Stand Still Awhile

Saturday, October 12

Today's guest post is by Heather Johnston. The text is an excerpt from the 2023 memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley.

In this passage, Bringley contrasts his first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art at age 11 with his next visit as a college freshman, and reflects on his decision to become a guard at the Met. 

Roaming the old master wing, I was stopped and held fast by Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters, from 1565. I responded to that great painting in a way that I now believe is fundamental to the peculiar power of art. Namely, I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn’t discharge the feeling by talking about it—there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that. As a guard, I will be watching countless visitors respond in their own ways to the curious feeling.

...

Seven years later, I moved to New York for college. The Met’s fall exhibition happened to be a display of Bruegel’s drawings and prints, and again I climbed the Grand Staircase, this time gripping a notebook in my new role as starry-eyed, ambitious student. My whole life I’d been nipping at the heels of my brilliant older brother—Tom, two years my senior, was a kind of math genius—and I saw myself as a plucky little brother with big artistic dreams.

...

The day I visited the Bruegel exhibit I was intent on absorbing every word the curators had squeezed onto the little descriptive labels. I felt I was ready to push past the stupefied response The Harvesters had once provoked in me, which I now suspected was childish and perhaps even stupid. I yearned to become sophisticated, and I thought that with the proper academic tools and up-to-date terminology, I could learn to properly analyze art and thus never lack for something to do with it. Did I feel a little bird beating its wings in my chest? Not a problem! I could quiet the strange sensation by applying my mind to the painting’s motifs or identifying its school or its style. Such a maneuver was a means of moving past my perception of soundless beauty and finding a language that might allow me to move and to shake out in the real world. 

But then my brother, Tom, got sick and my priorities changed. After college, for a period of two years and eight months, the “real world” became a room at Beth Israel Hospital and Tom’s one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Never mind that I was starting out at a glamorous job in a midtown skyscraper, it was these quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace, and loss—and, I suspected, about the meaning of art. 

When in June of 2008, Tom died, I applied for the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew. This time, I arrive at the Met with no thought of moving forward. My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.

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Sometimes I find myself returning to a phrase in my mind again and again. I encounter an expression that describes my internal experience so clearly that it seems the author has read my mind, and that they have identified a distinct emotion that English doesn’t have a word for. Bringley's statement at the end of this passage, "my heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile" is one of those phrases. The circumstances Bringley was in were tragic, but I find these words applicable in a variety of situations. Whether from grief or loneliness or joy, there are moments that are best described as the need to stand still awhile.