Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning to two offers in your email inbox. The first is a return offer from your investment banking internship. The second? A guard position at an art museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Given the choice, no one would opt for the latter, and any hesitation at all would feel like a slight against the status, security, and opportunity such an offer represents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Patrick Bringley surely felt the same when he quit his dazzling job at the New Yorker and began working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the surface, guarding art may not seem like the most glamorous career move\u2014long hours on your feet, observing the quiet rhythms of a museum floor\u2014but for Bringley, it quickly evolved into an incredibly nourishing experience that far surpassed his time at the magazine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Bringley\u2019s New York Times bestselling memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me<\/a>, he details his decade\u2013long career in the field. He took up the post after his older brother Tom passed away from terminal cancer. With the floor beneath Bringley\u2019s feet suddenly gone, he was whisked into unpredictable grief and desperately yearned for solace. But more importantly, an escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n That led him up the Met\u2019s grand marble staircase and into a world of mosaics made from a diaspora of people, living all walks of life\u2014of dreamers and artists and old masters beyond our time. The museum has \u201ca greater attendance than the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, and Nets combined,\u201d he points out.<\/p>\n At the New Yorker, Bringley was surrounded by largely the same demographic. \u201cMy peers had all recently graduated from elite private universities and maybe had worked another job in publishing,\u201d he says. It was a flashy institution, but vacuous and unfulfilling. Writing for the magazine meant playing pretend: faking a stylized voice and expressing opinions he wasn\u2019t sure were his own.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was more than a bit blinded by the bright lights,\u201d he admits. \u201cBut it\u2019s very hard, when you\u2019re in a good light \u2026 to accept that it isn\u2019t you; it\u2019s just light.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But as a guard, he could freely voice his ideas and think in obscurity, alongside coworkers who were not only demographically nuanced, but \u201cdiverse along every axis.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition to his interactions with coworkers and friends, Bringley\u2019s memoir thoughtfully explores his relationship with the Met\u2019s renowned collection. Beautiful paintings come into conversation with his suffering, and he examines how art energizes the static.<\/p>\n \u201cThe picture is so beautiful, so tenderly flush with life that it seems to be itself living,\u201d Bringley writes of Titian\u2019s Portrait of a Man<\/a>, pointing to its magic and sense of permanence. The artwork, displayed in the Venetian Paintings section, brings about layered feelings in Bringley; these emotional complexities are as wonderfully passionate, bright, and what he \u201cwished the human soul to be.\u201d But if Titian enlivens Bringley, then Bernardo Daddi exposes a profound pain. In his Crucifixion<\/a>, Daddi didn\u2019t just paint the body of Christ; he painted a deep, potent, impenetrable torture that lingers. Bringley says the picture has \u201cnothing on its mind except suffering,\u201d and to understand it is to take in \u201cthe great silencing weight of suffering.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Grief is a visceral pain we feel with every fiber of our body, as if it has taken refuge in the marrow of our bones. Yet its magnitude slips from our mind in the clamor of everyday life, until something reminds us again of our fragility. When that happens, we turn to great art that humanizes our pain and reminds us \u201cthis is real.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Although Bringley mainly focuses on the Met\u2019s artworks, he also remarks on pieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in delicate profundity. At the PMA\u2019s Author Talk: Patrick Bringley on \u201cAll the Beauty in the World<\/a>,\u201d<\/a> he retells an intimate memory when he and his mother visited the museum shortly after Tom\u2019s passing. Staring at an old master\u2019s painting<\/a> illustrating holy suffering, Nativity and Adoration of Christ, Bringley is reminded of the feeling at Tom\u2019s bedside: one of \u201cspeechless mystery, beauty, and pain.\u201d<\/p>\n During his talk, he reads aloud a section from his memoir where his mother sees Niccol\u00f2 di Pietro Gerini\u2019s Christ in the Tomb and the Virgin<\/a>, a painting of a beautiful, young man, dead in the arms of his mother, who holds his body upright.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n