To the world we dream about. And the one we live in now.
—Orpheus, Hadestown
I spent the entire day at the Met and it wasn’t enough. Unsurprisingly, because of the sheer volume of pieces, and beyond that — endlessly more frustrating — because no later than lunch smoke was coming out of my ears. I was exhausted. I had tried to prioritize, to start easy on the second floor, strolling through the European paintings and focusing on the wings I wouldn’t have access to back home. But I got stuck in the drawings before the Europeans even started. I was in front of Matisse’s Jazz series and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Something stopped me dead in my tracks. In my case, the largest part of studying art history happened during Covid and meant memorizing measurements of all the objects we never actually went to see. Standing there I thought I felt what must have been the muse behind all of the books I’d read then, what must have kept every one of my professors sitting through staff meetings, to talk about lines on paper to half-empty lecture halls.
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