But back to meeting Bethany. Dinner had made me sluggish. Before b-ball at the gym, I planned to shower, get through more of The Gothic Image. It was a book for my medieval history class, about religious art in France. I was a hundred pages behind. The previous owner had highlighted a single sentence in the introduction (“Work of the thirteenth century interests us even when inadequately executed for we feel there is something in it akin to a soul”) before giving up. So far, I understood that one line perfectly, but not much else.

My paper was on René Magritte. Lately I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it. A play within a play, a book within a book, a painting that depicted another, smaller painting. I had never paid attention to such things before. Was the interior work of art less “real” than the surrounding work? If so, why does our mind attribute levels of reality to what is, after all, just color on canvas? Since a painter can paint a painter painting a painting, could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God? Pondering such things probably wouldn’t help me get into law school, but I couldn’t stop.