What does it mean today to experience a work of art? In a culture of cynicism, at the mercy of a zeitgeist that prizes the trivial and ephemeral, where can we turn in search of the genuine, the sincere, the truly accomplished? And even if we were to find these things, would we know how to acknowledge their value?

The essays in See What I See are the fruits of a lifetime spent grappling with these questions. By turns lyrical and arch, nostalgic and impassioned, gnomic and piercingly insightful, they seek answers in the artistic achievements of the great masters as well as in less likely places. For Greg Gerke, the nectar of aesthetic experience is found as often in the human body as in poetry or prose, as much in a movement through the world as on celluloid and canvas. Rapturous and indignant, ecstatic and regretful, his essays register the nuances of living in a world abundant with art, and apprise us, page by page, of the sheer breadth of “the distinguished enterprise of being.”