I tried just to follow the lines before me. But how did you distinguish the raised bits from the hollow bits, the ups from the downs? Illustration by BARRY BLITT

When I was in the middle of the journey of my life, I decided to learn to draw. No, I wasn’t lost in a dark, enclosing forest, but it was the Manhattan equivalent: a midweek dinner party that had turned the corner to eleven-thirty and now seemed likely never to end at all. The host was a terrific cook, but one of those seven-course terrific cooks, disappearing into the kitchen for a quarter of an hour at a time to execute the latest Ferran Adrià recipe, while we all secretly gripped the underside of the dinner table, realizing that the babysitter meter was running and we would have to be up again in six hours to dress the kids and get them to school.

Having exhausted the exhausted neighbors to my left and right during the previous course breaks, I turned at last to my neighbor across the table. I knew that we had kids in the same school, and that he was married to the woman beside me. He was curly-haired and handsome in the pugilistic way that looks as though it ought to include a broken tooth. I asked him what he did.

“I’m an artist,” he said. “A teacher. I teach people how to draw.” He spoke with what I would come to recognize as a diffidence touched by, well, touchiness.

“Would you teach me how to draw?” I asked, for reasons that at the moment seemed as clear-flying as a lark in spring air, but that, over the next two years, receded and rose mysteriously, like fish swimming in a muddy aquarium.

“Sure,” he said, only a little surprised. “Come by the studio.” His name was Jacob Collins, and he explained that he supervised an “atelier” in midtown, called the Grand Central Academy of Art.

I said that I was going off to California to speak on Manet—did I intend that to be credentialling? I suppose I did—but that I would certainly come the week after.

He seemed to stiffen, even wince, at the mention of the French painter’s name. I might have said the man who painted the poker-playing dogs.

“You don’t like Manet?” I said, wondering. Didn’t everybody like Manet?

“Actually, I—” he began brutally, and then I thought I saw his wife, across the table, shoot him a “Don’t start!” look, and he shrugged.

This was interesting. The realists I knew in the art world defended their occupation the way the religious believers I know defend theirs, as one more spiritual option within the liberal system: See, I’m just exploring the possibilities of pluralism. This was clearly something else. This guy really didn’t like Manet!

When I got back from California, I armed myself with a sketchbook and a set of pencils and went to visit the Grand Central Academy of Art. The academy was in the same midtown building as the Mechanics Institute Library, a favorite retreat of mine already. I climbed the creaky wooden stairs, took a step into the atelier, and blinked. I was in a series of rooms that could have been found in Paris at the Académie in 1855 or, for that matter, in Rome in 1780. Easels everywhere, and among them plaster casts of classical statues, improbably white and grave and well-muscled and oversized. The statues weren’t displayed, as they are at the Met, at dignified intervals, but bunched together, higgledy-piggledy, so that the effect was that of a cocktail party of tall white plaster people who worked out a lot. The Discus Thrower frowned and threw his discus; a Venus wrapped herself up, modestly; an Apollo looked toward the Korean delis and salad bars just below; an incomplete David, with his slingshot, gazed into the distance. The scene was almost too much like one’s mental image of it, as though a student interested in New York politics had opened the door to a downtown clubhouse and found corpulent, cigar-smoking politicians in porkpie hats and short-hemmed pants and vests with “Tammany” written in bleeding type across them.

A cluster of students in mildly worn jeans worked on their drawings. Each hand moved, back and forth, up and down from the wrist, and the world seemed to flow onto the sketcher’s paper like silver water taking the form of things seen, subtle gradations of gray and black that didn’t just notate the things in an expressive shorthand but actually mirrored them, in a different medium and on a different scale.

Jacob had someone set me up with an easel, and then gave me a small plaster cast of an eye—something taken from a statue perhaps three times life size. “Just try and copy that,” he said.

I held my pencil tight and began. I had a graduate degree in art history, and I liked to draw, though I did it very badly. I could make crude line-drawing faces, which, depending on the direction of the “eyebrows,” might register vanity, conceit, worry, or anger. A squiggled line, for instance, drawn as a girl’s eyes, looks like self-delight. If the hieroglyphs of emotion were that simple, how much harder, my modern-art-trained mind demanded, could the work of representation, mere mirroring, really be?

I stabbed at the paper, trying to copy the contour of the plaster eye, and then looked at what I had done. I had just made a hard line that limped awkwardly along the top of the page, enclosing a kind of egg shape, meant to be the pupil. I looked at the easels around me, at the play of shadow and shade, the real look of the thing, which seemed so natural. I flipped a page in my notebook and, gripping my pencil tighter and staring back at the eye, tried again. It was even worse, like a football inside a pair of parentheses.

After two more flipped pages, Jacob came over. In a gentle tone very different from his dinner-party manner, he said, “Yes, well . . . I would argue that the space you’re asserting here in this corner could be seen as something much spacier. I think you could allow these intervals to . . .” He struggled for words. “To breathe more, without betraying the thing you’re drawing.” It was the most elaborately polite way possible of saying that the circle on the page meant to indicate the pupil was way too big in relation to the ridiculous double line meant to represent the orbit.

I started over on a new page, and tried to stare the damn thing down. The plaster eye looked back at me opaquely, unforgivingly. I took a deep breath and tried to let my hand follow the line in front of me. But how did you distinguish the raised bits of the eye from the hollow bits, the ups from the downs? The light fell across the thing, creating darks and lights, but how to register these with a pencil point? I tried crosshatched shapes in the darker corners, but this made the eye look like a badly wrought Mayan numeral over which someone had scribbled tic-tac-toe boards. My chest tightened, and my breath came short. It was impossible.

As I crossed Sixth Avenue two hours later, I was filled with feelings of helplessness and stupidity and impotence that I had not experienced since elementary school. Why was I so unable to do something so painfully simple? Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place—relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.