ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD

A former museum guard recounts the decade he spent at one of the world’s iconic museums.

Disenchanted with a seemingly glamorous post-graduation job at the New Yorker and heartbroken by the untimely death of a beloved brother, Bringley deliberately sought solace in art. At the Met, he gradually forged connections with co-workers from a wide variety of backgrounds, finding a kind of home at the museum. While the author employs the rather hackneyed formula of jumping between past and present, one can’t help but be moved by connections he makes between the works over which he stood guard, and the childlike simplicity of the prose suits his sense of wonder. Amused by the ghoulish questions posed by a parade of schoolchildren through the Egyptian mummy section, he reflects on the futility of the mummification process. “The body doesn’t make it,” he writes. “Believe all you want that some piece of a person is immortal, but a significant part is mortal, inescapably, and mad science will not stop it from breaking down.” The author is also intrigued by museumgoers who lack a sense of direction. “I like baffled people,” he writes. “I think they are right to stumble around the Met discombobulated….None of us knows much about this subject—the world and all of its beauty.” While some of Bringley’s personal responses to masterworks are informative and relatable, others border on the saccharine. Writing about a Monet landscape, he notes, “When I experience such a thing, I feel faint but definite tremors in my chest.” If these musings sometimes fail to stir us, the accompanying illustrations by McMahon strike just the right balance between simplicity and emotional complexity. Readers seeking sophisticated insights into the inner workings of the Met should look elsewhere, but Bringley offers enough interesting backstories to keep the pages turning.

An emotionally cathartic stroll through the hallowed halls of a beloved institution.