Not long after my first encounter with Agnes Martin's Friendship, I boarded a plane to Berlin with a laptop and a suitcase filled with books. I had sublet an apartment on a high floor of an ungentrified neighborhood—a new city, a new perspective—only to discover that the view out my window, where I sat much of the day at my desk, basking as I worked in the electric glow of my seasonal affective disorder lamp, overlooked a cemetery. The grid of gray cement tombs below, running all the way to a vanishing point at the low gray horizon, seemed to make concrete the tally of my failures, a brute final accounting of my twenties. (I was, by then, in my early thirties.) When my sublet ended, I changed apartments, a friend of a friend’s place: high floor, southern exposure, I was told. But this one, too, overlooked a cemetery.

The pathetic fallacy ran strong in Berlin. The mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had called the city “poor but sexy,” and artists and wayward citizens of the world were flocking there, drawn to its dark vitality. It was comforting to live in a place where no one knew me, where I didn’t yet speak the language or know the names of the streets, where anything could happen and no one would ever know. Berlin was not a grid, and I was always a little lost: this was part of its appeal. I felt a bit like a ghost those first few months—or maybe something closer to one of the angels in Wim Wenders’s sentimental 1987 film, Wings of Desire. Wenders’s trenchcoated seraphs flit about the riven city unseen and unhindered by the Berlin Wall, alighting here and there—on the broken-off spire of the Memory Church; on the gilded shoulder of the Victory Column. Only children can see the angels, and they are a bit like children themselves, all innocence and no experience.

A publisher had sent me a new English edition of The Arcades Project, in which Walter Benjamin laments the rarity, in modern life, of “threshold experiences”—using the German word for threshold, Schwelle, to mean an indeterminate space or time of transition, a place in which the divisions between one stage of life and another, or between the inner life and the public life, meet. “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary,” Benjamin writes. “A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen.”

It seemed to me that in my own life there had been, in fact, many threshold moments, but that they were often less clearly defined than the milestone events marked with formalized rituals like births, weddings, and funerals.

Berlin in the 2010s often seemed to me all threshold, a city as transitional space. More than a century after the art critic Karl Scheffler described the German capital as “condemned to forever become and never be,” Berlin was still in flux. The imposed structures of fascism, then socialism, had blown apart, and it was now global capitalism’s turn; the city was flush with foreign investment and start-ups. “I was poor in love / I was poor in wealth / I was okay in everything else there was,” began a song on all my playlists at the time.

But Berlin’s air of scruffy dissipation was turning over to something shiny and upwardly mobile, filled with organic shops and cafés serving almond milk lattes; famous artists were moving to Berlin, and galleries were springing up in my neighborhood, previously best known for a sex club and a Thai restaurant that served as a late-night artist hangout. Occasionally an unexploded armament from the Second World War would be unearthed during a construction project, but the city was resolutely forward-facing. A high-end clothing boutique opened in the empty Tagesspiegel newspaper printworks, a rack of gorgeously spare chiffon dresses, each a different hue in the spectrum, in the window.

Beneath the new gloss, though, the city was full of monuments to the titanic failures of its past, full of thresholds between old and new orders, some very prominent, others requiring a different kind of attention: the subtle vibration of my bicycle tires bumping over the double line of cobblestones inlaid in the places where the Berlin Wall once stood; the glint of a pair of brass Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, embedded in the grid of cobblestones in front of my building like glinting gold teeth in the pavement. Initiated by artist Gunter Demnig in the wake of the fall of the Wall, the project commemorates people killed by the Nazis at the last place they had a home. The names on the Stolpersteine at my door belonged to a seamstress and her daughter, I discovered after a quick internet search; I could find nothing more about them, other than the fact that they had been forced into smaller quarters in the building before being deported to Auschwitz. Still, I persisted in googling them every week or so, mostly late at night, as though there could be new developments.

Berliners had understandably grown a bit inured to the effects of Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembrance that had preoccupied the country in the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but I was undone by such knowledge, often finding it impossible to put their names out of my mind and go about my business. The city’s past seemed to run alongside its present, an afterimage that never faded.

Not unlike Benjamin’s “angel of history,” inspired by a monoprint from his friend Paul Klee, Wenders’s angels are impartial observers of human calamity. As immortals, they lack a sense of the temporalities that give shape and meaning to life; they perceive history without any thresholds, without any who-won-what or what year events ended, as simply a continuous accrual of disaster. Yet they are, in a way, threshold figures, neither dead nor among the living. They have compassion for the self-destructive humans. In one of the most affecting scenes, they watch as an older man searches, in a grassy no-man’s-land next to the Berlin Wall, for the café where he once met his friends for coffee. (It must be here somewhere, he thinks to himself. Where could it have gone?) Wings of Desire was released two years before the Berlin Wall fell. A complex of steel and glass towers known as the Sony Center now occupies the place where the scene was shot. Inside it is the cinema where I saw the film, at an anniversary screening commemorating the fall of the Wall.

Before I left for Berlin, my friend Victor had told me about his impressions of the city of his birth, which he visited in the late 1990s. It was the first time he’d seen the city since he left with his family in 1938, when he was 10. He was standing at the door of a building in front of his childhood address—on Leibnizstrasse, in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood—when a woman stopped to talk to him. “Sind sie von hier?” she asked. Are you from here? For the briefest moment, time collapsed; he was home. But it was only a tourist seeking directions.

I had no personal attachment to Berlin, and this innocence—ignorance, really, the language sliding past me on the street, unable to harm—was a relief. How blithely I treated the city as the backdrop for my self-improvement campaign. I acquired a cabinet full of teas that promised very specific things: a clear head, relaxation, energetic balance, open bronchial tubes. I saw an English-speaking Gestalt therapist, paid for by my new German insurance, who, in our weekly sessions, had me address her floor lamp. “Tell him you are angry with him,” the therapist prompted. I did yoga with a raven-haired instructor, Schöne Ulrike, as I dubbed her in my head. “Let go of the stories you are telling yourself,” Schöne Ulrike would often say, her perorations becoming intelligible by my second year in Berlin as my German improved. “Let the detour be the journey.” I took up jogging in the Tiergarten, much to the amusement of the sex workers who lined my street, who mocked me by running in place en masse as I passed by. In a high-end sauna in Mitte one evening, I paid extra for an exfoliating massage, then invited the masseur home.

I didn’t miss my ex—it was shocking, the extent to which I did not miss the person with whom I’d spent a decade of my life. Occasionally something absurd but sort of accurate that he’d once said would come back to me, about how I would be more fun if I drank more often or learned to kite-surf, or, when it became clear that I was leaving him, about how he couldn’t bear to be alone, because to experience something without another person there to witness it made it feel as though his life didn’t count. It seemed unfathomable that we’d spent so much time together doing this mutual witnessing, and it finally dawned on me that what I was grieving wasn’t the deletion of him from my life but rather the outgrown version of myself who had participated in all those shared experiences, confident in their assured continuity.

What to do with the accumulation of past lives, with the rubble of memories and guilt and stories that have ended? Before coming to Berlin, I had sold or given away most of my belongings. My ex had taken one of my moving boxes by mistake, noticing it only after his storage unit flooded. I took one look inside, at the molded-over stacks of prints and diplomas, and threw it into a dumpster. “He destroyed your past,” said a friend, expressing hyperbolic solidarity, but I felt relieved.

Always becoming, never being. One low day I sought beauty and solace at the Hamburger Bahnhof, the former train station–turned–contemporary art venue, only to find the word schmerz greeting me in enormous letters, the English translation in a smaller font below: pain. I wandered through the exhibition, with its Anselm Kiefer erosions in browns and grays, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s butchered horse, the squashed pale carcasses of Francis Bacon’s Crucifixion triptych, objects like Nietzsche’s death mask, a gouty hand, and a biting stick once used in operations without anesthesia. Whatever these things kindled inside me didn’t feel like pain but more like a numbed-over rawness.

The second winter I spent in Berlin, my floating, amniotic detachment from reality began to wear off, maybe right around the time I hit a tree root on the rickety old bike I’d purchased for €20, and the entire mechanism—gears, brakes, shocks—sprang apart, like one of Wile E. Coyote’s rabbit traps, leaving me sprawled on the bank of the canal. Or the morning a wild-eyed stranger shoved me to the ground at Zoo Station, standing over me, ranting and spitting, the surrounding commuters averting their gazes. For a moment, I thought he was going to kick me in the face. Maybe part of me felt like I deserved to be the object of a random stranger’s rage.

Everyday life became uncanny, sometimes malevolently strange. Another morning, heading out for my jog, I passed one of the sex workers on her knees on the sidewalk, hands covering her face, a man standing over her, red-faced and screaming. I went back inside the building and phoned the police. “A woman on the street is in danger,” I began, and immediately ran out of German. I gave the address and hung up. For weeks, I could hear the keening sound she made as he berated her. A month or so later the sex club on the street was shuttered, and I never saw the women who had gathered there again. Where had they gone?

One afternoon a card arrived in the post: a thank-you note from a friend who had visited me in Berlin, a blue-green Agnes Martin painting on the front, Night Sea. Made the same year—1963—as Friendship, Night Sea was its less flashy echo, the gold leaf glinting from beneath, rather than on top of, the paint. The mythology of the night sea usually involved the hero (the ego) being swallowed by a monster in the night sea (the unconscious), emerging transformed after lighting a fire in the creature’s belly.

Martin had emerged from the darker parts of herself to make one blazingly brilliant painting after another. But it had never been easy, and the monstrous voices still, at times, grew loud. “I have tried existing, and I do not like it. I have decided to give it up,” Martin wrote to her old friend and lover Kristina Wilson from Galisteo, the village near Santa Fe where she lived throughout the 1980s, on one of the days in which the solitary life was full of terrors. She was in her early seventies at the time. In fact, she didn’t give it up but lived on, productively, to the age of 92.

In the brief meditation at the end of class, Schöne Ulrike sometimes asked us to close our eyes and imagine our bodies to be cathedrals filled with die Stille und die Ruhe—silence and peace. But hovering in my mind’s eye was not a cathedral or a desert mesa but something more like an apartment building following an earthquake, the facade stripped off, furnishings spilling out of the exposed grid of rooms.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Two Chained Monkeys, c. 1562.

Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie Berlin.

I was on my way somewhere else when a sudden downpour led to an impromptu visit to the Gemäldegalerie, home to the unfashionable old masters. There I was, damply contemplating a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting from 1562, Two Chained Monkeys: a duo of red-capped mangabeys from Africa in manacles, a wide view of the Antwerp harbor visible in the background. One of the monkeys looked directly out of the scene at me, as if curious at my appearance, the other was huddled in on himself, resigned to his fate.

I felt their pain. They imprinted themselves on me, along with one of Holbein’s officious burghers, a weary-faced Mantegna Madonna, and two exquisite Vermeers. In one of them, Woman with a Pearl Necklace (c. 1664), a young woman in a yellow fur-trimmed jacket stands resplendently at her open window, holding the pearls up to the light. Some art historians speculate that Vermeer used visual aids to achieve his flawless perspectives that give his paintings such depth and intimacy: a camera obscura, perhaps, and/or a drawing square, a lattice of thread in a frame, a grid that would allow him to accurately render reality. The only evidence of this is the geometric perfection itself, the flawlessly rendered perspectives that Impressionists began to distrust and that modernists did away with entirely.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace, c. 1664.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In life, of course, the lines of perspective rarely meet so perfectly.

I returned a few days later. Again, the museum was empty of people. In a city filled with cutting-edge art—New York gallerists were swooping in to poach artists from the smaller Berlin galleries—no one had time for old masters. It was here that I found die Stille und die Ruhe; the museum was like a chapel, and off some of the galleries, there were even small anterooms for contemplation. On subsequent visits, it seemed like I could really hear something of the people in these portraits, who became familiar over time—the impassive mothers and infants, the satin-sleeved merchants, the young women on thresholds of their own, who also seemed to be seeking a new view.

I thought of something the Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert wrote about the Dutch masters in Still Life with a Bridle: how unlike contemporary artists, they never questioned the value of what they did. Could that really be right? Later I looked up the passage. “They can only be envied,” wrote Herbert. “Whatever their greatness and miseries, the disillusionments and failures of their careers, their role in society and place on earth were not questioned, their profession universally recognized and as evident as the profession of butcher, tailor, or baker. The question of why art exists did not occur to anyone, because a world without paintings was simply inconceivable.” For the seventeenth-century Dutch, art was integral to the web of microintersections that held things together.

I doubt we still have this kind of faith in art making, which isn’t generally thought of now as a professionalized trade. Nor do the many people who are indifferent to it consider it to be essential. But sometimes while I was in the Gemäldegalerie, aware of each painting as representative of a moment in the life of the artist and of the effort in making it, the centuries melted. I felt myself held there, poised between their time and mine, through the canvases on which the artists had amplified their sensations of the world. I returned many times to share their conviction—and to be reminded that they were gone, but I was still here.

*

It’s strange to think of Berlin as the place I recovered my innocence, though I did, with the help of new friends, people who were passing through indeterminate zones of their own. Their innocence was the kind found at dinners that ran late, in meetups at a particular bookstore or coffee shop located in a Hinterhof, or back courtyard, in which so many of Berlin’s best features were hidden. One night, cycling tipsily back to my apartment in the early hours of the morning in a party dress and sneakers, I spotted the fox family who lived on my street—even the kits had that slightly hard-boiled look of an authentic Berliner—and I found myself laughing, thinking of something someone had said. The city, with its ever-present past, humbled us, put all our personal catastrophes into perspective. It afforded a liberality and ease hard to come by in our own county. Berlin abided.

On a work trip to New York, I briefly stopped at MoMA, after a meeting, to see Friendship. Whatever affinities might have prompted Martin to make it, I felt its warmth and imperfection, how each of its careful lines was a revelation, like the waves, over and over again.

Back in Berlin, I went with my friend Emily to see a retrospective of the work of the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, whose work I’d first seen at Panorama Bar. He was a Gen Xer a decade or so older than me, and his photographs, stuck to the museum walls with pins or tape, featured incidental forms of wonderment. There were the euphoric club scenes he was known for, and splendid images of celestial bodies, but more compelling to me were the intimate still lifes of everyday things like morning-after beer bottles and sunlit tomatoes at a kitchen window, a penis in a hand, a tangle of socks and sheets: an affable immanence, all natural light and visual curiosity. Ordinary life could be sublime when someone—an artist, a friend—cared enough to take the world you knew so well and hand it back to you remade.

His portraits were astounding. One of them, Lutz & Alex Sitting in the Trees, I recognized from i-D magazine from the early 1990s. It is a pastoral of sorts: a young man and woman are perched on lush-leafed tree branches, naked as angels or monkeys, save for their long jackets. Edenic, but in a different corner of paradise than Martin’s towheaded child wandering in nature. Lutz looks down, perhaps a bit self-conscious of his hairy body on display, but Alex looks directly at us, a gaze that pierces me with its intimacy, shaded with a long history of shared memories, wry humor, and all the concessions of being known. Of course, she’s really looking at her friend—that is, the photographer, a neat bit of transference. Alex and Lutz don’t present as innocents, exactly—the punk edge to their outerwear gives them away—but for the moment, they’ve recaptured a lightness as pure as the trees they sit in.

The author admiring tree filling window (2002) by Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin.

Courtesy of Megan O'Grady

Emily took a picture of me in front of a photograph of a window, a view overlooking more of Tillmans’s trees. The trompe l’oeil effect of Tillmans’s image made me appear to be looking out the window at a great verdant beyond.

Tillmans had lost his partner, the painter Jochen Klein, to AIDS and himself lives with HIV—or so I had read; there was something valiant in his unpadded, take-life-as-it-comes way of looking. I wanted to see the world as he did—not detached from it, but with an openness to the wild rave of life.

Looking at Tillmans’s friends reminded me of Nan Goldin’s, with their fierce love for each other that animated their days. I believe he too wants to show the people he photographs how beautiful they are, and how much joy there is to be found, in a time and place in which they can love openly (if not entirely, perhaps, without fear). Life is something to be celebrated with friends.

Afterward Emily insisted that I accompany her to a party nearby, and though I was tired, and it was snowing heavily, and I knew that I wouldn’t know any of the people there, I gave myself over to her more expansive sense of the way our evening together should go. Inside, at a table crowded with dripping candles and wine bottles, I was introduced to a man with very large sad eyes. When he turned to talk to me, I wanted to duck under the table, I felt so thoroughly seen.

Perhaps there are, after all, things we feel before we really know them. Later, as I left the party, the sad-eyed man was coming back in from having a cigarette. As we crossed paths in the doorway, my hand reached out to touch his arm, startling us both. He said goodnight, and I said goodnight, and we both said goodnight again, and then I walked home in deep, fresh snow, replaying the moment when I had passed the threshold. ♦

Excerpted from How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves. Copyright (c) 2026 by Megan O'Grady. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.