“Sacred” was the word Patrick Bringley used to describe the hospital room where his brother lay dying of cancer at 26 — set apart from the noise and ordinary rhythms of everyday life.
“Anyone who’s been in that situation knows how your heart can feel full even as it breaks — how you can be filled with love and gratitude at the same time as pain and sorrow,” Brignley told a packed audience at the Osborn recently. “My mom was looking at her son as if seeing him for the first time. Then she looked at me, and with the light falling through the window in a certain way, she said, ‘Look at us. We’re a[n] … old master painting.’”
Displaying a painting of Mary Magdalene by Moretto da Brescia, Bringley recalled that moment from his brother’s hospital room.
“I think she meant it as both adoration and lamentation — the intermingling of love and grief that defines those luminous old master paintings,” he said.
“I was drawn to the spirit of that room, which felt very much like an old master painting,” Bringley said in his talk that was part of The Osborn’s Wellspring Series.
The author of the 2023 “New York Times” bestselling memoir “All the Beauty in the World” spoke about his decade as a security guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His talk traced how that moment of loss led him to the museum — and to a new way of experiencing life. On a screen behind him, he showed photos of his brother, the galleries, and a fraction of the artworks he stood beside during many 12-hour shifts.
Following his brother’s death, Bringley did not return to his job as a young writer at The New Yorker. Instead, in a state of grief and shellshock, he searched for work that felt nourishing and straightforward, a job that would allow him to mostly be alone.
“I found this job that is sort of a loophole in the universe, by which I could stand still professionally in this beautiful place,” he said. “But of course, a guard doesn’t just stand still looking at pictures all day. At 10 a.m., the doors of the museum swing open, and seven million people pour into the Met each year.”
He noted that the museum’s attendance surpasses that of the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, and Nets combined, and described his role helping ensure visitors interact safely with the art.
Moving easily between stories — of conversations with the museum’s 500 security guards, many of them foreign-born; of wide-eyed visitors; and of the occasional accidents and attempted heists — Bringley built toward the more personal epiphanies the job afforded him. The audience sat in near silence.
He reflected on how long, quiet hours in the galleries reshaped his experience of time, boredom, and learning.
“I don’t think I got bored, and that’s just because time works differently when you have so much of it,” he said. “If you’ve got 45 minutes to kill — you’re in line at the post office, your phone’s dead — that can feel interminable. But if you’ve got 12 hours to fill and you can’t kill it, you make peace with it. It’s like being out on the open ocean — you cannot see the shore. Your brain just works along longer wave lines.
“You become used to hours that pass like minutes. And that was a good thing, because I had so much to explore. I’d spend one day in ancient Egypt, the next with Jackson Pollock. Maybe I’d round out the week with Kongo power figures,” Bringley said. “As a guard, you learn your way around every nook and cranny of this 12-acre museum. But you also have the time to reckon with just how much you do not — and will never — know.”
While he began the job valuing solitude, describing himself as “this sort of ghost figure in the corners,” he said he gradually returned to the rhythm of everyday life through the relationships he formed with both people and art.
“One thing I learned from art is how to feel humble, as I’m walking from the Roman galleries to the Dutch Golden Age to 11th-century Cambodia to 16th-century Benin,” Bringley said. “You see all these things that remind you how big this world is.”
“It’s the feeling of looking up at the night sky — of being small, but peacefully so, before the vastness of it all.”
The Wellspring Series continues on Wednesday, May 20 at 7 p.m. with Lisa Napoli, author of “Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR.” The event is free and open to the public. To attend, email rsvp@theosborn.org.
