Review of All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

“I get there at the Met with no thought of moving ahead,” Bringley writes at the outset of “All the Splendor in the Entire world: The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and Me,” his exquisite account of that 10 years. “My heart is comprehensive, my coronary heart is breaking, and I poorly want to stand however awhile.”

Stand continue to he did. And walk, on “sole-slapping marble” (painful after 12 hours) and creaking wooden floorboards (sweet aid). And rate and pause and ponder and direct visitors to the restrooms and the mummies. For times, then months, then yrs on conclude. He drank in the art, observed local community with the other guards and smiled to himself as museumgoers blew past masterpieces to take a photograph of “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

What emerges is a wonderful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane.

Bringley’s communion with the art seems to fill a non secular need, but it is a corporal just one, also. On 1 of his initially mornings, right before the people get started to troop in, he marvels at this excellent occupation he’s observed: “It’s just me and the Rembrandts. Just me and the Botticellis. Just me and these lively phantoms I can almost imagine are flesh and blood.” The $80 once-a-year “hose allowance” the guards get for socks belies the reality that he has nowhere to go in which he is not accompanied by these phantoms pinned to the partitions. It satisfies him. “I’ve surrendered to the turtleish movement of a watchman’s time,” he writes. “I just can’t fill it, or get rid of it, or fritter it into scaled-down bits. What could possibly be excruciating if experienced for an hour or two is oddly uncomplicated to bear in massive doses.”

The artwork can overawe him. His dwelling section as a rookie is the previous-masters wing, and Bruegel’s “The Harvesters” is his go-to portray, as it is for so several. “I responded to that excellent portray in a way that I now imagine is fundamental to the peculiar power of art. Particularly, I expert the wonderful beauty of the picture even as I had no concept what to do with that splendor. I couldn’t discharge the experience by chatting about it.”

Bringley likens the sensation to the “fantastically immersive” working experience of touring by yourself in a international city. “You dissolve practically — dissolve into streetlights and puddles, bridges and churches, scenes you glimpse by means of to start with-story windows,” he writes. “Even an common pigeon flapping its wings is oddly vivid.” Paintings are these kinds of home windows. In a gallery, “ten or twenty gold-framed home windows are blowing holes by way of the 4 partitions.”

Bringley at times tries to tame his too much to handle inner thoughts about the art by bringing it down to earth. He sights the old-master wing as akin to a village, and over time he counts all the inhabitants: There are 8,496, scattered amid 596 paintings, and they incorporate “every little track record cherub, bullfight spectator, and ant-sized gondolier,” he states in a footnote. Portion B? It has 210 Jesuses. “If you’re pondering how I could possibly depend all that,” he suggests, “you undervalue the kind of time I have.”

Time is Bringley’s leitmotif. He singles out art that speaks to distinctive principles of time — the work of the Egyptians, with their “neheh,” whose essence was a circle a Titian portrait of a youthful male in which “time seems to have pooled as a substitute of frozen, as if past and upcoming are subsumed by the very important present” a Greek statue identified as the New York kouros that Bringley feels specially linked to “as a fellow transplant, and as one who also stands in the museum day right after working day.”

His meditations on time look supposed to aid Bringley mend from the loss of his brother, but they can deliver harsh truths, way too. Just one early morning he spends some time indulging inquisitive schoolchildren peppering him with inquiries about the mummies in the perennially popular Egyptian wing. “A minute later on they bolt from the space, and I’m remaining driving to replicate on how unattractive the mummifying impulse was, what a failure, what a brazen, feeble denial of a elementary fact. The body doesn’t make it. Believe all you want that some piece of a human being is immortal, but a important component is mortal, inescapably, and mad science will not quit it from breaking down.”

Bringley may put paint and marble at the centre of his ebook, but he reserves affection for the individuals of the Satisfied, much too, no matter if site visitors, laborers, passersby or fellow protection guards. He observes the workaday churn with a eager eye. On his initially day, the guard instruction him details out a effectively-tailored curator, eyes on the flooring as he hurries towards his office environment at the rear of closed doors. “The irony doesn’t escape both of us,” Bringley writes. “Those of us who devote all day out in the open with the masterpieces, we’re the ones in the low-cost suits.” (The uniforms are the province of “Johnny Buttons,” who mends individuals suits and banters with the guards, 1 of whom tells him he’s acquired it built, “sitting on your ass all day stitching buttons.” And “what do you do?” Johnny shoots again, “besides standing about conversing to the … statues?”)

Bringley’s fellow guards are a assorted ton, drawn to the Achieved for assorted reasons. At the New Yorker, his friends ended up generally the latest graduates of elite non-public educational facilities, but here, he is familiar with sentries who have “commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal” and “painted facial capabilities on department keep mannequins.” An more mature Togolese banker named Joseph who survived an assassination endeavor gets his closest good friend in the guard corps. On the last working day of perform for Bringley, who a ten years afterwards is nonetheless a young person, Joseph fantasizes about his individual future in their shared language of artwork. He will retire to his mother’s village in Ghana, he claims, and look at the fishermen: “‘You know the Winslow Homer painting in Segment G of the Black man lying on the raft? Sharks are circling all-around him, there is a storm off in the length, but he’s observed the worst presently and he’s just comforting like this’ — Joseph strikes a pose — ‘that’s me.’”

Bringley clearly gets it. In his circumstance it’s his old pal “The Harvesters” that aids him see his return to the ahead-relocating earth. He views it for the “thousandth” time, concentrating now not on the laborers in the foreground pausing for their meal, but on the distant “children throwing sticks at a helpless rooster, the monks bathing in a swimming hole, a cattle driver hauling a load of hay.” The arrested figures, this time, remind him that it’s time to go. “Standing is a talent that can rust,” he says, and “the world does not make alone quick to draw.”

Mary Jo Murphy is a deputy editor on The Washington Post’s Democracy team.

All the Magnificence in the Earth

The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and Me

Simon & Schuster. 226 pp. $27.99