As part of my work around the writing of my book Life in Five Senses, I decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum every day for a year. I loved these daily visits to the Met so much that I still go to the museum every day.
Around the same time that my book hit the shelves, another book was published, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley. For a decade, Patrick worked as a museum guard in the Met, and in this terrific memoir, he writes about his experience.
Because we both had new books that discussed spending time in the Met, somehow—and I don’t remember exactly how—Patrick and I met. We had a lovely time wandering through the museum together, talking about our observations and favorite objects.
The highlight, for me, was when Patrick pointed out something he called the “guard marks.”
A “guard mark” is the mark made on a wall where museum guards have leaned up against it, and over time, have caused that wall section to darken. Especially on the stone walls around the top of the Grand Staircase that leads up from the Great Hall, these guard marks make a very distinctive stripe along the walls.
In his book, Patrick writes: “I can make out a faint blue cloud on a nearby portion of the white wall. This is a so-called guard mark, the product of hundreds of footsore workers leaning against it in cheap polyester suits.”
But even though I’d read Patrick’s book, and even though I’d visited the Met hundreds of times, I didn’t notice these guard marks until Patrick pointed them out. And they’re highly visible! Once he pointed them out, I couldn’t un-see them, yet in all those visits, when I walked right past them, I’d never noticed them.
Now I look for them every time I visit, and I delight in pointing them out to other visitors.
The way I didn’t see, then did see, the guard marks reminds me of an important truth: What we see depends very much on what we expect to see, and for that reason, sometimes, the obvious is the hardest thing to notice, if we don’t know to look for it.
Resources and links related to this episode:
- Life in Five Senses
- All the Beauty in the World (Amazon, Bookshop)