Alone in the Temple of Dendur

When our friend E. started working as a curatorial fellow at the Met Museum a few years ago, she mentioned that employees are allowed to bring visitors to the museum, including on Wednesdays, when the museum is closed to the public. They’d suspended this practice during the pandemic, but earlier this year, they brought it back. Last weekend I was talking with E. about how I really needed to see the Winslow Homer show before it closed, and maybe I would go squeeze in a visit on Monday or Tuesday, and she said: “Well, how about a private tour of it on Wednesday?”

Friends in high places! This is one of the perks of loving people who love their work. Not only are your conversations more interesting and soul-searching (when a person spends their time thinking about things that light them up, their enthusiasm becomes contagious), but there is also a good chance that, at some point, because they love that work, they will want to share that work with you. I love nothing more—truly, nothing more—than getting to see how another person spends her time. Understanding the texture of another person’s ordinary Wednesday is, for me, the height of intimacy.

Anyway, that’s not actually the point of this post. The point is that Andrew and I leapt at the opportunity, and in doing so, managed to check a major item off the New York bucket list. We didn’t have a ton of time, squeezed as we were by the other obligations of an ordinary Wednesday, but E. had planned our visit well. We met at the ground floor entrance near 81st Street. This was a doorway I’d stepped through many times before, and inside, though the museum was basically deserted, the shape of the room was familiar: the ticket counters, the elevator, the coat check. But then E. led us past the restrooms, to the door that separated the public from the private, the stage from the backstage. With a quick buzz of her pass, we were through.

There are moments, as a novelist, when you can feel your brain working in overdrive. You’re like a greedy sponge, trying to soak up every last bit of your surroundings, absorbing knowledge that you couldn’t otherwise access. Doors labelled Government Affairs; doors labelled External Affairs. Pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped copies of catalogues destined for the gift shop. The bulletin board near the security guard’s lockers. The staff cafe. Long basement hallways spanning multiple north-south city blocks. A sign on the wall, E.’s favorite: YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT. “I feel like a kid in a candy shop,” I said, slightly giddy. There are moments when you are hyperaware of how special an experience is. Every detail sticks with you. Every detail teaches you something, and makes you ask new questions. Every detail might prove the genesis of some future story. This heightened attention, in my experience, has the curious effect of actually expanding my sense of time. (Back in 2019, for instance, we spent a week in Russia. A week isn’t much, in the grand scheme, but that week contained more soul-shifting inspiration than entire seasons of my life.)

After walking through the staff cafe, we climbed a staircase and reemerged into the museum, in the Egyptian wing. A few moments later and there we were, in the Temple of Dendur. There was another group taking selfies, another employee and her friends, but soon they left, and the three of us were alone.

If you’ve ever been in the Temple of Dendur on a Saturday or Sunday, you know how busy it can get. It’s a big room, but for most of my life, I’ve only experienced it in a crowd: people milling around the reflecting pool, voices echoing from the vast glass wall. But last Wednesday, when it was emptied of other people, the room felt somehow smaller, and more intimate. Like looking at your apartment on the day you move out, after the furniture and boxes are downstairs on the truck, you suddenly think: how did it all fit in here? I didn’t have to jockey or elbow my way up the steps. It left my mind free to wander. As I looked at the temple, and at the priestess statue tucked inside, which I had never noticed before, I was struck by how unlikely this was. In its two thousand years of existence, this structure had witnessed so much. Empires, wars, new religions. Think about how many millions (tens of millions, hundreds of millions?) of people had spent time in its presence. But right then, for that microscopic sliver of its lifespan, we were alone with it.

**

Several years ago, I started a spreadsheet to track the books I was reading. When someone asks me what I’ve been reading recently, I have this tendency to draw a total blank (uh…my email? an article in New York mag? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen except that was back in 2010?), and so I started writing the books down, to counteract that tendency. The spreadsheet is very basic. I keep track of the title, the author, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, and then I have a column called “Notes” in case I feel like noting down my reaction, which I do about fifty percent of the time. My reactions are highly subjective and unscientific, things like “blah” or “meh” or “long as shit” or “liked, didn’t love.” But some books merit the all-caps treatment. Peppered through the spreadsheet are “LOVED” and “INCREDIBLE” and “SO FRICKING GOOD.” Middlemarch gets “WOW, WOW, WOW.” War and Peace gets “WHAT CAN I EVEN SAY?!” It’s like the New York Times Book Review for stupid people.

The books that merit those rapturous all-caps reactions tend to be the classics. Occasionally a contemporary novel sneaks in there (Homeland Elegy by Ayad Akhtar), or a semi-recent work of nonfiction (The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk), but most of the time, we’re talking about Leo Tolstoy, we’re talking about George Eliot and Toni Morrison and Paul Bowles. I think there is a reason that I love these classics so intensely; I think the passage of time has a lot to do with it. Because, in reading each of them, I have the uncanny sense that the authors—despite that passage of time, not to mention our meaningful differences in background and race and nationality—are speaking to me, and to me directly.

When I pick up a copy of War and Peace or Beloved or Middlemarch, I know that there are, technically speaking, millions of copies of this book in existence. I know that there are certainly other people reading this very book as this very moment. I know that this book wasn’t written for me, for Anna Pitoniak, for this specific human body. But when I open the book, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels private. It feels like we’re alone in the room, just the two of us.

Some art speaks loudly. A crowd doesn’t dampen it. Some art actually needs the crowd: the concert, the opera, the sculpture in a city park, the public monument, the blockbuster movie. Some art operates on multiple levels. Watching a performance of one of Beethoven’s symphonies is a very different experience from listening to it on Spotify in your living room, but both experiences are equally important, because both will reveal different aspects of the art to you. But there is something, to me, very special about experiencing a work of art alone. Whether reading a book, or listening to music on the subway ride home, or lingering in a museum right before it closes: that sense of total privacy opens up a kind of bi-directionality. I am looking at the art, but I also feel that the art is looking at me. It’s a subtle, slippery feeling. It doesn’t always happen. But when it does, it’s magic.

See, I’m a word person. Always have been, always will be. I love reading, I love writing, I love talking. I can talk until the cows come home! But, like most of us, I’m also drawn to what challenges me. There is art that doesn’t rely on words. And while words can be written around that art (scholarship, wall text, blog posts like this), they never actually touch or affect the art itself. To experience the art is to sit there quietly, not saying anything, not using the words in your brain. Just sitting and looking in silent communion.

Even if I can’t articulate exactly what these moments mean to me, I can tell you how much I treasure them. A few years ago, I had a feast of them. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg has a stunning collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, but when we visited, the galleries were nearly empty. The crowds, it seemed, were focused on the galleries across the square, with the Tsar’s old state rooms and the Faberge eggs and the Rembrandt portraits. But where we were—Matisse, Monet, Gaugin, van Gogh, the list goes on, and often I was the only person gazing at a given work of art. There was a room filled with Picassos, and I spent several minutes in that room, totally alone, transfixed in particular by this piece.

In New York these opportunities are harder to come by, but that’s part of what makes them so special. That’s part of why last Wednesday with E. was so meaningful. But I do my best. I keep chasing that feeling. I like to go to a museum late in the day, just before it closes, and linger until the guards kick me out. The last time I went to MoMA, I managed to be the last person in the Swimming Pool room. Just me and Henri Matisse, alone for thirty glorious seconds, until the guards said, ma’am, we mean it, it’s really time to go. And so I say goodbye, and step back into my regular life, but those thirty seconds will have always happened; they will always be woven into the existence of that piece, even if I’m the only person who remembers that existence.

**

Before I leave you! Housekeeping. I have a handful of events scattered across the coming months, listed here, but I wanted to alert you to a few in particular.

Coming up soon: if you’re in the Hamptons area this summer, I’m speaking at the Quogue Library summer author series on Sunday, July 31 at 5 p.m. This is my first event out east as a quasi-resident, though hopefully not the last!

And further out: if you’re in British Columbia, I’ll be appearing at the Whistler Writer’s Festival on Saturday, October 15. Exact details to come (the festival is announcing the 2022 line-up next month), but this one is also special. Whistler is my hometown, and honestly, if you had told eight-year-old Anna that she would someday come back and get to talk about one of her novels, her mind would have been blown. (And then she would have gone right back to watching the Magic School Bus.)