With Flying Pen, When Mortals Sleep

It was a sweltering August day. I made my way across the promenade, and through the bustling crowd, to a small line forming outside the Timkin Art Museum. Inside, I stumbled on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Parable of the Sower, painted in 1557, nearly five centuries ago. Photo: The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei When Bruegel took his brush to this canvas, the New World had just been found by Europeans, and the United States was still long into the future. Around me then were all those people, those wandering souls, who across those centuries stood before this same piece and idly mused at a thing made by the hands of a long-dead Flemish man. I thought about him. Not Bruegel—another man—one whom I've come to know these past few years. He does not know of me, yet we both could have seen this very painting. We were connected through the mists of time by this canvas portal to the past. It was October 10th, 2023 at about ten in the evening. I was crawling down a research…