This trip to the Cloisters with my girlfriend Susan was my third trip. I have now been there a total of five times, but we have only gone together once. Most of our visit that day was comparable to my other visits. Here again was the studied precision of the religious icons and illuminated manuscripts. Here again I felt the serenity of the abbeys and the reconstituted chapels. Like anything brought brick-for-brick across the ocean, the Cloisters retains the feeling of being somewhere else. It is equal parts unnatural and magical, a place grafted onto its surroundings but somehow still living, even blossoming, as a result.
