NYT invites us to stare at Whistler’s “Nocturne in Blue and Silver“.

How did your 10 minutes and 4 seconds feel?

Nostalgically meditative. I’m a vascular surgery resident who usually works 80+ hour weeks with little time to eat or sleep, and a former Harvard College student who used to wander around the art museums on quiet weekends for inspiration. I haven’t stopped to stare at a painting in years.

Initially, I was focused on the directly observable elements of the painting. I noticed within the first two minutes the reflection, the mirrored double-reflection, the ghostlike upside down warehouse in the bottom right corner with no above-ground counterpart, the Japanese(?) calligraphy floating in the water at the bottom. The beautiful calming egg-blue colors. I knew it was dusk or dawn, given the way the sky and water were the same shade and blurred the riverbank. 1800s industrial London first came to mind, which filled me with even more nostalgia as I lived in London for 3 years. But then I thought it was not crowded enough to be London—it must be a smaller industrial European city, or perhaps even an East Asian port city given the (Japanese?) brushstrokes at the bottom and the more angled, thatch-like roofs and low-to-the ground buildings.

Wherever in the world, I thought of all the hidden figures milling about within the shadows of the streets, toiling within the buildings with glowing oil lamps, their working hours extended by the invention of artificial light. Then my mind really started to wander, thinking about the purpose of work and productivity and wellness, relating to the present day and how we are the same, nothing has changed, humans are humans. How do these reflections shed light on my current conundrum of trying to figure out how to maximize the good I can do to improve people’s lives with my time on earth?