Whims beget surprises. When I arrived, I found out that I had envisioned the wrong thing, the wrong kind of place, entirely. These canvases are nothing like his more luminous color studies, paintings so full of depth and light that it almost feels as if you can enter. The Houston canvases are dark purples, maroons, black: the colors of old sorrows or ageless ones. I had wanted something I could disappear inside, but these colors seemed to come from inside me. According to James Breslin’s biography of Rothko, he set out to paint something difficult to look at.

The chapel is lit only by a skylight, designed to match the one in Rothko’s New York studio, where he built a partial mock-up of the chapel interior to work from. No matter where you stand, the room’s irregular geometry seems to thrust you into its center. Comforts are few. There are usually two tidy rows of backless benches in the center of the room, a handful of meditation cushions on the brick floor. It is quiet but rarely silent. It is not an easy place. Nothing tells you how to see.

In this place, purposeful looking becomes an exercise in failure. My initial diligence seemed to yield only backaches, but I gamely sat for a couple of hours each morning and afternoon. For a long time the paintings refused me, but slowly, resonances materialized. A swirl that looked like the graceful curve of a spine rose from a purple field. I thought about bruises and hematomas. My eyes moved over the sharp geometry of black giving way to maroon, and it was the color of my mother’s exhaustion when she died, of everything life had wrung out of her. I wanted to tell someone, point to it and show them where I’d found her, but then I realized that no one else would be able to see. No one could see anyone’s ghosts but his or her own.

Time passed, but I couldn’t tell you how much. Eventually my knees were achy and I was hungry. As I stirred and stretched, it occurred to me that this might be the thing we share, this grief for our many solitudes. We go to the chapel to see, and to know that we can’t. Perhaps it can only be this way: Rothko committed suicide in 1970, a year before the project was completed. He made the paintings in New York, under light we will never know; he never saw what they would look like under Texas’ expansive sky. There is no right way to gaze upon the paintings, no ideal set of conditions.

Sitting there alone, I suddenly felt happy for everyone around me, moved by the tenderness I knew was inside them. I was glad for what they could see, even if it was hidden from me. I think this gentle affection for not knowing might be what we really mean by empathy. Perhaps this is what Rothko meant when he told a group of art students that he included in his paintings a measure of hope: ‘‘10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.’’