Bringley was working a desk job at The New Yorker when his older brother Tom died of cancer in his twenties. After that, he had no taste for a career; he only wanted to stand still. So he took a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stayed ten years, in a blue suit, on his feet, in the same rooms all day. The book is what he saw from that post: The paintings, sure, and he’s good on those, but mostly the other guards, who come from everywhere and know the building better than the curators, and the visitors doing whatever people do in front of art. It’s a book about attention and what happens when you give something eight hours instead of eight seconds.
Tall and straw haired, abrupt in her movements, she looks and acts like an enchanted broom.
Chapter 1, page 6
Wandering the wing, I feel something like a traveler in a strange and distant land. If you’ve ever spent time in a foreign city alone, without the language and without a companion poking your sides, you know how fantastically immersive the experience can be. You dissolve almost—dissolve into streetlights and puddles, bridges and churches, scenes you glimpse through first-story windows. You walk the streets alive to the exotic details, but even an ordinary pigeon flapping its wings is oddly vivid. There is a poetry about it, and as long as you glide through watchfully, the spell won’t break.
Chapter 2, page 20
It occurs to me that it isn’t enough to learn from finished works of art in all their apparent perfection. I should keep in mind the toil these works entail. One good reason to look at someone else’s creation is because you’re studying how you might build something yourself. And for the first time in my life really, I feel as if I am building something. In a terribly inelegant, ad hoc process, I am building two little humans; and I am making the little world I would wish them to live in, a project that can’t be perfected or finished.
Chapter 11, page 164