Reading: José Saramagao, Baltazar and Blimunda

Moving: walked a lot

Garden: none of that either

Watching: the Met

27 November 2002: Frick and Metamorphoses

We had planned to go to Ellis Island but with limited time, weather mongering, and Thanksgiving Eve trains, we didn't. Also we didn't go Tuesday. So we didn't go. But it will be there next time. As I told RDC, I will never be disappointed to go to the Met.

I can't begin to express how much the Met means to me. I wanted to see Tut; instead I saw Alexander. I entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time in seventh grade, deep in my obsession with Greek mythology, having graduated from D'Aulaire to Edith Hamilton and Homer. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Galleries in D.C. and in London have all been wonderful, but only in the Met and the British Museum have I felt such a tie to all my civilization's roots. Walking through the galleries of Greek and Roman sculpture and pottery, wonder weighs heavy on my breastbone. Most of the Egyptian wing was closed for renovation, but even that, an older civilization yet and my first reason to want to see the Met, doesn't blow my skirt up the way Greece does.

Perhaps if I had read The Cat in the Mirror earlier.

I liked Joseph Stella's 1914 Coney Island, round and vibrant; and Alexander Archipenko's bronze Gondolier, in which the pole becomes his left leg and the line is strong. There was not a van Gogh Sunflowers but one by E. McKnight Kauffer (whoever that is) and another by Monet. It's not enough to let me forgive Gaugin (whom I hate because of Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence because I am the most logical person ever down the pike) but he did prefer van Gogh's to Monet's sunflowers, which is only logical. The two first cubist paintings ever, by Picasso and, uh, someone, in 1911. Also Picasso's 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein. Van Gogh's Irises.A Cézanne that I thought was a Modigliani. A Turner that, unique among Turners, didn't make me want to slit my wrists, Europa and the Bull (his are the only seascapes I seriously could do without, and his harbor scenes are technically impressive with detail but otherwise yawnful).

We stopped for a snack in the European sculpture gallery, and I visited what used to be my favorite sculptures in the whole wide world (not that my world is especially wide now, but it's a damn sight less narrow than it was when I first saw them). For years now I have remembered them as marble sculptures of the seasons, but they are limestone and of the elements. Of course. The elements would have struck me as more esoteric than the seasons.

After a late (and yummy) deli lunch, we found our train. An hour and a half later, his uncle picked us up, and then the family part of the trip began.