Metropolitan diary. (The Last Word).

I've seen Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Thomas only in reproduction. Three apostles have come to the resurrected Christ. Their four bowed heads come together like the arms of a cross, or the petals of a wilted flower. The painting is all chiaroscuro. Christ's bare chest is in light, but his head is in shadows. Each crease in Thomas's forehead is brightly lit with the strain of concentration. Behind, the room is dark. The apostles' eyes are drawn to a single, saving wound. Thomas has put his finger into the wound in Christ's side. Jesus' hand grips Thomas's wrist, holding him, allowing him. The two are close enough to feel one another's breath, and Christ's mouth is slightly open. Is he gasping? Does he groan in pain? I wonder if I'll ever know--the original is in Potsdam.

On a Saturday morning, I take the 6 train to 86th Street and walk up into a world busy and swept clean, New York's Upper East Side. Keeping custody of my eyes, I walk past store windows filled with Italian shoes and gossamer blouses, bagels, and cell phones. My destination: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The locals call it "the Met." But I've only recently arrived in Manhattan. I grew up in Colorado and went to college in Indiana. The prospect of visiting the Met is as exotic as, well, visiting Potsdam.

Of course, I know about the Met, the way one knows about Algiers or Proust or Big Ben. I have seen its name on countless postcards, postcards I have taped above my bathroom mirror or keep tucked in books.

I was twenty-three when I made my first visit to the Met. I hurried through the galleries of sarcophagi and burnished codpieces, not yet ready for them, needing something more familiar, accessible. I climbed the grand staircase to the nineteenth-century European paintings. Their minute replications, on postcards, in textbooks, have been shaking me up all my life; now I stand before the originals, trying to be still.

Here is Claude Monet's Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest: his 38 by 51 in. scene is dark at midday, the sunlight interrupted by a canopy of leaves. It is an animated world, with trees like men, the bright fingertips of their thin arms stretching out into a sky that looks as thick as denim. My eye moves to the oak and the path before it. The tree looks charred, yet it blooms. The trail, only lightly trampled, an invitation to the green that surrounds it. I imagine Monet, standing on the other side of the path with his brush, hesitant. He squints his eyes and sees--suddenly--birds of light in the trees, pools of light on the ground. He must paint quickly to catch the light. It is already gone.

And now Philippe Rousseau's Still Life with Ham--a dinner table just abandoned. The viewer enters the scene just slightly above the tabletop, as though seated where the painter has, moments before, hastily left. The cloth is creased, the day's newspaper is folded neatly, and an unopened letter to Monsieur Ph. Rousseau awaits its reader. There is contained violence in the scene--one corner of the tablecloth, hastily upturned, and the knife resting against the ham hock, ready to cut again. The ham, the trophy, is succulent with its ribbons of pink fat and delicate veins. There is a story here. For whom were the three stacked plates and why does Rousseau eat alone? Is he late? Ill? Is his servant--so recently vanished--plotting to poison him? Or is the drama in the objects themselves--the jug, the goblet, the water?

Well fed and in wonder, I push away from Rousseau's table, Monet's woods, this gallery, and head back into the streets. I will return another Saturday to take in more paintings.

As I make my way downtown by subway, the other paintings that I am not quite ready to see come to mind. Amedeo Modigliani's nudes--black-lined and round--overwhelm me. I fear I don't have the depth to sit in front of Mark Rothko's color fields, or the levity to fly with Marc Chagall's lovers in The Birthday. Not to mention Caravaggio's Thomas, hanging in Germany, safely out of range for now.

Thomas was absent Easter evening, the story goes, when Christ returned through locked doors to end his followers' unbelief. I am home now, behind my own locked door. I look at the Caravaggio, just a postcard on my desk. Wanting to understand, I try to smell the sweat, feel the heat in the room where Jesus has come in search of his doubting disciple. Like Thomas, I am stubborn and clever. I need to see the wounds. I want evidence.

For now, these paintings and prints will have to serve as my witnesses--like the disciples in the darkened upper room. And, like Monet, trying to catch the day's fleeting light on his canvas, I'll spend a lifetime trying to understand how that light falls on a face--on us all.

Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum presently lives and teaches high school in New York City.