Telling the Bees

A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is Dubious Distinctions, the patron-only newsletter for Dubious Analogies.

This past weekend, I was in New York, so I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was looking for one particular painting:

“Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin,” Ilya Repin (public domain)

This is a painting of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, a Russian writer with an intense life story who inspired the prelude to my dissertation. I traveled very far to see the painting; not just to New York, but across New York, including taking the metro the wrong direction at least once.

The painting was not on display. I would have been entirely devastated if not for a kindly security guard who empathized deeply with my plight. He was disappointed for and with me, and had just seen the painting recently before it was removed from display, and buoyed up by this moment of human kindness, I moved on.