Musée D'Orsay, Paris
Today I am thinking about the nature of time. Time spent, time gone forever, time to come. A teacher once asked our small seminar group to draw a picture of a year. Only Becky, who later moved to Sweden, had enough insight to draw a circle. Like Joni Mitchell in Circle Game—"And the seasons they go round and round"— she saw how time was shaped like a carousel. The large clock inside the Musée D'Orsay, a former railway station, is another circular portrait of time in action. Its imposing scale makes me feel as small and awed as the boy in Martin Scorsese's 2011 film, Hugo. I wouldn't mind a turn on it either.