Beauty, Strangeness, and Silent Presence: A Guest Post by Patrick Bringley
Patrick Bringley never thought he’d end up as a security guard at the Met, and he never could have guessed how it’d change his entire life. Explore the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art like only a former security guard can. Read on for Patrick’s exclusive essay on how All the Beauty in the World came to be, down below.
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All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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Paperback $18.99
An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard.
An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard.
When I worked as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I always kept a little notebook in my inner blazer pocket. Not because I thought I’d write a book about my experience — I didn’t imagine that until near the end of my ten years standing on post. But I’ve always scribbled in notebooks, for as long as I can remember. And when you work as a professional watchman, it turns out there is no shortage of things to take note of.
I would pace through galleries before the museum opened, and it might be just me and the Greek gods, or the Egyptian pharaohs, or startling quilts from sharecropping communities in Alabama. I would learn from reading museum labels, but I sensed there was much that the curators had left out. Namely, the feeling of facing up to these objects, and what to make of their beauty, strangeness, and silent presence. I would rush down to the locker room on my break and try to wring a few words out of these ineffable encounters I was having.
Then the doors of the museum would swing open and the galleries would be flooded by people, intriguingly intermingled with the portraits and statues. “When you get bored of watching the people, you look at the art,” a fellow guard once advised me. “When you get bored of the art, it’s back to the people.” And there’s wisdom in that; one enriches the other, and I was never bored for long. I became a practiced people watcher in the much the same way as I became adept at admiring Rembrandts. New Yorkers and tourists, art lovers and skeptics began to litter my notebooks.
And earning even more ink: the Met’s extraordinary corps of more than five hundred guards, from every country and background — my colleagues and friends.
In time, I developed an ambition to write A Guard’s Guide to the Met. I thought I could wrangle my scribbled notes into an unconventional guidebook, covering the treasures and the people, the galleries and the backstage. But with so much to include — hundreds of cultures! scores of centuries! a building with a twelve-acre footprint! — I struggled to tie it all together.
Only slowly did I convince myself that the book should be a story. If I wrote a memoir, I could paint the institution while telling the story of a guard, an unusual but also relatable figure, relatable at least to anyone who’s spent quiet hours wandering a great museum.
And since it wouldn’t be about just any old guard — it would be my story — I had to delve into subjects I had spent more time thinking about in my long quiet hours on post than jotting notes about. Namely, I would have to explore why I had taken up my post in the first place after suffering a loss.
That set me on my journey writing All the Beauty in the World.