Travels in Vermeer Read Online Free Page A

sweet
sensation of joy?
    Why do I feel this sweet sensation of joy? I look from one painting to the next: the little street, the milkmaid, and the letter reader. For the moment, I am this tingling at the back of my scalp.
    4. The Flash
    I walk ahead through late, dark Rembrandt, and then loop back to Vermeer again. I browse through elegant De Hooch—his open doorways, merry companies—then return to Vermeer again. Finally, I move on to the heavily guarded, sea-green room that houses Rembrandt’s masterpiece commonly known as The Night Watch (actually titled The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch ). Its size and splendor is a shock. Fourteen feet wide, it seethes with national pride. The captain and his lieutenant are lit at the center with dramatic chiaroscuro, as is a little girl, part mascot, part guardian angel. Behind and around the three, an entire militia prepares for a peacetime parade, though for all the Baroque bravado of musket and lance, they might as well be readying to die for the common good. Here I stop.
    I’ve seen enough, the exit beckons, but something has happened. Instead of leaving, I turn and float lightheaded against the press of the crowd, back through the galleries to the Vermeer room again.
    Then I stand before the sunlit street, the milkmaid, and the letter reader. I’m thinking now with my eyes, my skin, I’m drifting sidelong into dream—the paintings meet me there. I feel the trickle of memory in the street’s gutter. There is the doe-faced maid at the center of it all, ministering forever. There is the cloud-blue reader, dissolving in the raptness of her attention.
    I’m standing well back in the center of the room. People move quietly toward the paintings. Each person whispers, in German or Japanese; some say nothing at all.
    Suddenly, I understand: Vermeer’s hushed clarity addresses me, is for me as I stand here now. What I’ve been going through, what I’ve tried to deal with in my divorce, is total loss. I thought I knew about all that when my first wife, Jackie, died of cancer—but this time, I ’d lost faith. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in love; I’m not sure I believe in anything. But, looking at these radiant canvases— unreachable yet familiar—reminds me. The rapturous inner life of each woman and the infinitesimally detailed and self-contained life of the street are each imagined as an undiscovered heaven on earth. It’s as if these visions are here to startle me to my senses by showing me recovered images from a former life.
    Now I leave and retrace my steps through the rooms. On the white marble stairway, I reach for the sharp-edged, stainless-steel handrail. A shape flits before me, inside me, in my mind—an abstract shape like a helix, like the arc of a swallow’s flight. I reach the landing, and turn.
    All this takes place in a moment: one prolonged flash.
    When I was ten or eleven, on a cold gray autumn day, my older brother Dan took me outside and unwrapped a foot-long ribbon of magnesium. (Because my father tended to bring his work home with him, our house back then was a wonderland of beakers and Bunsen burners, microscopes, pipettes, and other paraphernalia.) He let me hold it, weightless and malleable in my hands. Then he solemnly went through a vaguely scientific process of sparking a propane torch, fine-tuning its flame—as Dad had taught him— and lighting the coiled magnesium on our gravel drive. It burned spookily, with a godlike, white-blue flame that Dan said we were not supposed to look at. When he threw a cup of water on it, it sputtered noxiously, then leapt up violently, so we flinched and scattered. Soon, though, it petered out, and we were left to marvel at its spiral spine of ash.
    The eerie, inexplicable intensity I feel when looking at Vermeer’s paintings is like that—that different kind of fire. A certain chain of events