After a personal tragedy, Patrick Bringley swapped his glitzy magazine job to work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The experience was so profound, he wrote a book about it
When Patrick Bringley’s beloved older brother fell ill with cancer, he found that he no longer had much appetite for his ritzy job in the events department of the New Yorker. Life then was about hospital rooms and love and “all the very basic things” in this world; there seemed no meaning in hanging his jacket over his desk chair every morning. But what to do instead? In 2008, Tom died, and all Patrick knew was that he needed the kind of work that would not require him to scrap and scrape and constantly “muscle his way forward”. Soon after this, acting on a whim, he applied for a position as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by the autumn, there he was in his uniform, standing next to Raphael’s Madonna and Child Enthroned With Saints – the first post in a job he would happily hold down for the next 10 years of his young life (at the time, he was 25).
“I knew I wanted something straightforward and nourishing,” he tells me when we talk via video call (he is in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and two children). “But it turned out to be much more than that. I had a sense straight away there was something extraordinary about it. Office life is busy. You’ve always got your mind on some project; you’re always pushing the ball forward. All of a sudden, I had that drop away. I was in a gallery. My hands were empty, my head was up, and I was duty bound not to be busy. There was nothing I was meant to do except keep my eyes open. A wave of freedom washed over me. In the stillness, my mind was able to wander.”
