memories I want to keep from this week 🥀

I took a week off of work.

Here’s what I did:

Went to the Met Cloisters.

The Met Cloisters is a museum in the Bronx at the highest point of Manhattan. It’s in the middle of Fort Tryon Park with a hefty hike up to the top. On Tuesday, I took the A train down almost to the end of the line, and it was quite a warm day to hike to the museum. The view, however, was worth it. The Met Cloisters is a truly magnificent structure to look at. If you have any interest in religious history or monasteries, it’s a place I’d recommend exploring.

I took a tour of the museum whose main theme was the Annuciation with Mary and the angel Gabriel. So much of the tour reminded me of places I witnessed in Israel. Mary’s three titles (according to our tour guide): God-bearer, Queen of Heaven, and Intercessor. The garden might have been my favorite part of the cloisters–such vibrant greenery surrounded by stone.

Related Post: Documenting Your Life ft. a book crawl in NYC

Attended a Broadway show.

If you’re in New York and you don’t have much planned, I’d insist on you attending a Broadway show. I went to see Hadestown. It’s essentially the myth of Eurdyice and Orpheus. The actors were amazing. It always amazes me to see people my age so successful. 

Read Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. (Translated by Philip Roughton)

I picked this book up wandering around the McNally Jackson Bookstore in Soho. I was looking for a coffee shop and found a bookstore. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. The book blurb mentioned a church and a pastor, so naturally I picked it up. This book has much less faith than I expected, and depending on who you ask, questionable morals too. But Stefánsson is a great storyteller. The novel isn’t linear and inspires conflicting emotions within. After all, we live life forward and understand it (though not always) backwards.

“It’s wonderful to be young, to have dreams, we have so many plans, and then life chastens us.”

“Fate is as old as the world. It has seen many things, possibly everything, which is probably why it has an unquenchable need to mix up the cards in the hope that something unexpected happens.”

“We’re constantly adding to our knowledge, of course, yet it seems the more we know, the less we understand. That’s the paradox, and we live within it.”

Related Post: a food and drink guide to nyc

Brunch in Park Slope

Met up with some dear friends at Wild Park Slope for brunch, and ice cream, and then a bit of respite in Prospect Park. Received cards from them, and it’s wild to see your friends’ handwriting. Like here it is, here is the person you are. You who loop your f’s or for whom everything deserves italics.

We looked in at Ripped Bodice, but I’m not much of a romance reader. Part of reading is knowledge and part of reading is the glimpse into another mind. I want to know what someone else is thinking, perhaps it’s as close as I am allowed to get to mindreading.

Related Post: little glimmers of life

Watched A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick

Warning: this movie is long.

It’s about an Austrian farmer named Franz who is willing to give up everything not to bow to Hitler. It’s utterly rich.

It’s utterly gorgeous with the bright blues and greens. Which of course make the few reds stand in contrast. And Christ is everywhere if you know how to look. (Which is a great lesson to learn.) Malick, it seems, wants the imagery to speak for itself, but if you read your bible, you can find the allusions easily.

The movie is convicting. Are you able to withstand? To flee from the idol of compromise and comfort for the sake of your conviction? Apparently, Franz, the main character, and Bonhoeffer were both imprisoned at the same place during WWII.

My favorite scene is with the painter in the church. He himself feels conviction for having painted a comfortable Christ, one we admire without having to follow. If we truly are following Christ, we will have to give up things, people, perhaps even our lives.

The movie ends with a Middlemarch quote, and for the next few weeks or so, I hope to finish George Eliot’s magnum opum.

“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
– George Eliot

Signing off,

Gigi