“So much for Christmas” Vita brevis, ars longa. The week before Christmas finds MacNeice in London’s National Gallery. Outside, movement continues and suggests ephemerality. Inside, “Other worlds persist,” caught and elevated to significance by the artists’ attention, by the achievements of form. Last March, sensing how things were going and that museum doors would soon be shut, I stole an hour between meetings to duck into the Smith College Museum of Art. The visit felt like a last leave-taking from old friends (I took quick photographs of some favorite works) and like a farewell to the very act of standing in front of paintings (as opposed to staring at reproductions). During the intervening months, that experience of seeing art, of finding some consolatory order and endurance in the frame, was one I keenly missed. I’ve been able to get back into galleries lately, and I have found the frantic rhythms of my mind soothed by those long moments before the canvases. MacNeice, though, finds the “arrogant Old Masters” irritating, not least because they evince the persistence of the past.