In the MoMa, paintings in this room and the next will catch your eye--capture, hold, apprehend, infect--but it is best to follow the numbers that lead you calmly through the gallery, rather than to rush immediately to Picasso's "Boy Leading a Horse." If you choose the latter course, you see, you will inevitably next race over to Van Gogh's "The Olive Trees" and then to some Matisse or other (maybe "The Bather"). By the time you haphazardly stumble over Elsworth Kelly's giant crimson canvas, you will not understand why it is personable. Also, you will probably miss the pink petal nipples in Ganguin's "The seat of the Aereoi" (1892) and how Kandinsky's "Four Panels for Edwin R. Campbell" (1914) describe birth, life, dying, and death. Much better to follow the room numbers, so that by the time you get to Pollock, you can ask yourself, "but where are the women? " And then you can look to your right and find them in "Echo: #21" (1951), looking something between splatter and script (but still more beautiful than in "Easter and the totem," and entirely fitting given that Picasso lived). And then you can see them in the splatter. Thus, when you finally make it to Lucien Freud's "Man Posing" (1985)--be sure to go soon so as not to miss it!--you will be astonished at how unsettling it is to see a man splayed on a couch in a sketch for an oil painting, and you will give appropriate attention to why this is so.

After visiting the MoMa, you might think that visiting art museums is fun and be tempted to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is a terrible idea, and you would do much better to go to the Metropolitan Opera and revel in Renee Flemming's Desdemona in "Otello." The MetMu is as close as we get to a Borgesian library, except that the books are varieties of humanity. While it might be fun to ponder what the Cypriots meant by always carving men with small (some might say silly) grins on their faces (perhaps they were happy? perhaps it is not a grin? perhaps it is a pose of worship? of desire?), or to wonder at how pink is the diaphanous monster about to eat Andromeda on a Roman wall painting from the first century BCE, you will be constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed precisely by all these varieties of humanity. If you go to the MetOp, on the other hand, and see Renee Flemming as Desdemona, you can learn about the beauty, anguish, violence, and self-deception involved in being a variety of human who cannot be anything but virginal.

Whichever you choose, after such a day, you will probably be tired. If you listen to a recording by Alfred Brendel, you will hear passionate piano music that is strangely unsentimental, and this might be refreshing. When you think that the man has obsessed with striking keys for the past six decades, you might cry a little, and remember how you have obsessively loved in a way that demanded nothing from the object of your love.