All the Beauty in the World

A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader's delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley's home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards--a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

These book club questions were prepared by the author and are available on his website.

Book club questions for All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Why did Bringley find his “low skill” job as a museum guard more stimulating than his prestigious position at The New Yorker magazine? Have you ever encountered such a paradox in your own life? Can you think of other jobs that might be surprisingly interesting or nourishing?

Bringley is discussing a Lamentation painting when he writes: “Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know.” What does the author mean by this? Have you ever used a work of art in this way? Did anything in the book make you “stop and imagine more fully” something obvious?

Bringley is discussing Peter Bruegel’s painting The Harvesters when he writes: “I am sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.” How do you interpret this line? Can you think of aspects of your life that have reminded you of art, or art that has exquisitely described a part of your life?

What is it about quiet spaces (museums, churches, temples, nature) that feels comforting, particularly in a time of grief? If you were grieving, would you find painful images like those of Christ’s Passion consoling or upsetting?

Bringley writes: “The more time I spend in the Met, the more convinced I am it isn’t a museum of art history, not principally. Its interests reach up to the heavens and down into worm-ridden tombs and touch on virtually every aspect of how it feels and what it means to live in the space between.” What sorts of things do you think you can learn by visiting an art museum? How would you apply the lessons of the book when you next visit a museum?

Should all jobs come with an $80 hose allowance???

When discussing his role as a guard, Bringley writes: “I can’t spend the time. I can’t fill it, or kill it, or fritter it into smaller bits. What might be excruciating if suffered for an hour or two is oddly easy to bear in large doses.” What is your own relationship to time like? Does it ever slow down for you and allow you to perceive more than you usually do? When?

About Peter Bruegel’s The Harvesters, Bringley writes: “I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn’t discharge the feeling by talking about it—there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint—silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest. And I didn’t know what to make of that. It is always hard to know what to make of that.” This raises the question, what is the point of looking at something beautiful? What, if anything, is accomplished by it?

Was there an artwork in the book that you looked up and found particularly interesting or beautiful?

What surprised you about the way that the Met operates, either in the galleries or behind the scenes?

Bringley writes: “The glory of so-called unskilled jobs is that people with a fantastic range of skills and backgrounds work them. White-collar jobs cluster people of similar educations and interests so that most of your coworkers will have somewhat similar talents and minds. A security job doesn’t have this problem.” Have you ever encountered a phenomenon like this? What is gained by mixing with all sorts of people? What in particular might be gained at the Met by having a wide variety of people interpreting the collections?

Bringley writes: “I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride.” Why does he think this? Out in the wider world are we sometimes too blasé for our own good?

Several years into his time at the Met, Bringley writes: “Strangely, I think I am grieving for the end of my acute grief. The loss that made a hole at the center of my life is less on my mind than sundry concerns that have filled the hole in. And I suppose that is right and natural, but it’s hard to accept.” How could he possibly be grieving for the end of grief? Have you ever encountered something like this?

In his chapter on Michelangelo and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Bringley writes: “Meaning is always created locally. The greatest art is produced by people hemmed in by circumstances, making patchwork efforts to create something beautiful, useful, true.” What parallels exist between the Renaissance master and these quilters in rural Alabama?

On the last page of the book, Bringley writes: “Sometimes, life can be about simplicity and stillness, in the vein of a watchful guard amid shimmering works of art. But it is also about the head-down work of living and struggling and growing and creating.” Why do you think Bringley ultimately left his job at the Met? Do you have each of these aspects in your own life in some sense: on the one hand, simplicity and stillness; on the other hand, struggling and growing?

All the Beauty in the World Book Club Questions PDF

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