Author Chat with Patrick Bringley

In this episode, we sit down with Patrick Bringley, MA, author of All the Beauty in the World, to explore his profound journey from working at The New Yorker to spending a decade as a museum guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Patrick shares how the loss of his brother to cancer led him to seek solace in art, offering him space for reflection, healing, and a deeper appreciation of life’s beauty and struggles. 

We discuss the power of art in processing grief, the intersection of the mundane and the sublime, and how his time at the Met transformed his perspective. Join us for a heartfelt conversation about loss, love, and the unexpected paths that lead us toward meaning.

Relevant links for this episode: 

• https://www.patrickbringley.com/
• https://www.metmuseum.org/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/arts/design/patrick-bringley-met-guard-memoir-play-charleston.html

General Links:

• Disclaimers: https://cancersurvivormd.org/disclaimers/
• Brad Buchanan: https://linktr.ee/bradthechimera
• G [Josie] van Londen: https://linktr.ee/cancersurvivormd
• CancerBridges: https://cancerbridges.org/

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:04 Patrick’s Story and Inspiration for the Book
• 5:15 The Meaning Behind the Book’s Title
• 7:05 Balancing the Mundane and the Sublime
• 15:30 Art, Grief, and Healing
• 24:41 Writing the Book
• 31:45 Patrick's Future Projects
• 34:06 Final Reflections

Transcript

[00:00:00] G van Londen: It is an honor for me to see Patrick here. I'm a big fan of his , he's written a beautiful book and, I hope you'll read it at some point. 
[00:00:11] G van Londen: we hope this session will inspire you. without further ado, it's my honor to introduce Patrick Bringley, who has, written his first book, that describes, his tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And how he, describes his connection to, art and how it helped him grieve the passing of his older brother, who passed away from cancer. I by no means do any service to your story, Patrick, and I wanted to ask you if you can spend a little bit of time expanding on your story, if you feel comfortable doing so.
[00:00:58] Patrick Bringley: thank you so much, Josie, for [00:01:00] having me and, all of you for coming out tonight. It's an honor to speak to other people who, are affected by something that, has affected so many of us. my brother, died when he was 26 years old.
[00:01:11] Patrick Bringley: He had what's called a soft tissue sarcoma. it was stage four when he was diagnosed. he lived with it, um, I think it was about two and a half years. when he was diagnosed, I was, two years younger than he was. I was, in New York City, I had graduated college. I had gotten a job at the New Yorker magazine out of college.
[00:01:32] Patrick Bringley: I thought, I was up in a skyscraper at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. here I am, at the center of the world I've made it and I'm going to try to climb the ladder and make a career. but then my brother got this diagnosis and I was spending , less time in midtown skyscrapers and more time in, hospital rooms and my brother's apartment in Queens. it was clear [00:02:00] that very momentous things were going on in quiet little rooms like that. I think sometimes the word sacred really just means set apart from the ordinary mundane, world we're all rushing about.
[00:02:11] Patrick Bringley: We're thinking about prosaic things. when I felt like I was spending all this time in places like that, I became very allergic to, going back to some office job and worrying about, office politics and corporate ladder climbing when my brother died, I didn't want to rush back and find some other office job. I wanted to do something straightforward and nourishing that would let me think my thoughts, continue to stay in this mood where I was interested in things that were, basic on the one hand, elemental on the one hand, also kind of mysterious.
[00:02:51] Patrick Bringley: beautiful at the same time as they're painful, all these things that you go through. I, was shell shocked and I wanted to stand still a while. [00:03:00] And I found this kind of marvelous, you know, loophole in the universe by which I could stand still professionally. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[00:03:09] Patrick Bringley: I got the job and I stayed there 10 years. I spent 10 years as a guard at the Met. So I was just, you know, one of these guys in dark suit who stands in the corner and, looks around for a living. at all the art and all the people and the 7 million people come in there every year and the 2000 people work there and 500 guards and it's this kind of world inside that building and I quite loved it and I quite loved the simplicity of the job, the sort of honesty.
[00:03:41] Patrick Bringley: And no BS of the job, and communing with all of these beautiful things, you know, I was in the old master paintings one day the Cambodian art the next day and the African art the day after that. seeing all this art that's about life and death and suffering and the gods and the afterlife and everything that you could try to wrap your [00:04:00] mind around.
[00:04:00] Patrick Bringley: and I got to spend unhurried hours inside that place. So I was very grateful. And that's what I ended up writing my book about.
[00:04:08] G van Londen: Yeah, just to jump back to the title of the book, Patrick, you called the book, All the Beauty in the World. And I think you can interpret that title in many different ways. can you share with us how you meant for the title to be understood? 
[00:04:26] Patrick Bringley: Yeah, I'm happy to have it understood in multiple ways. As a guard, you have all the time in the world, inside that place.
[00:04:35] Patrick Bringley: that's kind of a phrase that came to my mind. the Met, you know, it's an encyclopedic museum. It tries to collect things from every corner of the world. And in a way, it tries to encompass all the beauty in the world. another resonance of my book is that, not just finished, pristine, perfect works of art, represent all the beauty in this world.
[00:04:56] Patrick Bringley: those works of art are about things that can be [00:05:00] very painful, but also very beautiful. And I think not only my communion with works of art in that place, but making friends. There's even parts of the book outside the museum where I have children and meet my wife.
[00:05:15] Patrick Bringley: I go out and try to build a life in a world that is, sometimes unforgiving and full of, things you might not rather be dealing with, things mundane or painful But, that's beautiful too, the struggle to build a life out there. I hope that in some ways the Met is all, everything beautiful in the world, but of course the Met is just a sliver in its own way, representative of this vast world that all of us inhabit, not just museum guards. 
[00:05:45] G van Londen: Yeah, thank you. It's almost sort of a portal. I don't know if you have the book in front of you, but, there's a few sections that I highlighted and I'm jumping around, perhaps more than you'd like to, but, in the last chapter of your book.[00:06:00] 
[00:06:00] G van Londen: Let me see if I can find it right now. Here, no matter how arresting a moment is or how sublime the basic mysteries are, a complicated world keeps spinning. We have our lives to lead and they keep us busy. 
[00:06:17] G van Londen: I like that particular sentence because it summarizes it all, I think. there are these mundane things next to these grandiose art pieces, that distract us, but we have to deal with them.
[00:06:35] Patrick Bringley: Yeah. there's this wonderful poem by, W. H. Auden, called, Musée des Beaux Arts. And the first line of the poem is about suffering. They were never wrong, the old masters. And what he means in particular, the poem goes on to talk about this Peter Brueghel painting of the fall of Icarus and that even when this momentous kind of thing [00:07:00] happened, Brueghel just situates it kind of in a corner of the painting and shows that this world is going on around it.
[00:07:08] Patrick Bringley: And you'll find that even in, crucifixion scenes, like a little Fra Angelico picture there's this, momentous and sacred or Sublime that feels like it should stop the world from spinning. this young man broken up on a cross but the old masters typically have all these flourishes of the mundane world that continues to happen around it in the frangelico picture, there's all these roman sentries looking up at it Some of them are interested some are bored and some have their minds on other things and I do think that for anyone who's had this experience of going through, illness or, the death of a loved one.
[00:07:47] Patrick Bringley: There can be this jarring moment where, you leave the hospital and get on the train, And you see this whole world just kind of continues to spin, around you. And sometimes that [00:08:00] can feel, sort of cruel. but in other times it can feel, hopeful and it's, something that you have to deal with and adapt to.
[00:08:08] Patrick Bringley: the narrative of my book in some ways is that I begin, my journey at the Met quiet and shell shocked kind of the guard, standing in the corner. But over the course of 10 years, you know, get my rhythm back and more integrated into the rhythms of the everyday world.
[00:08:26] G van Londen: There's so many directions I can take this, Patrick. I see a question pop up, but I wanted to stick with this topic for a second, and see if Brad has any questions, because poems is his, cup of tea, and you just quoted a poem. Brad, is there any question you would like to ask while we're on the poetic topic?
[00:08:47] Brad Buchanan: Well, I, I, of course, I'm a big fan of W. H. Auden and, that particular poem, needed to be in this book somewhere and, I'm glad it is. that also reminds me of the scene in the book where your mother, [00:09:00] Walks in to the hospital room, Patrick, where you were, giving your brother massages, trying to make him more comfortable, he just walks in and looks at the scene of his, sleeping body, and says that this is a bleeping old master painting.
[00:09:16] Brad Buchanan: Um, that there was something about that moment that was like a real life, perhaps I guess I'm wondering, not so much explain what the old masters were up to, but did your appreciation for art change in any way as a result of watching your brothers, 
[00:09:38] Brad Buchanan: decline and death did that change your appreciation for art? Did you appreciate more certain themes or? periods of art, certain artists, did it turn you more towards religious art? how did that affect things?
[00:09:56] Patrick Bringley: Yeah, very much. I mean, when I was younger and in [00:10:00] college and I'd looked at, old master paintings. I thought of them as very grandiose things that are painted on cathedral walls and, in the covers of great books.
[00:10:09] Patrick Bringley: And in order to understand these things, I thought I would have to become very sophisticated. You know, I would have to take some art history courses and learn the lingo and, be able to write erudite stuff that they might put in the New Yorker but then when my brother was sick and all of a sudden, I'm spending all this time in a hospital room, it's very obvious that the sorts of things that are being explored in paintings of the passion in the 14th century are the same things that are right in front of our eyes, I don't think it takes a stretch of the imagination to understand why people in say the 14th century were very interested in the passion, which is a word that means suffering.
[00:10:51] Patrick Bringley: I mean, these people, the bubonic plague may have killed a third of Europe. these people lived their life on [00:11:00] the edge. they were very familiar with death. They were very familiar with suffering. They had lost children. They had lost spouses. they kind of understood that as a sort of the essential kind of poignancy of this existence.
[00:11:16] Patrick Bringley: And I think that they found it as evidenced by those paintings, they found it very moving and beautiful at the same time as, you know, devastating. to me, that mix of emotions, you know, to use a couple of words from the old masters, adoration on the one hand and lamentation on the other, how these things, intermingle how both of them sort of imbue these paintings that are often, luminously sad, the mood of a lot of that late Gothic kind of early Renaissance art.
[00:11:49] Patrick Bringley: I was drawn to that stuff, because I recognized something familiar it's not to say that that's all I was drawn to, because, I could pick examples from anywhere. [00:12:00] But I think I did learn from that experience to, look at art in a somewhat human way that doesn't get bogged down in art history.
[00:12:11] Patrick Bringley: Not that art history isn't good and interesting, but you have to remember, if you're looking at a Greek Coro statue the Greek guy who carved that statue, wasn't thinking about art history. He didn't know that he was carving in the archaic age.
[00:12:26] Patrick Bringley: he thought he was making a grave marker for one young man who died 2, 600 years ago in Athens. you would come to this thing with libations in your hand and be thinking about where this young man's soul had fled and then look up and see this portrait of life, vitality as the Greeks conceived life to be.
[00:12:47] Patrick Bringley: And I think that when you look at works of art, you do honor to the artists and the works of art. If you are doing the things that they thought you would be doing, which usually [00:13:00] is meditating on some aspect of existence and what it is to be human and what it is to, inhabit this, astonishing earth that we inhabit and it's mysteries it's presence and it's plainness so I think having such an experience, um, made me Interested in that as opposed to my earlier trajectory.
[00:13:23] Patrick Bringley: Where I bet I would have been much more interested in, the footnotes and the sort of things that curators write on labels.
[00:13:30] Brad Buchanan: There are lots of great writers in New York writing about, art genres and, periods, uh, you know, Peter Sheldahl of the New Yorker, I think is pretty, much on point. So , I appreciated the way you brought your own personal, sense of appreciation, which I found relatable and the book does not get bogged down in a bunch of art history concepts.
[00:13:57] Brad Buchanan: Or, jargon, that would [00:14:00] be inaccessible to the ordinary person. where art's concerned, I am very ordinary in that regard. I'm glad you took the approach that you did in the book of not putting on any sort of expert hat. In fact, I like your Mets hat.
[00:14:15] Brad Buchanan: That's a very down to earth hat. I think in the book you wear a similar, relatable type of, uh, metaphorically speaking. but yeah, I think we should get into the chat question though, Josie. 
[00:14:27] G van Londen: Yeah,. somebody in the chat is asking, if you would be willing to explain more about your brother's journey.
[00:14:35] G van Londen: Brad was asking about how your brother's experience and your experience of your brother's journey changed your appreciation of art. But I think it goes in two directions because art also helped you, heal from your traumatic experience, if I'm allowed to use that particular wording.
[00:14:59] G van Londen: I was [00:15:00] wondering, if you would be willing to share a little bit about your brother's journey. Your perspective of it and how art has helped you heal. You touched on it a little bit, but maybe would you be willing to go into a little bit more detail and maybe specific example. So there's really two questions there.
[00:15:22] Patrick Bringley: Sure. my brother moved to New York for graduate school he was getting a PhD in Biomathematics, so he studied Biology. He actually studied the way fluids move within cells. he got his diagnosis. and you guys know how all this goes. He had, you know, radiation and chemo and more chemo and more chemo and surgery after surgery after surgery. Um, at some point, it went to his lungs and it went to his brain as soon as it had gone to his lungs, you know, you, you know, this is, this is, you know, very, very, very bad news.
[00:15:57] Patrick Bringley: he handled his [00:16:00] illness with astonishing simplicity and grace. he was young, newly married, but he had this personality, you know, even though obviously he was brilliant. He had this very straightforward, every man kind of personality. You know, he loved baseball too.
[00:16:17] Patrick Bringley: And he, didn't throw his life in a crisis in a strange way, because he knew the things he liked and loved he wanted to be around family keep watching, jeopardy doing the crosswords and watching the ball games. in his hospital room, I have a lot of very happy, fond memories because it was this beautiful little place where we are kind of following his lead he was doing all the things he needed to do to fight, but he also wasn't
[00:16:39] Patrick Bringley: diluting himself. And, he just kind of had in his character for, for whatever reason, he just had this profound kind of stillness and, simplicity and, frankness. so he was somehow well equipped for what was thrown at him. And, a hell of a [00:17:00] lot was thrown at him, of course.
[00:17:01] Patrick Bringley: Because, you know, it's like not just big calamitous events, like, Oh my God, I have cancer. It's also that it's just all of these tens, trillions of little annoyances. dealing with the hospital and with your insurance company and just losing your ability to do this and that.
[00:17:18] Patrick Bringley: The other thing, how that makes doing this hard and it's a burden on your wife and you need someone to do the dishes more, you know, whatever. to me just witnessing that, witnessing the level of uncomplainingness and that he was able to still just kind of show gratitude for what he had and, was just gobsmacking.
[00:17:37] Patrick Bringley: I mean it's, you know, I, I, I feel unworthy of it, you know, 'cause I, I am a person in my normal life, like most of us probably, you know, I complain. I complain about things even though I shouldn't complain about anything, I feel, you know, in some, in a pulled back way, I've got my health and my beautiful family and I've got a career and my book's done well but I [00:18:00] still, forget these things and you become unwise my brother, for whatever reason, he just had an ability to just kind of remain in his pocket of wisdom.
[00:18:08] Patrick Bringley: And he always had this kind of little smile in his eyes. which was insane. It's just, it's hard to even fathom how he did it, but he did it. 
[00:18:17] Patrick Bringley: Uh, yeah, I don't know if that explains the journey really. I mean, he, he was living in Queens. he had this Dr. Philip Blum, who we liked a lot.
[00:18:24] Patrick Bringley: And, he just went through all the stages and all the surgeries and all the recoveries and, prolonged his life somewhat. But, at some point it wasn't gonna cure him. and then as for your other question, I don't know that it's ever straightforward, like how you use art or anything else in a sort of recovery sense.
[00:18:42] Patrick Bringley: I was very grateful for the space and very grateful to not just jam myself back into the rhythm of something, but to have this place that continued to feel sort of sacred and, interested in, elemental and [00:19:00] basic rubber meets the road type things, being with art that also seemed to be focused on things that I thought Tom was focused on and I wanted to be focused on.
[00:19:09] Patrick Bringley: and just, there's just, wasn't a lot of nonsense to what I was doing. not a lot of nonsense to, some ancient Egyptian statues that I was contemplating. and that felt nice. it felt like I had the space that I needed to think my thoughts and go at my own pace.
[00:19:28] Patrick Bringley: But then I also think there is something comforting, about knowing, how alone we are, both, talking to friends or colleagues going through similar things, but also that the world in general. I mean, that's what humankind has always dealt with. 
[00:19:43] Patrick Bringley: That there are people who for thousands of years, all over the planet have been thinking about the same sort of issues that you are, and finding beauty and facing struggle. I like to be in the company of all those things. it felt like a worthwhile use of my time.
[00:19:59] Patrick Bringley: So [00:20:00] I think that made me feel good ultimately put me back in rhythm. And part of what put me back in rhythm too, is just kind of everyday stuff, I made friends. I would talk to, the visitors and they wouldn't be asking me about, frangelic opinions. Most of they'd be asking me, you know, Hey, you know, is there a good restaurant around here?
[00:20:17] Patrick Bringley: You know, where's the bathroom? just through these little conversations that gets you back into. the cadence of the everyday world. I was grateful for it.
[00:20:27] G van Londen: Your response was beautiful. as I'm listening to you, it's almost like your brother and you are, giving each other a gift. Your brother put you on a path with purpose.
[00:20:43] G van Londen: This is the purpose you found for yourself. You wouldn't have gone this path if it wasn't for your brother's health, situation. And I think similarly, this book is a legacy to your brother. You are keeping him [00:21:00] alive through this book. It's almost like you're giving each other a gift a lasting gift.
[00:21:08] G van Londen: Do I make sense or does this sound bizarre? 
[00:21:11] Patrick Bringley: No, no, you do. Yeah, I, I appreciate that. I, I, you know, it is a nice thing to think, like, one thing that's been nice about the book being out in the world is that I'll hear from my brother's friends, even ones that I didn't know, people from college or something, who say that, they recognize him in the book, and feel there's something captured in him.
[00:21:30] Patrick Bringley: whether you think of it in a literal or metaphorical way that kind of puts a piece of him into them as they're reading it and so that it sort of spreads him around and kind of does sort of keep, um, something that was in him alive. so that's cool. it's very cool.
[00:21:46] Patrick Bringley: I'm grateful for that. 
[00:21:48] G van Londen: Thank you, Patrick. Another question is, were you an art enthusiast prior to taking the guard job?
[00:21:58] Patrick Bringley: I've always loved it. I [00:22:00] didn't study it formally. I went to NYU and I mostly did, English, literature. I was in this program where you could do a bunch of the liberal arts, little religious studies, little classics, little this and that.
[00:22:11] Patrick Bringley: but no, I always just, loved going to the Met as soon as I went to New York City. I think one of the reasons I live in New York is that I love this feeling of being small walking around and losing yourself in a crowd and feeling like you're just this tiny insignificant speck and oh my God, look at all this world around us.
[00:22:32] Patrick Bringley: one of my favorite places to do that was at the Met I wasn't an art history student or something because I could just wander through that place naively, sort of like a child. I'm just being astonished by things and sort of losing myself in things that were beautiful for reasons I couldn't quite understand.
[00:22:52] Patrick Bringley: And I think that came from my mom too so I grew up outside Chicago, and my mom was a theater actor, her whole career. My [00:23:00] earliest exposure to art was probably seeing her in plays and, that feeling of the house lights going down and the stage lights going up and something kind of magical happening on the stage, is very real with me.
[00:23:14] Patrick Bringley: And I think I thought of arts as of a piece with that, and she loved art too, so she'd bring us the Art Institute of Chicago. Um, and, uh, I just, I don't know, I've, I've always put it on a pedestal, it feels so substantive and so big and so meaty to me.
[00:23:30] G van Londen: Thank you, Patrick. I think Brad has a question. 
[00:23:35] Brad Buchanan: Thanks, Josie. I'd love to know more about the process of writing the book. was there anything about writing the book that felt therapeutic to you and how did that work?
[00:23:47] Patrick Bringley: But also clearly you had to carve out time. from your personal life, the book also, you know, describes becoming a father, to not one but two kids, finding time and place [00:24:00] to write. Was that stressful or was writing kind of in some way therapeutic, for where this book is concerned, but I'd love to know also how the idea for the book, started and germinated, Sure. So, yeah, I've always written, I've always scribbled and written poetry and things. I would keep a little notebook in my pocket, at the Met and, you know, I would scribble on the way home on the train or on my breaks be writing down, observations I could remember about something that struck me, little conversations I was overhearing, things like that.
[00:24:33] Patrick Bringley: but I didn't have in mind writing a whole book, for sure. Cause I didn't know how to do that. I thought, maybe I'll try to write, a review of a special exhibition from a guard's perspective or something. I did kind of have That inkling, a couple of years in, then maybe six or seven years in, I did get serious about writing a book, my first idea was to write a guard's guide to the Met.
[00:24:54] Patrick Bringley: That was my idea. And I would, write about the art and mix in, behind the scenes [00:25:00] stories and anecdotes of funny things I overheard But I started to write that and, um. You know, it was kind of a mess, because I think if you ever try to write something that doesn't have a center to it, a story or, some kind of animating impulse behind it, it's like a bunch of anecdotes sprinkled all over the place.
[00:25:18] Patrick Bringley: So I worked hard at it, but I was like, this just isn't coherent in any way. and I was like, well, people sure do like stories and what story would I have to tell it just dawned on me. It's like, well, you know, it would have to be my own story. Um, and then, uh, you know, in order to write about art in a very subjective way which I thought could be appealing. I would have to tell them quite a bit about the subjects, which is me. And I realized, I probably would have to also write about my brother and about coming to the Met and sort of by degrees that gotten more ambitious that way. it started off just this idea, you know, I'm a guy who's going to write some essays about art.
[00:25:58] Patrick Bringley: And I had to teach myself how to [00:26:00] do that. how to write a memoir. I had to especially teach myself how to do kind of the novelistic sort of elements of it, because, memoir is a lot like a novel that you, you should be writing and scenes and things, you know, take place in settings and you want to kind of paint the picture of these things.
[00:26:16] Patrick Bringley: so I just wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, you know, probably a million, I don't know, half a million words, just wrote, wrote, wrote, filled up notebooks, I write longhand. whether that was therapeutic, I mean, I think so in the sense of I really enjoyed the thinking of the thoughts and the wide open writing.
[00:26:33] Patrick Bringley: I didn't know what direction I was going in. I would just think about something and I would just fill up a notebook about that subject. And that was a process of figuring out what I thought about this stuff and what I had to say, what I might have to say that was original, my kind of tone, my sort of voice, what that, what that could be.
[00:26:51] Patrick Bringley: Because not a lot of people write about art in a, in a very, you know, highly personal way. Most people write about, you know, in an academic sort of way. So I had [00:27:00] to, I just wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote endlessly in circles. Until I figured out what the tone is, how I pitch this, my posture towards the art and the way I'll be writing about this stuff.
[00:27:12] Patrick Bringley: Then, once I had that, I wrote about 40, 000 words, which is kind of a short book of what I thought could be kind of a book. But it was still pretty in my own head and pretty essay like but I was able to get an agent based on that and I got an agent just by cold calling, you know, I didn't know anybody.
[00:27:31] Patrick Bringley: So I was just you do what's called querying. you find memoirs or books similar to your book. You flip to the back to the acknowledgments. find where the author thanked their agent. He writes on the name of said agent. And you start bugging them. You write them a query letter with your pitch.
[00:27:45] Patrick Bringley: and then if they like your pitch, they'll ask you for pages. if you like your pages, maybe you'll get a meeting. Um, but, you know, 90%, 98, 9 percent of people ignore me. but you only need to find one. I found my agent and my agent was instrumental in helping me [00:28:00] craft a book proposal or giving me the model of what a book proposal should be.
[00:28:04] Patrick Bringley: And, we had good success with that and found. an editor at Simon Schuster, who we liked the best of the ones that offered us, deals. then was the hard part. at that point. hardly anything of my original book survives into the, book because I had to be a professional.
[00:28:21] Patrick Bringley: I had to deliver this in, you know, really the best shape I could. So I had 18 months to completely rewrite it and deliver the manuscript, and then six months, we edited it. I don't think that was therapeutic at all, just because It's so hard taking, thoughts and really hammering them into shape.
[00:28:42] Patrick Bringley: they're much more beautiful when they get to just be floaty and you get to have pages full of things swirling around. But, when I really had to hammer them into a very coherent shape, it was very difficult. but it's what you do. that's why you're paid the not so big bucks as a [00:29:00] writer.
[00:29:00] Patrick Bringley: that's your job. so yeah, that's what I did. And then it releases into the world and, instead of being quiet for a living, you talk for a living like I do now.
[00:29:10] 
[00:29:10] Brad Buchanan: thank you. that's a great, narrative of how, the process evolved. what about finding time to write? It sounds like that was occasionally challenging. 
[00:29:22] Patrick Bringley: So, it was, you know, that's what I did with my time. that's what I would do on the train.
[00:29:27] Patrick Bringley: But yeah, of course you had to find time. I worked a schedule at the Met where I worked, two 12 hour days, two eight hour days. So I had three days off. Um, so that gave me extra time to be writing. I was very fortunate that when I got my, book deal, I got enough money to live on so I was just able to just write. So once I had, the book deal, that two years that I described of writing the book, that was my full time gig, but it was also COVID. So I also had to zoom school my kids or help them zoom [00:30:00] school for however long that lasted. And it's not that it wasn't without stresses and chaos.
[00:30:04] Patrick Bringley: It certainly was, but, you know, I'm luckier than your average writer and that I did get the money to just write. 
[00:30:13] Patrick Bringley: How old were your kids when you were zoom schooling them? they were pre k and first grade which 
[00:30:19] Brad Buchanan: That's a tough. so probably the worst age to have to do something like that You and your spouse have my full sympathies Thank you.
[00:30:29] Patrick Bringley: Yeah, it was hard on everyone in different ways that's what i've learned talking to people. it didn't miss you whoever you were 
[00:30:36] Brad Buchanan: Indeed. Now there's another good question in the chat that I'm happy to relay. Are you working on another book, assuming that you want to write another book?
[00:30:45] Brad Buchanan: And do you have a subject in mind without divulging trade secrets, of course? 
[00:30:52] Patrick Bringley: Yeah. So, um, yeah, there are a few things I'm doing right now. One thing. Is I adapted this book into a one man play and [00:31:00] performed that down in Charleston, South Carolina. They produced it down there as part of the Charleston literary festival and it went well.
[00:31:07] Patrick Bringley: it looks like it's going to be off Broadway starting, probably in March through May. I'm going to be performing as myself in an 80 minute play, where I'm wearing the blue uniform and I'm a guard and there's going to be projections of the art. It's directed by Dominic Dromgoole, who's, a Brit.
[00:31:24] Patrick Bringley: He used to run the Globe Theatre in London, and helped me sort of envision all the visual aspects of it. he's been wonderful, helping me turn this into an honest piece of theatre. that's exciting. I'm writing a new book, but I'm in that beautiful early stages that I described where I'm just filling out notebooks.
[00:31:42] Patrick Bringley: the most important thing is to continue to write. I have an overall idea, which in its vaguest terms is about seeing, not looking, but seeing and how you see arts and how art helps you see other things and kind of what I learned from [00:32:00] being on the floor of the Met, but what I want to continue to learn as I'm out in the world.
[00:32:05] Patrick Bringley: looking at not just things on pedestals and in frames, but the sky the trees the sun and the sea what can I learn about that talking to other people how does one see, because it's this complicated dance that happens between your eye your mind and the world out there.
[00:32:21] Patrick Bringley: I'm thinking of writing a book about that, but that's all in early stages. Um, and then I do a lot of talks. I give private tours of the Met and talks at museum. I'm actually going. In two weeks, I'm going to Seoul in South Korea. one of the craziest things that's happened in this whole adventure
[00:32:38] Patrick Bringley: is that my book is like a wild smash hit in South Korea. the book has done well in the United States. It was on the bestseller list for nine weeks which is just insane. but in Korea, it's like a whole nother level. I'm gonna get to go there and try to discover why that is.
[00:32:53] Patrick Bringley: I'm very excited for that. so yeah, those are all the irons I have in the fire right now. 
[00:32:59] G van Londen: it's [00:33:00] very amazing how you highlight the beauty in the world and make art more accessible and relatable to everybody. we talked about the title of your book, how it can be interpreted in many ways and you're okay with others interpreting
[00:33:14] G van Londen: it in any way they would like to interpret it, and I guess it's the same with art. Everybody sees art, differently depending on where they are in their phase of life and what they're dealing with it's not an easy task but you're doing it.
[00:33:28] G van Londen: And you're helping many people. I hope you do realize that, and that's part of why I think it's a Smashing Hit in many places, you're hitting something in them, that makes them appreciate. Life putting it in perspective. I'm guessing that that is what it is, but you're gonna tell us when you come back from Korea, right?
[00:33:51] Patrick Bringley: Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see. It's it's interesting how I've been told a number of interesting things by [00:34:00] Korean journalists, about making art relatable One thing I heard from a Korean who this very smart guy And he was very interested on the subject. He said, well, your book is so American.
[00:34:11] Patrick Bringley: And I said, oh yeah, how so? And he said, in Korea, we are this very old and homogenous culture. we have a great respect for erudition. we really think that in order to weigh in on something like art. you should have read the canon and have this deep knowledge of the progression of thought over the course of a thousand years when you're talking about, these Chinese hand scroll paintings or whatever else.
[00:34:37] Patrick Bringley: And he's like, well, as you're American, so you're this young culture, this diverse culture, you don't feel as if there is a sort of canon of texts because that guy is some, you know, the Dominican Republic and this guy's from, Haiti. And, you sort of charge in like a bull in a China shop and, you know, you think, well, this stuff is made by human beings and I'm a human being.
[00:34:58] Patrick Bringley: And let me, you know, sort of try the best I [00:35:00] can. And he said that he thinks that's a very un Korean attitude, but an attitude that they find very sort of interesting, because, they're interested in Western art, but they feel as if in order to weigh in on Western art, you know, how could they?
[00:35:15] Patrick Bringley: So they have to sort of keep, keep an arm's length from it. Whereas my feeling is don't keep an arm's length from anything, get in there. maybe I'm right or maybe I'm wrong, but, it is a perspective that I'm glad to have out there. Um, because it is kind of the way that, that I go through things, get in there, try to have an experience.
[00:35:34] Patrick Bringley: You're looking face to face with something that is as beautiful today as it was. 2600 years ago, you can stand in front of it and feel some of its music. it's a very different experience, feeling the music of something as opposed to just reading about it in a book.
[00:35:50] Patrick Bringley: I hope the message comes across. 
[00:35:53] Brad Buchanan: On that, note for people who just love your book, since you're not going to [00:36:00] write, all the beauty in the world part two, quite the same way, Are there other authors that you took inspiration from? people that you think people who love your book should also read?
[00:36:13] Brad Buchanan: anything along those lines? 
[00:36:16] Patrick Bringley: Yeah. of course there's so many books that I read and love. when I was writing my book, I read over and over again. the book homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. it's this beautiful. Memoir he wrote about his, experience in the Spanish Civil War it's very serious minded, but also his prose is so crystalline I found probably because I was a young writer and very impressionable that I would fall into the same cadence writing as the stuff that I was reading, so I couldn't read things that were a bad influence on me.
[00:36:53] Patrick Bringley: So even though I might love, Dickens I wouldn't want to be reading Dickens because you don't want to write. Your syntax, like [00:37:00] Dickens syntax, because it's, it's sort of broken and, um, you know, it has these flourishes to it you're not Charles Dickens, you can't write that way.
[00:37:07] Patrick Bringley: Um, so I would have to be careful, reading things that would instill good habits into me. And I love Orwell's non fiction. I read also Joseph Mitchell over and over, the great New Yorker writer of the middle of the century. who also has this humane, simple, crystalline, observant prose about, life in New York around him.
[00:37:28] Patrick Bringley: But no, I wasn't reading any, art history at all, really. except when I had to, look things up and get some information. I guess I was more inspired by that, journalistic style of writing. 
[00:37:41] Brad Buchanan: thank you. I would never have imagined that Orwell's Civil War memoir would be something you'd be reading, Orwell is kind of a stylistic minimalist, he wrote that famous essay, Politics in the English Language, where he tries to, get us to [00:38:00] focus on telling the truth, not using, flowery abstractions, hiding behind, mystical concepts, in a way he's very materialistic, he writes about things and objects as opposed to, big ideas 
[00:38:14] Brad Buchanan: And in a way that's kind of what the old masters were doing too, as artists, they were focusing on the physical realities that they were painting. So maybe there is a sort of overlap there somehow in some way, but that's a fascinating literary influence and probably a very good stylistic discipline to be an Orwellian disciple as opposed to someone like Walter Pater, who wrote lovely essays about Renaissance art, but might not have been the greatest stylistic model, more like he would have been more of a Dickensian.
[00:38:49] Brad Buchanan: Victorian, Baroque word artist. 
[00:38:53] Patrick Bringley: Yes, yes. Orwell is very concrete. you're right that he's focusing on things that are visible in the world. And I, [00:39:00] I always try to be very concrete in my writing. And of course, painting is very concrete. everything, paint is not like ideas.
[00:39:08] Patrick Bringley: Paint is like paints. it's concrete and it's soundless. it's right there in front of you. I think there is wonderful discipline in reading, a writer like Orwell, where he's not just borrowing a phrase that he read somewhere, he's building sentences out of things that he's seen out in the world, and he's putting his own metaphors together, I think that's If you want to have original thoughts, that's what you need to do.
[00:39:33] Patrick Bringley: that's why AI will never write a good book, because it has never seen anything. all it can do is regurgitate things that people have already said. that's precisely how not to write in a way that, would be original or arresting I like to try to write sentences that people read and think oh, I wouldn't have thought about it quite that way.
[00:39:52] Patrick Bringley: Have this sort of intelligence running through it. there are Certain writers like Orwell that, you know, you feel like every sentence he wrote is intelligent, [00:40:00] like it didn't just spew out of him. It was thought. I cannot live to his standard, um, at all, but, it was a good standard to try to shoot for.
[00:40:12] G van Londen: Thank you, Patrick. I'm going to ask Brad if he has any final questions, comments, suggestions.
[00:40:20] Brad Buchanan: I think we have taken up a full hour of Patrick's time, so I want to say thank you to him for being so candid and accessible to this group. And, for opening up the inner workings of the book and talking more about his brother, which is sort of the hook, suppose
[00:40:39] Brad Buchanan: for this group, since we are a cancer focused, support group. Yes, and 
[00:40:44] Patrick Bringley: thank, I'll say thank you and thank you all. all my love with you your journeys, wherever you are. there's a brotherhood and sisterhood. among many of us, and I'm touched and humbled when I hear from people who, read my book and say, I've some of [00:41:00] those same thoughts, which isn't surprising because, we're all human and we've all been through a similar thing.
[00:41:06] Patrick Bringley: Um, so thank you. 
[00:41:08] G van Londen: Thank you for sharing your story, which, um, I guess it's, it's bittersweet. It can be painful to remember some memories, but the love for your brother is clearly shining through.