Book Review: All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley
Twenty-five-year-old Patrick’s beloved brother Tom dies and he finds himself unable to return to the hustle of his cubicle job at The New Yorker magazine. A long-time lover of art and art museums, he visits the Met and finds there a timeless stillness and beauty that is the antithesis of the thrusting, questing energy characteristic of New York City. Thus begins the story of the ten years he works at the Met as a guard, learning who he is without his brother in company with some of the greatest world art of all time and an international, multi-ethnic crew of guards from all walks of life. This is a workplace memoir taking us into the back of the shop, which is fascinating alone. But there is so much more.
Spending time with Patrick in the contemplative quiet of his workday woke me up to how relentlessly busy I am. (How little time, if any, do I spend simply feeling it passing, slowly, grain by grain, giving me the space to think and notice what I normally don’t think or notice?) The writing is so good! It brought back my own experience of the power of art to displace the ordinary and reveal the extraordinary. Imagine experiencing that awakening over and over in the leisure of long days, months, and years communing with great art. All the Beauty in the World is wonderously rich in insights gained from learning not “about art, but from it.”
If I could tolerate being on my feet eight to twelve hours a day, six days a week, forty- eight weeks a year, and could teleport the daily commute from way-upstate New York to Manhattan, I’d consider signing on to be a guard at the Met. Seriously.
Five stars. Highly recommend.
