When President Clinton visited in 1994, the underground passages along his Secret Service route were freshly painted and blow-ups of vintage photos from Met history were hung on the walls. If you hadn’t noticed the ghosts before, they were now front and center — from 19th-century schoolchildren to rows of gun-­burnishing guards in front of the museum’s shooting range. These images still mark our paths as we weave in and out of doors rarely noticed by the average visitor.

I WANT TO BELIEVE IT was always this way, behind these walls. In “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton describes the late 19th-century Met as “mouldered in unvisited loneliness.” Newland Archer sits with Countess Olenska in the Met’s vast emptiness and says with resignation, “Ah well — someday, I suppose, it will be a great museum.” He was right, but I suspect there was already greatness in the hive of activity that Newland Archer couldn’t see. Down in the basement, sign painters were writing artists’ names in gilded letters, aproned restorers were replacing noses on statues, mount makers were building pedestals. And yes, there was probably some overeager young woman delivering cheeses.

The museum’s underground halls are all hung with signs reading “Yield to Art in Transit.” Art moves physically within this warren so it can do a different kind of moving — of souls and minds — when it is in the galleries. And really, we should all yield to art in transit. We so often talk about the inspiration that can be found at the Met — over 5,000 years of visual expression — when just a few feet away from those works of art, people have worked hard, fallen in love (with the museum, with the art, with one another) and come to understand something bigger than themselves.

Our day-to-day movements mark our work, the choreography of our coming and our going, our meeting and our doing. But it is the rhythm of the past that makes monumental the pursuit of these necessary things. It is a dance with ghosts who lean on crates in the night and reminisce about that wild party in 1970.

I think of the lampers in that same way. I imagine them opening their cupboards to reveal a blinding stash of pure glow. “This is where we keep the light,” they’d say. Just let them know how much you need, and they will soar to the ceiling to deliver it.