#patrick bringley

I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art grants us that.

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley

I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride. Baffled people are surprised by things that are, in fact, surprising - that a Picasso is right there for them to breathe on, that an Egyptian temple has been picked up and moved to New York.

#frontmezzjunkies shares an #ActonReview of #AllTheBeautyInTheWorld a #newplay written and performed by #PatrickBringley directed by #DominicDromgoole at #DR2Theatre

What are you reading? What do you recomend to?

I took an Amtrak train to my adopted home of New York. I was twenty-five years old. I joined the rapid, heedless foot traffic of midtown, uncertain, in the broadest sense, of where I would go. Not to the nearby skyscraper with the high-flying desk job I’d been lucky to get but could no longer stomach. Not along any path, I thought, that would find me scrapping and scraping and muscling my way forward through the world. I had lost someone. I did not wish to move on from that. In a sense I didn’t wish to move at all. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I had been allowed to dwell in silence, circling, pacing, returning, communing, lifting my eyes up to beautiful things and feeling sadness and sweetness only.

I’m surprised by the meaning I begin to find in even small interactions with guards and visitors. A favor asked, an answer given, thanks proffered, welcomeness assured… There is a heartening rhythm to it that helps put me back in sync with the world. Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm. You lose someone, it puts a hole in your life, and for a time you huddle down in that hole. In coming to the Met, I saw an opportunity to conflate my hole with a grand cathedral, to linger in a place that seemed untouched by the rhythms of the everyday. But those rhythms have found me, and their invitations are alluring. It turns out I don’t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever. In discovering the cadence with which I meet people, I feel as though I’m discovering the kind of grown-up I’ll be. Most of the big challenges I’ll face in life are also little challenges I confront in daily interactions. Trying to be patient. Trying to be kind. Trying to enjoy others’ peculiarities and make good use of my own. Trying to be generous or at least humane even when the situation is rote.

I was more than a bit blinded by the bright lights. But it’s very hard, when you’re in a good light—“Where did you say you work? The New Yorker?!”—to accept that it isn’t you; it’s just light. Naturally, among the first things I did when I started at the magazine was crack open a Word doc and attempt to write an article in the witty, urbane New Yorker style. I was obviously faking it, and I failed. But rather than take a lesson from that, I retreated to the safety of magical thinking. It speaks well of me that I’m around so many accomplished people, I told myself, many of whom know my name! I have the business card of a serious, substantive person, so keep playing the game and I am sure to become one! It took me almost three years to grasp an unwelcome paradox. If I were working a less “impressive” job, I would be scribbling my thoughts down in obscurity, free to take big swings at whatever topic inspired me. Here in the big leagues, however, my thoughts were cramped and my ambitions were curiously small. I spent my time trying to write one-paragraph book reviews in the “Briefly Noted” section, using a voice that was not my own, claiming authority I hadn’t earned, and expressing opinions I often wasn’t sure I really held... So into that muck I sank. And before long I became something I had never really been before: lazy.