suffers.

To sum up, I can neither believe nor stand how good her picture is, and for the first time in a long time, I simply adore.

I am making the little world I would wish them to live in, a project that can't be perfected or finished.

Skilled labor to be sure, but of a humbling type that admitted no shortcut taking, no way to proceed except stroke by patient stroke.

Meaning is always created locally. The greatest art is produced by people hemmed in by circumstances, making patchwork efforts to create something beautiful, useful, true. Michelangelo's Florence, even Michelangelo's Rome, was in this way rather like Loretta Pettway's Gee's Bend. I'll try not to think anymore in terms of the "High Renaissance." I'll think of a person spreading out a bit of fresh plaster, and painting it, and a little bit more, and painting it…

that we're mortal, that we suffer, that bravery in suffering is beautiful, that loss inspires love and lamentation. This part of the painting performs the work of sacred art, putting us in direct touch with something we know intimately yet remains beyond our comprehension.

They help us believe that some things aren't transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes—and here is the proof, painted in oils, carved in marble, stitched into quilts.