Prologue

Only now can I see the tracks of my longing so clearly. When the idea hit me– visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art one hundred times and see what happens– I was standing in one of its Impressionist galleries minding my own business. My eyes flew over Monet’s poppy field and under his lavender-tinted clouds. The premise arrived fully formed like a dare and somewhat startling like a pigeon. Each day I would venture to a randomly selected gallery– never the same one twice– and stay for exactly an hour. Day by day, I would explore museum turf. Day by day, I would have sessions in rooms. I knew about those; I am trained as a Jungian analyst. Straight away, the thought gave me a buzz like a new patient call. Whatever happened, I knew there would be some intense intimate moments (I coveted those) and that somehow, even if in a tiny way, I would be changed. I was game for that. My life was in a rut. I looked forward to meeting the museum’s genuine personality, the banal habits, peculiar desire and simmering disquiet I suspected were there. I wanted to observe the effects it had on people, and I suppose, me. I would witness things most visitors don’t, not because I had special access, but because I had the time and had established a rapport. I knew I would chronicle what happened just as I always did with each analytic session: write it down and file it away. This would be my observance.

I had visited the Met many times before and still my understanding of its rooms and collections was partial. Those visits traveled the same pleasing routes at the same self-serving tempo, time and again. I went to applaud beauty, but also myself in knowing where to find it. My encounters matched a not too conscious agenda and my paths throughout the museum amounted to desire lines. I cut corners.

The same ego that had configured these routes loved the 100-day idea. It was a mountain to climb, and I liked a summit. I never doubted that I would complete it. That tenaciousness had gotten me through analytic training with its own steep slope of hours. All those museum days– I could squint and call them a quest– were challenging enough to intrigue me, but I was dimly aware that underneath them was a corrective. The fact that the idea had come to me while I was standing in a gallery at the Met was not lost on me. What did I need to see? Still, back then, I didn’t grasp where the corrective was coming from. I had never considered a museum, even one as gargantuan as the Met, as a possible interlocutor for the unconscious. 

Maybe what it thought I needed was a little more extravagance– at least that is how Thoreau would have framed it. At the conclusion of Walden, he diagnoses the conundrum: “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.” I sort of knew I needed some assistance. But after all the time I had spent in an analyst’s office, I did not realize how much I needed a different kind of space committed to fresh encounters and unexpected vantage points. What observations might come from there? What extravagance? This required getting out of my rut: extra (outside) vagari (wander). Thoreau worried about being “yarded.” I could feel the fence of my consulting room even as I understood its purpose.

At the beginning, I had a sense of the museum’s power, but I had conflated it with scale. A mountain is not its height alone. What took me rooms to understand was that the Met’s real power, what gave all those square feet so much energy, was its simple but awesome capacity to hold such varied experience under one roof. At first, it was contemplating the logistics that turned me on because when things are big, I assume they are important. The thought of toing and froing to 1000 5th Avenue held me in a sort of spell. I anticipated a project which would decorate the margins of my life as visits slipped into days, weeks and months and I tracked rooms and what happened inside them. All of this would situate me in a wider physical world and I needed that; consulting rooms can feel small at times. I knew the visits would make me feel more substantial, more respectable to myself, even as I remained slightly embarrassed that I had the time to make them. Successful people, I thought, were never so available. 

But as my ego scoured the floor plan and relished in advance the story it would tell, another part of me sensed the potential. That part, informed by psychoanalysis and well-acquainted with other approaches to psyche, understood that the project was not random. It was a journey I was meant to take because the Met is a destination and, psychologically speaking, a source.

I was not conscious of how completely immersed museums are in laws of attraction. I suppose I thought visitors, even interested ones like me, were just playing their part. And yet the more time I spent in the galleries, the more I understood these rooms as quintessential places of encounter. The loving, disliking and indifference that transpired in any gallery never made it to a wall label. Artist, medium, dimensions and style, maybe political context or provenance, these were easier to address. But the regarding subject activates the gallery and the museum. This subject may scour details, but beneath that eyeing is a psychological need, one we might not even realize we have. We look to find what might work for us, something on the outside to answer an inner question or complaint. I had not anticipated that 100 days of looking would present such an accurate mirror of my demands and the seams of my desire. Some were so basic, so tedious I felt, I had never faced them directly, not even with my own analyst.

The project played to an affection I have for routine that found its flow in numbers. I took the 4, 5 or 6 to get uptown. I would walk the same number of blocks and climb a certain number of stairs to arrive at yet another numbered gallery. I stayed for exactly 60 minutes. I never ran over. I never cheated. A session. Numbers guided me. Without them, I feared being unmoored in a very large space. With “one hundred,” I heard an echo of completeness and perfection. It dawned on me how entrenched this part of my personality really is– it took me back to the eco square. 

In fourth grade, each of us had to locate one. “One meter by one meter,” the teacher called out as we spilled through the front doors of the elementary school. It was 1975 and the metric craze was on. I headed to the woods, really a scrubby patch of pines that bordered the carpool lane, wandering as far as I thought I could without sparking a teacher’s interest. Other kids squatted in the crab grass by the flagpole. But since I needed the perfect square and believed such things were never close at hand, I roamed. Once our squares were marked, we were instructed to observe and catalog. Nothing had ever felt so instantly intimate and under my control. Twigs, pine straw, ants and red clay. Some things were countable; some were not. I stared into my square as if into oblivion. I have no idea how long we stayed out there or what happened next. We did not follow our eco squares over time; we moved on to other things. But that night I realized I had lost my ID bracelet, an object I prized because it was expensive, and my best friend had one. The next morning, as everyone else filed into the building, I sprinted back to the square and ransacked the natural order of things to find it. It was not there. The square was no longer so magical and nice. I was crestfallen. It had taken something. Cave Insidias– words I later read at the museum.

Looking back, this mini field trip offered two important insights: the unknown is closer than you realize and more accessible than you think. Actually three: you always bring your own material to the square. The lesson plan must have mentioned natural science, but this same scrutiny applies to psychological inquiry. Committed observation is the first task if we want to bring the layers of life into view. All Jungian analysts have heard the complaint, “Oh, but I don’t remember my dreams.” Jung’s response was essentially the unconscious pays you the attention that you pay it. Pay attention and you will be surprised what dawns on you. This is the premise of any analysis and what helps patients pay attention is a version of the eco square known as the consulting room. Its boundaries and conventions allow two people to observe the strata of sensation, emotion, feeling, thought and desire that present in any given moment and, in some way, are related to a patient’s big complaint. The size of this room, intimate and in New York often quite small, adds pressure to the cause. I discovered that if you are sensitive and intentional, galleries can work in a similar way. They impel encounter.

Thoreau said it all with an adverb. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The galleries were a sort of woods for me. I liked the fairy tale analogy: the museum as a place where compelling characters suddenly appeared and where unremarkable events might mean more than you think. If, as Jung believed, the opposites touch, one of the most civilized spots in town was also among the wildest; a place built on artifice, phenomenally natural. For every conscious aesthetic choice under that roof there was unbridled instinct to match. The Met reminded me of a woods with its mystery and abundance, its mix of boring and spectacular moments, and its moods. It could be bright one minute and gloomy the next. The building’s vistas presented uncanny amalgams of time. Like sedimentary rock, a long view could compress centuries. Weather was never far off. Every once and while there was a window and tourists always dressed according to the outdoor temperature. If nothing else, the museum is a woods because so many visitors get lost.

As I contemplated this 100-day idea, my ego fast-forwarded with plotlines of its own. I might meet someone, not necessarily a lover, but someone whose gaze vibrated in the same direction. Perhaps a lovely dreamer in a thrift store coat. It occurred to me that I might get cruised. Eyes brush everything in a museum. With over six million visitors a year when my project started, the odds were in my favor. And finally, I had a guard fantasy. Our paths would cross every so often in different rooms directed by fate. Confidences would be shared. Slowly but surely, I would get the castle scoop. I had seen a film where a woman returns to Vienna to tend to a dying relative and passes extra time in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, befriending a guard in the Bruegel room. This movie seemed to prove it possible. I did not hold my breath, but I hoped. I told no one.

Any museum experience unfolds in and between rooms. You wander on your own path– even if you are with others– the protagonist in a singular tale of observation. Rooms build that story; they add up to a whole. Card counters and POWs testify to how indispensable rooms are as an ordering mechanism of the human mind. They create memory castles. Rooms create narrative momentum not only because they can hold so much, including a trace of the past, but also because they almost always connect to a future, to whatever lies on the other side of the door.  

For Virginia Woolf there is A Room of One’s Own. The room equals freedom, especially when you can close the door. For Bachelard, there is The Poetics of Space. A room offers an overture to reverie, the sine qua non of poetic experience. And while Thoreau made a reputation by moving to the woods and his pond became the headliner, his single room cabin made his story possible. His “lodge” of 1-2-3 chairs became the trunk for his experience. He left his door intentionally unlocked. Rooms facilitate so many things: imagination, art, solitude, friendship and society. When it came to my path through the museum, each room appeared like a chapter, a section on the way. Like the fabled analyst’s office, galleries offered a place to contemplate and rebound. At other times, these rooms added pressure, provocation and acoustics.

“Only connect!” Many years ago, I copied this line from E. M. Forster into a journal where I kept wise and pithy sayings. This assemblage of life instructions from the philoso-sphere pleased me– I had discovered them, after all– and yet I rarely returned to the journal except to write the next quotation down. I had stumbled upon “Only connect” in a book review. I had no idea where it came from much less that it condensed the emotional thesis of Howard’s End. It simply sounded good. Nor did I know those words had been excised. In his novel, Forester elaborates on Margaret’s observation: “That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted….” Looking back I see I went to the museum for that connection. My life needed a stronger heartbeat and the museum seemed like a reasonable place to find it. I was not so literal as to think it required a person with a pulse, but let’s face it, I was always on the lookout. My life felt so prosaic when I judged it against a couple nuzzling on the subway or in the middle of a venomous sidewalk spat. Though I did not grasp it at the time, one of the reasons I headed to the museum was because I wanted to be in love and unconsciously, I trusted the museum had passion to spare.

But passion is obviously more complicated than that. Before “passion” came to mean desire in the late 14th century, the term connoted suffering, endurance and experience. Thus crucifixion was passion. Ugh. I did not realize that in seeking passion, I would turn a corner into my own peculiar sufferings and that pursuing a soulful experience would also try my stamina. I learned sometimes beauty stings. While I imagined meeting someone and other things– ideas, artists and epochs– another energy, what Jungians refer to as the objective psyche or unconscious, simply wanted me to meet myself– again, at the museum. 

When I set off on my 100-day journey, I was attuned to the vastness of the museum. What I had not considered was how fate might hitch these days together: clouds, the Egyptian Wing, staircases, wanderers, hubbub, the Grand Tour, Jayne Wrightsman, the unlikely sense of touch. Days, galleries, and works of art suggested different approaches to observation; vision, too, deserved some thought. Was I staring, gazing, glancing, registering, surveying, seeing or simply lost in thought? And, although I conceived of myself in the starring role– my ego is healthy enough– I began to realize that I had that wrong. The museum is so loaded with creative energy that it was by far the larger force. I was as much an object in its tale as it was in mine, subject to its personality, privileges and grudges. I thought I was the analyst and it turned out I was every bit the analysand. As I moved through room after room, it was guiding me. I never stopped turning my head for others, their artful mien and banal conversations. But what I did begin to grasp was that in thinking about them– the figures surrounded by gilt frames and the ones standing beside me in sneakers– I stumbled into moments of my truest seeing, the observance that is connection. That made me a little less lonely and a little more alive. This was real company. And ultimately this passion led me to you.