Maybe he was driven by doubt, too, unable to rest in two dimensions? His rooms and hallways have the almost-depth of stereopticon views, or those 3-D contraptions of my childhood, View-Masters, a sort of plastic binocular in which spun a cardboard disc holding transparent slides; pull the trigger, the disc turned, and the slides told a little story: wonders of the Grand Canyon, the labors of Hercules, the sorrows of Bambi.

What did Von Hoogstraten think he was doing? Who knows what he believed? What’s important is the resonant object, here, now, inviting interpretation and resisting it at once, a physical embodiment not of one idea but of many. It breathes with that odd, cold, long life that some works of art have.

This motionless thing—which has long outlived its moment of fashionable novelty, its unrecapturable context—offers a permanent demonstration, in its deep silence. Here is chaos brought to order and order dissolving again. We think that art makes order out of the unruly, but here chaos is made, too. And so we’re allowed to play, serious children, in Von Hoogstraten’s dialectic: back and forth, between the formless and the formed, worlds of appearance. Disorder resolves into pattern, then dissolves again, back and forth, as long as I stay.

Which might be all afternoon; I have all day, nowhere to be till evening. I don’t know that in a few hours T. S. Eliot’s widow—charming, a bit vague around the edges, a blond blur—will present to my book a prize named for her late husband, and that she and I and my British editor and various luminaries will all head off for a celebratory dinner in some fancy London boîte, where she’ll tell me stories of her life with “Tom” thirty years before. (My favorite: driving through Cape Cod, they tossed martinis out the window, with the intention of intoxicating the squirrels.)

The pressure of the competition seems a world away; I’ve lost myself in the world of this box. And I feel at home here, strangely, though I’m thousands of miles from anything I know; there’s something familiar about this house, something oddly comforting and unsettling at once, hard to resist.

And suddenly I want to lift off the lid of the box, want to break all the rules and grab hold of it, rip off the roof so I can peer down into those rooms…. Though it wouldn’t work even if I could do it; there’s no choice but to look through a lens.

Maybe around some corner—at some angle I’ll finally discover, if I lean into the eyepiece, if my eye works hard enough to probe the hidden recesses—I’ll find them, not Samuel Von Hoogstraten’s hidden people but my own, the family I can’t seem to see through any more direct means. They are hard to approach; they don’t want to be known.