Mazes

The new Raven Books on Church Street has opened. The very first book I saw in its window as I passed was Labyrinths: The Art of the Maze, by a visionary Italian who's a planted a paracosm in his garden, all of bamboo: "no one has ever been killed by falling bamboo ... its elegance is as flawless as that of the Bodoni typeface." Reader, I bought it. It's almost too large for my lap, full of metaphysics, meditations, archaeology, and artwork.

On Sunday evening, I went to the opening of the new exhibition at the MFA: Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. I knew from all the banners they were going to have the lady in the pale yellow jacket--paler still than this, like floating island--looking up from her letter;

I hadn't known they were getting The Astronomer from Paris. Holy Christ. It was like looking up for the new moon and discovering a comet.

Two perfect beauties, which is two more Vermeers than Boston has had since the Gardner tragedy. I so deeply loved that painting. I mourn it.

They also have the cover of The Embarrassment of Riches, with that strange still child in pink fawn and silver blue, who is not on those paving stones. Not in Delft.

These galleries will take several visits to go round: there's so much to study. I liked the room full of working women: lacemaking, ironing, louse-combing, whoring (she looks blowsy and dead tired, and is holding a gold coin the size of a Nancy button). Round the corner, three tailors stitching, crosslegged on a table. No more twist! And a barber-surgeon cutting corns. Skaters; acres of black satin stretched over prosperous paunches; a landed couple with ten pretty children wreathing garlands, and five more in heaven, naked and diaphanous, with a servant boy behind their hillock, an Ethiope with a pearl in his ear. I loved the three tables, set for three classes of meal, from earthenware and wooden spoons to green glass rummers to exquisite Chinese blue-and-white.

And speaking of tables, I was expecting wine-and-cheese-and-fruit for the members' opening. No such parsimony. We got a fabulous Dutch meal: salad with aged Gouda; pea soup with smoked sausage (snert); rustic breads; potato-and-pickled-herring salad; salmon with mustard; braised short ribs with a root-vegetable mash (stamppot). Yum! There was something enchantingly pink in tall glasses, said to be gin with elderflower liqueur. No tea or coffee though, and no dessert. I suppose pancakes for a crowd aren't practical.