This evening I had an encounter with some art.
I was having dinner in a restaurant with a friend, when I became aware of a framed photograph on the wall, one of a row of framed photographs. But this one was different from the others.
It was casual yet intense, familiar yet eerily exotic, joyful yet strangely poignant. It was seemingly candid yet perfectly composed, utterly natural while being all about illusion, comfortably warm yet oddly offputting.
All through our dinner conversation, which was wonderful, part of my mind kept wandering back to this strangely compelling image. At the end of the meal I walked back to the rear of the restaurant, to check out the book listing the prices of all of the images for sale on the walls. My picture was priced at $200, framed.
Reader, I purchased it.
I then carried it through Washington Square Park, holding it carefully with one hand, my other hand clutching an umbrella to shield it from the perilous New York rain. At last I deposited it triumphantly, undamaged and dry as a bone, inside my apartment.
Now the picture still is sitting — I am tempted to say on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — and I am regarding it with bemused appreciation. I am not posting a photo of it here, because we need some private time to get to know each other, this picture and I.
Such are the ways of art.