I had a professor tell me once that art is the obsessive search for beauty. “Art is reverence,” he said, “beauty is the temple,” or something like that. He was an older film historian, the frumpy kind, and he raised a few eyebrows in class with that comment. But last week I saw a play called All the Beauty in the World, and leaving the theater, his words, simplistic as they are, came to mind.

It was a one-man show at the DR2 Theatre performed by Patrick Bringley, who fashioned the play out of his NYT-bestselling memoir of the same name. For an hour and fifteen minutes he stood up on stage and told us about his life, not in the way a seasoned actor would, but in a quiet, matter-of-fact style, unpretentious in its poetry.

Slowly, episodically, Bringley told the story of his time as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His brother died and he needed stillness, so he left a job at The New Yorker to go and pace those marble floors, twelve hours a day. Very often, he was talking about the paintings, projected stylishly behind him as he spoke. Art history lectures can put the best of us to sleep, but he kept us on our toes, weaving in and out of different timelines, finding the art in all of it. There was a moment he described with his family huddled around a hospital bed like an old masters painting, another where a museum-goer sat transfixed like a Rembrandt. He was stunned by the silence and simplicity of art and life, and all that beauty awed him, comforted him.

At that point, he would’ve liked what my professor said. There is no temple of beauty like the Met. It’s free for students, so I wander in there on occasion, let myself get lost and half a day goes by. But Bringley worked there for over a decade. He never said it outright, but there was a point in the play where he started to get restless.

He found peace at the Met, but he was looking for the bedrock, that reality with a capital R. He found it on the outside, by starting a family, seeing life at its most outrageous. That living breathing mess added a layer to all those exquisite masterworks he knew, all the scenes in his memory.

To me, the play was its most beautiful when Bringley stopped to ask why. Why, in a yammering world, amid all this human spillage, why create? He talked about the urge to seize a moment, believe in it and let it live. That struck me. When I write, I commit moments to the page so I can live them twice, or more, and love them properly. To perceive once in time is not enough. And it isn’t about capturing or killing, these paintings are not dead or frozen, they are imbued with life, a world of context beyond the frame.

This has all been very heady, so thank you for bearing with me, if you’ve made it this far. It’s just that I found All the Beauty in the World to be enormously hopeful. It made me want to make stuff. If I could see that professor now, I’d tell him that for me, art is reverence for time, the prettiest thing of all. That and he should see All the Beauty in the World.