Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a good developer for country-boy wages (and I was still in the same time zone).
Occasionally they would fly me to the city for a meeting and I would spend my evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, which is surely the most beautiful and bewitching cities of the earth. My favorite spot is the Met. Like a lot of introverts, I love museums, and the Met is the greatest of them all. I mean, how many museums have their own Egyptian Temple? Indoors?
Once I spent an entire weekend roaming its halls, barely scratching the surface of its vast collections. I tend to gravitate toward the Modern period from the early- and mid-twentieth century. From guys like Matisse and Picasso all the way to Hopper and O’Keefe.
From a historical perspective, my interest stopped after that. I never much got the whole Post-Modern thing—Abstract Expressionism and all that. It seemed too theoretical. A joke that high-brow art critics had played on the rest of us, as Tom Wolfe wrote so wittily in The Painted Word.
Continue reading “Brief Encounters with Infinity”
Ash Clifton, Writer 