Peter Slevin A contributing writer focussing on politics

In the unremitting cacophony that characterizes Donald Trump’s second term, from Iran and Greenland to ICE detentions and cage fights on the White House lawn, it is no wonder that people seek refuge in art. There is art as protest, of course, but also as a quiet pool of calm. To be away from the fray, finding beauty and perspective in artistic creations, can be sweet solace, indeed. In these pages, thirty-one years ago, the writer Lawrence Weschler made just such a discovery while a bloody war driven by ego and grievance raged in the Balkans. Travelling to The Hague to cover the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, he found himself at lunch one day with the chief judge, who shared details of unspeakable acts of cruelty. When Weschler asked how he remained sane, the man said he would often go across town to “spend a little time with the Vermeers.”

That very afternoon, Weschler took a taxi to the Mauritshuis museum and sat among the tranquil paintings that Vermeer had produced in the period after the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that had killed as many as eight million people, by some estimates, before it ended in the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648. Weschler wrote, of Vermeer, “At a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history of his continent, he had been finding—and, yes, inventing—a zone filled with peace.” Amid the tumult and the uncertainty of the current moment, Weschler’s piece reminds us to find our own Vermeers, and spend time among them.