Thoughts on a Visit to the Met

Hope in dark times

I had yesterday off for President’s Day, and no one else in my family did. This meant I was free to do what I wanted for a day. As is typical on these blessed days, I decided to go to New York City and bum around for a day. Sometimes I just wander, but yesterday I decided to check out the Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at the Met.

Friedrich is one of my absolute favorite painters and one who typically does get retrospectives like this in the United States. It was also an enjoyably surreal occasion because I had gazed upon some of the paintings before when I was a graduate student living in Germany.

Even before I arrived at the museum, my soul felt lifted from the bog it had been in over the last week. Our beloved family cat had died suddenly and painfully and I had gotten some bad health news from a cherished family member. The situation in the country and the world was only getting worse and my stress levels at work were shooting up in the days before the break.

The ache in my soul eased the minute I got off the train in New York City. In Manhattan, more than just about any other place, I feel more palpably alive than in my daily existence. After getting off the subway at 72nd I walked to a bakery and grabbed a delicious cookie and coffee that I consumed while walking in the bright morning light hitting the brownstones of the Upper West Side. From there I took in the soothing sweep of Central Park before arriving at the Met.

Since I was flying solo, I could do something I never get to do when I am shepherding my children in its corridors: wander aimlessly. I went to a section of the museum I’d never seen before, staring into the eyes of a woman on a Byzantine mosaic. Across the millennia that person, whoever, she was, lives on. I eventually found my way to the Friedrich exhibit, which heightened my feeling of being alive even more. His scenes of nature at its most fearsome and sublime never fail to set something off in me. I was there at the exhibit with other people who were similarly touched. Without speaking to one another we were sharing a special moment together.

I felt a wave of comfort in that moment, the kind of comfort I have not felt since before November. As awful and twisted as the nation and the world is, there are plenty of people out there who believe in something higher than the cheap nihilism of the moment. Day after day I feel like I am drowning in a tidal wave of bullshit, mendacity, cowardice, and AI slop. Here it felt like the Met on its pedestal sat above the flood waters.

After the Friedrich exhibit I wandered without a map, deliberately getting lost. In doing so I let the ecstasy of art overtake me. The Met is a massive, labyrinthine monument to human creativity. I took in 18th century French interior design, Edo period Japanese painting, contemporary Black art, Grecian urns, Baroque paintings and Impressionist masterpieces, all without intending to. Room after room after room was full of art, and each piece so beautiful I could have spent hours in just one room.

The tech overlords want to reduce us all to passive, easily manipulated consumers, no more than a mass of data and pixels. Surrounded by the work of human creativity across the centuries and continents, I was reminded that the Silicon Valley ideology is such a weak and impoverished one, one incapable of fulfilling human need.

By the time I got home I was already fretting about the news again, but I have carried the feeling I had at the Met with me. Trump and Musk are going to do terrible things. The tech overlords will try to stuff our mouths, ears, and minds with AI slop. We will fight them, and we may not win. If we have any chance of winning it will come from drawing on our human spirit. Art, literature, philosophy, music….these are things to cling to not as a distraction but as the fuel for the fire that burns in our hearts. Keep it lit.