For a long time, nothing. Then, suddenly one has the right eyes.

At Penn, one of my favorite classes was Modern Art from Picasso to Pollock. It was taught in the Spring. The crabapples bloomed, and opened up an artery of pink across campus. We lived with an intensity that marked the tail end of a particular shape of life. Modern Art was a tight class held in the back of a small, mottled beige lecture hall in the Jaffe Art building, filled with a range of characters from undergraduates to local members of the Philadelphia community. Our professor was brilliant, articulate, and easily moved. One day she cried in class while showing us the artist Donald Judd’s Works of Concrete — an exhibition set across 340 acres of pale sky and parched desert earth. The boxes lay flat on the fields of Marfa, solemn against the long, amber, West Texas light. I remember being bewildered by her tears. Years passed before I understood the root of that expression. Learning to love art, or more broadly learning to love anything at all, requires defenselessness and openness

At Penn, one of my favorite classes was Modern Art from Picasso to Pollock. It was taught in the Spring. The crabapples bloomed, and opened up an artery of pink across campus. We lived with an intensity that marked the tail end of a particular shape of life. Modern Art was a tight class held in the back of a small, mottled beige lecture hall in the Jaffe Art building, filled with a range of characters from undergraduates to local members of the Philadelphia community. Our professor was brilliant, articulate, and easily moved. One day she cried in class while showing us the artist Donald Judd’s