I was born in the age of masterpieces. It began long before I was born but ended before I was thirty years old. Even in my life the masterpieces were outweighed by the non-masterpieces.

Masterpieces were large creations that took months or years for one person to make. Masterpieces were usually physical objects composed of intricately balanced colors and shapes and each one had many components, each of which evoked a distinct psychological impression, but which all together transformed into a coordinated vision, a singular sense of life.

Some of the masterpieces I knew were Star Wars, Birth of a Nation, Kind of Blue, The Birth of Venus, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Sebastião Salgado's Migrations, The Iliad, The Oresteia, The Mahabharata, The Tale of Genji, David, The Shawshank Redemption, The Divine Comedy, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, The Wasteland, Ran by Akira Kurosawa, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Pather Panchali, Einstein on the Beach (by Robert Wilson, not by Counting Crows), The Art of the Fugue, Fallingwater, Midnight's Children, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Time's Arrow, The House of the Spirits, Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy on Earth, Maus, Schindler's List, Meshes of an Afternoon, Bringing It All Back Home, Mezzanine.

Before I was born some people had great swaths of time on their hands and others had none. The former were driven by an egotism that held their perspectives to be unique, God-given, novel and necessary, and a desire to enlighten others by presenting these perspectives in meticulous detail. The latter were driven by a need for some vision larger than what their own lives afforded. By these forces, a creator and an audience would meet in a forum, and would be affected.

A masterpiece was something that astonished you, and you'd go away with stung eyes. Or you'd feel peaceful while watching it, and your bad feelings would drop away, like after a good run. After seeing a masterpiece, you'd think of it for days, and you'd contemplate its creator, and you'd admire that person. It was something with a precise name and if you heard anyone whisper that name in a cafe or in a Social Security line, you would drop your cup or give up your place in line to hear how they knew of it, and what they thought of it, and how they remembered it. You would pass hours with your friends recounting elements of your favorite masterpieces.

This will sound strange to you, but when I was a boy, there was no direct way to interact with a masterpiece; there was no way to affect its contents or explore it on your own path. A masterpiece was something you humbled yourself to experience; it was something like a tunnel that you walked through, that you trusted not to collapse. It was not something that would return, changing but familiar, like The Simpsons (that near-masterpiece) or The Sopranos or the vaudeville. It was not like the ragas, or the oral stories of my great-grandparents, or the sitcoms of the latter 20th century, and it was not like the gamelan or the parade at Carnaval. It was always something rigid as a piece of forged steel.

With Apologies to Hollis Frampton