New York, Day 6: The Met

Sometimes the ways of the universe are super double awesome.  I am currently in the middle of an Alice in Wonderland obsession.  It is a rich text to me for many reasons that I’m not currently ready or able to explain.  But when I discover, by accident, that I happen to be near an Alice in Wonderland sculpture, I feel like the message is that I am on the right track somehow.  Here is what it looks like:

Just to bring things back to earth, here is my kid humoring me by posing with a bear sculpture the way he would have when he was small (I chose this over the picture of him posing as if being devoured by the center bear, which is how he poses with the sculpture now that he is larger…).

We spent the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  One day is clearly not enough.  Those of you who have read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs.Basil E. Frankweiler will know what I am plotting.  (Those of you who haven’t should hurry up and read it; it’s awesome.)  T. and I saw many, many beautiful things, but perhaps the best part of the day was seeing this:

It’s a picture of one part of one page of a Qur’an (here’s the whole description from the Met), one of the largest ever made.  T., because he is studying Arabic, was working on parsing it out for me when a lovely man and his son came up to us to help.  They translated the passage for us and made a beautiful object also meaningful.  In these contentious times, it warmed my heart that someone would reach out and help me in my ignorance to understand an important part of their language, culture, and religion.

Today’s John the Baptist is Spanish and sculpted.  (I also saw one painted, but it was only his head on a plate, with Salome.)

And, finally, here is a bowl with fish.  I like that it seems like the fish are swimming at different depths because of the way the coloring works.