My photo for November 23 was taken in one of my very most favorite places in Washington: not the Capitol, but the third floor of the old Patent Office Building. It is now the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The building was used as temporary barracks in the early days of the Civil War and later served as a hospital and morgue after the battles of Manassas (Bull Run), Antietam and Fredricksburg. Walt Whitman tended to wounded Union soldiers here. The second inaugural ball for President Abraham Lincoln was held on the third floor while wounded soldiers were being tended in the rooms down below. It was written that he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a ball during the time of war.

In the photograph Michael is trying to figure out what Elsworth Kelley had in mind with his blue painting. When I walk in this floor of the building, I think always that the world we live in is almost completely incomprehensible... and yet artists persist in trying to make us see it in ways that we haven’t seen it before.