A New York Times bestselling author spoke to Upper School students about grief — and the solace and meaning he ended up finding through his decade of work as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Patrick Bringley, author of All the Beauty in the World, spoke in Baker Theater before having lunch with faculty and students. He visited AP Literature and AP Art History classes later in the day.

He told the audience that he was just 22 years old and working at what he thought was his dream job at The New Yorker when his older brother, Tom, got sick. At that time, Bringley began to spend a lot of time inside hospital rooms, and his interest in his work at the fancy midtown skyscraper began to lag.

“It was such a contrast to the atmosphere of Tom’s hospital room, which to cut right to the heart of things, felt much more like an old master painting,” Bringley said.

“You know, Tom was just 26 when he died, and the whole thing felt kind of very mysterious on the one hand but also very plain, very simple, very elemental. Kind of the bedrock of the human story.

“And to me, that’s how great art often feels,” he said.

Bringley said he never studied art but always had an interest in it. After his brother died, he left The New Yorker and found his way to a job working for one of the most famous art museums in the world –– The Met.

“I wanted to keep standing still awhile, and I found this job that was a loophole in the universe,” he said. “My job was to have my head set on, my hands empty, my head up, and sort of step outside the normal flow of life. And watch. Be a watchman, while everyone else was doing the rushing about. And with that came an incredible freedom of mind.”

Bringley said his co-workers reflected the diversity of New York City, hailing from "every country you can imagine." He ended up finding a community that “sort of brought me out of my speechlessness that I had when I first started the job.”

He described The Met as a “world in miniature.” He said its 12 acres draws over 7 million visitors a year — more than the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, and Knicks combined — and its contents are too important to leave only to scholars, curators, and people with Ph.Ds.

“The Met is not really about our history,” he said. “It’s not really about art. If you want to learn one of those things, that’s fine, but it’s a museum whose interests stretch right up to the heavens and down into the tombs we’re headed for. It touches on every aspect of how it feels and what it means to live in the space between those things.

“It takes all sorts of people who have lived all sorts of different lives, who have suffered, who have loved, who value different things, to puzzle through all the great questions that art really raises.”