Light and air

The dog, who barks like mad whenever we leave, has had us under house arrest, but today we defied him and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A few stops on the 4 train and we were on the Upper East Side, another world from Cobble Hill. How can I describe it? A spring warm day, the light, the sense of spaciousness, the dog walkers heading for Central Park... "Can you smell the money?" Jarek asked. Yes. I could. In the museum, my work badge got us in for free, which seemed too good to be true even though I had been told about this. The "suggested donation" is $15, cheap if you consider all the art there, but it adds up. Now I can come whenever I want! Visit the Vermeers and leave again, if that is my wish!
We got lost (literally) in European Paintings, looking for Rembrandt but kept getting sidetracked, buttonholed really, by old friends like Memling and Goya and El Greco and Caravaggio. I kept thinking, I can't believe I actually live here and can visit these guys all the time. In some ways that is wonderful and perhaps in some ways it leads you to take things for granted. I remember standing in front of "Las Meninas" in the Prado for something like half an hour, knowing I would not come back to Madrid for many years, or maybe never, trying to remember every single thing about it, and it was a profound experience that haunts me still. Every single painting I saw today, and I saw some great ones, I thought, hey, I'll be back. That is probably a mistake. You should look at it every time like you will never see it again, because one day that will be true.
The Diane Arbus show was temporary, so maybe I looked closer at that. What an amazing talent she had. The works left me both awed and rather depressed; there is such a sense of desolation in every frame. How did she do it? Even the subjects who don't seem to have a perturbed look, like they've just lost something important, a tiny minority, seem myteriously doomed. And yet they are so beautiful, so strange.