I‘m looking at a single frozen moment in time. In the paint-ing, time appears to have pooled instead of frozen, as if past and future are subsumed by the vital present, or as if there were a part of this young man exempt from time‘s pitiless arrow, and that is what Titian painted. - P20
I left the picture and went looking for Maureen in the Early Renaissance galleries. When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found.
It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily by his mother, who hugged her son as she would if he were living-a scene that is called a Lamentation or Pietà.
My mother has always beena good one to cry-at weddings, at the movies, but this was different.
She cupped her face, and her shoulders shook, and when I met her eyes, I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain. Whenwe adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage "Life is suffering" A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant forwords. - P33
Also by custom, I couldn‘t open a book at my desk, or take a head-clearing walk, but it was just expected that I‘d waste hours clicking around on the Internet, learning how to not read books. So into that muck I sank. And before long I became something I had never really been before: lazy. - P48
Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can‘t be domesticated by vision-what Emerson called the "flash and sparkle" of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidy-ing minds typically let us see. Usually, we are looking around for useful information and dampening or ignoring a riot of irrelevant stimuli that threatens to drown it out. Monet‘s picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters-the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters-and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment. - P60
Looking back, it makes me think of Pieter Bruegel‘s great painting The Harvesters. In that picture, a handful of peasants take their afternoon meal against the backdrop of a wide, deep landscape. There is a church in the mid-ground, a harbor behind, gold-green fields rolling back toward a distant horizon. Closer to the picture plane, men mow the grain with scythes and a woman bends low to bundle it. And at the nearest cornerof the foreground, these nine peasants-comical and sympathetic-have broken from their labor to sit and sup beneath a pear tree. - P87
I was operating as a kind of watchful ghost, whereas he was this obvious grown-up, full-blown. His natural warmth and candor were a threat to my self-imposed lonesomeness.
But things change. - P99
It turns out I don‘t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever. In discovering the cadence with which I meet people, I feel as though I‘m discovering the kind of grow-up I‘ll be. Most of the big challenges I‘ll face in life are also little challenges I confront in daily interactions. Trying to be patient. Trying to be kind. Trying to enjoy others‘ peculiarities and make good use of my own. Trying to be generous or at least humane even when the situationis rote. - P102
We‘ve all had moments when we‘ve been treated like gum on the bottom of somebody‘s shoe. You can‘t work as a security guard without the occasional asshole reminding you, in so many words, that you‘re just a security guard. At our best, we don‘t recognize this as an insult. At our worst, we do sometimes feel as small and powerless as the bullies intend. But on these days, at least we can make them villains in the stories we tell at the bar. - P126
Strangely, I think I am grieving for the end of my acute grief. The loss that made a hole at the center of my life is less on my mind than sundry concerns that have filled the hole in. And I suppose that is right and natural, but it‘s hard to accept. - P142
Michelangelo originally carved a stout and muscular body of Christ, but then he just continued to carve, steadily emaciating the figure until it looked frail and shrinking and oddly like modern expressionistic sculpture. His Pietà of the 1490s was a virtuosic display. This was something more pained and private. - P161
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