Over time I have become tired of and less interested in memoir, just as the form has dominated the reading world. I admit every life is special, indeed unique, but that doesn’t mean I have to read about everyone’s cancer recovery, divorce survival or escape from an oppressive culture.
However, friends persuaded me to read “All the Beauty in the World” and I loved it.
The book begins as a grief memoir. Bringley’s brother, Tom, two years older, to whom he was very close, develops a terminal cancer, a mysterious soft tissue sarcoma. A graduate student at Columbia, Tom, in his last two years of life, heroically completes his doctoral dissertation in biological mathematics, receives his Ph.D., then passes away.
Patrick Bringley is devastated and rattled and in his search for calm decides to leave his enviable but stressful job at the “New Yorker” and in 2008 take a job as a guard at the Met.
The book then becomes a kind of workplace memoir, but a workplace filled not with competition and ambition, but with quiet and beauty.
The job. Guards work two 12-hour and two 8-hour days a week. They wear blue uniforms and have an 80 dollar a year sock allowance. Wooden floors are much preferred over marble, easier on the feet, and guards take the elevators, not stairs, when changing floors. Every little bit helps.
The tasks are obvious : give directions, answer questions and keep visitors from touching the artwork. Bringley thought he would learn a good deal about art and he does, but not in a factual or historical or technical way. He learns how to look at the paintings, not how to explain them.
The beauty “was not like words, it was like paint—silent direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought.” It is not thought: it is feeling.
As he switches galleries we learn of different eras and genres. He favors the Old Masters and religious paintings; most visitors crave the Impressionists.
He learns the most popular rooms were the Egyptian. Visitors could not help asking, is this real? There are 26,000 objects, most of them three, four, five thousand years old, all real. The Temple of Dendur was brought over in the 1970s, during the construction of the Aswan Dam, 800 tons of sandstone. How is that possible?
Then in 2018 a pair of exhibits fires his imagination. One, Michelangelo, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— is familiar, revered. The other: the quilts from Gee’s Bend. He sees timeless similarities in the two disparate forms. Michelangelo prepares and executes one patch of ceiling a day—the “giornata.” Quilters make a square.
The freshness and originality of the quilts is astonishing to him: abstract designs, asymmetrical patterns, shades of colors from worn, sun-bleached fabric. They are “beautiful, useful, true.” So is this wonderful memoir.
