A love letter to the in~between.
In Paris, last month, I made an appointment at la salle de consultation du département des Arts graphiques du musée du Louvre.
Before I could see anything, I had to leave my belongings in a locker. No bag, no phone, no distractions. Just a pencil and a notebook in hand.
I remember walking through the large, open library, the sound of my new leather Mary Janes echoing beneath the high ceilings. They were painted with cowboys crossing a desert, an unexpectedly whimsical companion for an afternoon spent studying centuries old works of art.
Before I could even ask for the pieces I had requested, I stopped to look up.
The ceiling.
I stood there for a moment, taking it all in. The scale of the room, the architecture, the quiet magnitude of being somewhere that held so much history. I had come to study the work, but the building itself had already interrupted me.
Eventually, I found my place and requested the pieces I had come to see. They were brought to me by a curator wearing white gloves, one at a time, with a care that seemed to acknowledge the distance between the person who made them and the person now sitting before them.
There were only two of us in the room.
I spent the afternoon thinking, writing, studying. Considering what these pieces might have meant when they were made, what their makers intended, and what their first viewers might have understood. And then, what they mean now. What survives of their original context, what has been lost, and what we bring to them ourselves.
I loved the intimacy of it. To request a work and have it brought to you. To sit with something that had existed for centuries, not behind glass or surrounded by a crowd, but close enough to study the details that might otherwise go unnoticed.
There is a difference between seeing a work of art and being given the time to look at it.
And then there was the drawing.
A naked woman sits on a rock, one hand holding the face of a small, horned, baby like man sitting on her lap and grabbing at her breast. Her other hand rests behind her against the rock, supporting her weight. A little lizard lies on the ground nearby.
But it’s her face.
She doesn’t look frightened. She doesn’t look particularly bothered, either. She looks annoyed. Deeply, almost impressively annoyed.
Again?
And there I was, giggling to myself in the Louvre.
Because suddenly, this drawing from another century felt less like a historical artifact and more like an observation about men in general.
The audacity. The persistence. The peculiar ability to be both irritating and, against one’s better judgment, a little cute.
A small, horned creature with absolutely no sense of personal boundaries, sitting there as though he belongs.
And her? She’s holding his face like she’s dealt with this before. Like she’s seen the routine. Like she’s not about to let it ruin her afternoon.
I loved her immediately.
I don’t know what the artist intended, what the woman was meant to convey, or precisely how the image would have been understood by the people who first encountered it. I only know what I saw, and what it brought to mind.
He’s just a guy.
What amused me most was the distance between the drawing’s creation and my own reaction to it. Centuries separated us, yet I could recognize a feeling, laugh at a familiar dynamic, and find myself in conversation with someone whose name I may never know.
Perhaps that is one of the pleasures of looking at art. We arrive expecting to learn something about another time, another world, another way of seeing. Sometimes we do. And sometimes we encounter something that makes us laugh because, despite all the things that change, certain human experiences remain stubbornly recognizable.
I had gone to the Louvre to study, to understand something about the work and its history. But the experience reminded me that looking is never entirely separate from the person doing the looking.
We bring our own histories, irritations, and affections. We bring our present selves into contact with the past, and somewhere in that meeting, something new becomes possible.
A drawing can be a historical record and an invitation to imagine. An object can tell us something about the world that produced it while revealing something about the world we inhabit now. Its meaning does not have to be exhausted in a single viewing.
Perhaps this is why I wanted to be there in the first place. Not simply to see beautiful things, but to spend time with them. To ask questions without needing immediate answers. To notice what held my attention, and to remain curious about why.
How rarely we give anything our undivided presence. We move through rooms, through cities, through entire lives, gathering impressions and moving on before we have really looked. We photograph things to remember them, sometimes forgetting to experience them while they are happening.
That afternoon, I had only a pencil and a notebook. A room full of history, a curator carrying works in white gloves, the sound of my shoes beneath a magnificent ceiling, and enough time to sit with what was in front of me.
I also had a drawing of a naked woman, a horned baby man, and a tiny lizard.
Somehow, all of it belonged.
I think often about the space between what something was and what it becomes to us. The distance between intention and interpretation. The way an object made in another century can arrive in our hands, our eyes, our imaginations, and become part of a story that could not have existed when it was first created.
We do not have to know everything to be moved by something. We do not have to arrive at the correct interpretation before we are allowed to feel curiosity, amusement, tenderness, or even disgust.
Sometimes, it is enough to stay a little longer.
To look again.
To let the question remain open.
Perhaps the art of dropping in begins there: in the willingness to give our attention to what is actually before us, rather than what we expect to find.
To be present enough to notice the ceiling before the collection. The sound of our own footsteps. The expression on a woman’s face. The tiny creature on the floor.
To let the world surprise us, even when we think we have come prepared to study it.
And to remember that looking closely is not only a way of understanding the things around us. It is also a way of discovering ourselves in the act of looking.
Sometimes, the past offers us a lesson.
Sometimes, it offers us a mystery.
And sometimes, it offers us a little horned man and the very distinct impression that this woman has had quite enough.
I think there is room for all of it.
Perhaps this is what it means to look across centuries: to recognize what has endured, and to question what should not have. We can appreciate the absurdity of human nature without making peace with its worst habits. We can find a creature endearing without excusing its behavior. We can laugh at the little horned man and still ask why the woman must be the one to manage him.
Affection is not absolution. Patience is not an obligation. And being lovable is not the same as being accountable.
Men have had centuries of cultural permission to be complicated, careless, and forgiven. Women have had centuries of practice making sense of it.
Perhaps it’s time for a different kind of evolution. Less instinct. More introspection. Less entitlement. More tenderness. Less expectation that women will teach men how to be good to them.
The future does not need a better behaved little devil. It needs men willing to outgrow him.
<3, AP