Description ★ #1 Overall Bestseller at Korea's Top Three Bookstores ★ ★ Chosen as "Book of the Year" by Critic Lee Dong-jin ★ ★ Amazon Bestseller for 40 Consecutive Weeks ★ "When I lost the strength to go on living in the world, I decided to hide away in the most beautiful place I knew." A story of a man who, in the moment his life collapsed under the weight of loss, sought refuge in the most wondrous of worlds. We often deceive ourselves into thinking that life is unfolding just as we planned, and that we can go on steering it in the direction we want forever. Patrick Bringley, an ambitious young man, once believed this too. After graduating from college, he began his career at The New Yorker, working in a high-rise office with a view of the Empire State Building, certain that his life would keep rising until he reached the "big leagues." But one day, while he was busy building his career and dreaming of brilliant success, his older brother Tom—someone smarter and more thoughtful than anyone he knew—was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away at a young age. Watching the brother he depended on fight his illness and ultimately die, Bringley lost all will to keep doing the things that required him to "strive, scrape, push, and cling" just to move forward. After his brother's funeral, he suddenly remembered visiting an art museum with his mother—a place of silence, surrounded by beautiful things, where sorrow and sweetness alike were allowed to exist. He remembered the guards standing quietly in the corners of the galleries, watching over the visitors. And so Bringley decided to step out of a world that only knew how to move forward, and simply let himself be—in the most beautiful place he knew, doing the simplest of jobs. In the fall of 2008, he began his second life as a guard at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among 700 Acres of Space, Three Million Works of Art, and Over Seven Million Annual Visitors—Discovering the True Meaning of Life, Death, the Everyday, and Art Known as one of the "three great museums of the world," the Metropolitan Museum of Art boasts 700 acres of space, three million works of art, and more than seven million visitors a year. Working as a guard in this vast museum—standing alert for eight to twelve hours a day with barely a movement—offered the author an experience entirely different from his fierce working days amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each morning, before visitors arrived, Bringley would gaze at the works on the quiet gallery walls, sometimes feeling an intense sense of immersion as if meeting Rembrandt or Botticelli in person, and at other times confronting a painting by Bernardo Daddi capturing a moment of suffering, feeling a cold and poignant sorrow. At a special exhibition of Michelangelo's work, he looked at a sketch drawn by the genius sculptor at the age of eighty and felt boundless awe for his relentless diligence; before Mary Cassatt's tender paintings, he felt an inexplicable warmth, "as if soaked in sunlight." In this way, the author, standing closer than almost anyone to works depicting moments of grandeur, beauty, and heartbreak by the great masters, begins to discover "moments where every particle holds meaning." Following the author's calm yet warm reflections, readers come to realize that "everyday life is contradictory—sometimes tedious, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful," and that "life is a process of living without complaint, struggling, growing, and creating something new." A Witty and Deeply Relatable Chronicle of a Grand and Beautiful Museum, the Works That Fill It, and the People Who Keep It Running This book has won the love of so many readers not only for its profound reflections on life and art, but also for the vivid portrait it paints of the museum's many facets. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is home to some 2,000 staff members—curators, conservators, painters, HVAC specialists, art handlers, and more. Among them, the roughly 600 guards, who call themselves "security artists," spend more time beside the exhibited works than even the curators or conservators. The fellow guards Bringley met were strikingly different from his former colleagues at The New Yorker, who had mostly come from elite private schools with similar life paths. Among them were an immigrant who had fled to America after facing threats of assassination, and a former insurance employee who, after twenty years at his job, rediscovered a forgotten dream and became a guard...