Editor’s Note: The following article is a chapter titled “Six Persimmons” that has been excerpted from From Darkness to Darkness by Will Heinrich, published by Thousand Horsemen Press in the summer of 2026 and available online and through independent booksellers. (Copyright © 2026 by Will Heinrich. Published by permission. All rights reserved.)
Every summer Jonah compiled a list of about a hundred upcoming museum shows for the newspaper’s special fall preview section. The first time he did it they were visiting Nadia’s college friend at her parents’ house in Pasadena, where he had to share a queen-size bed with Nadia and eight-month-old Orly. Fording hundreds of press releases, making decisions, and writing one-to-two-sentence synopses of complex shows he hadn’t seen while exhausted and sleepless was a trial. But the next year found him more confident, and ultimately the process became so automatic that it made no impression on him at all. If someone asked him in August, after he had filed his piece, what fall shows he was looking forward to, he would have to refer back to the document to come up with an answer.
One exhibit that did stick in his mind, though, the year Orly was six, was of a famous Chinese ink painting, a still life of persimmons, making a brief visit to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It would be coming from the Japanese monastery which had acquired it when it was already nearly 300 years old and which had then kept it mostly rolled up and hidden away since the early 1500s. Jonah mentioned the show to his editor as one he’d like to cover, emphasising how unprecedented it was for the piece to travel and reminding her that he was her only freelancer with any affinity for, or knowledge of, Asian art.
She was amenable to his writing about it, she told him, but said that, because of the expense of covering the war in Ukraine, the art section had no travel budget left for the year.
“Do you really have to see it in person?” she asked.
Jonah hesitated.
“I mean,” he said, “for a review.”
Then cannily, or guilelessly, he added that he planned to go see it regardless. He figured that after more than a decade as an art critic, it was time to admit that art was important to him, and that so long as she did pay him to write something, he would at least break even on the experience. She offered to pay for a night in a hotel and he replied that he was planning to stay with his cousin.
“Well,” she said noncommittally, “see if you can find a cheap flight.”
Using credit card points, he found one for a couple of hundred dollars. He checked with his cousin and made plans to stay for two nights; it would be the longest he had been alone since Orly was born. Then he forgot about it, mostly. But he would mention his upcoming trip now and then to this or that person, amused to cut the figure of an adult whose job let him travel. Downtown to take notes about a conceptual art show, he met his father for coffee.
“Wow!” Alan exclaimed when Jonah told him about the ink painting. “I always wanted to see that but your mother and I were never in Kyoto on the right day.”
When the time came to go and Jonah found himself alone with a backpack on the E train, bound for Kennedy Airport, he was bemused again. As a younger man, he had travelled to escape his ordinary life, to fling himself without boundaries into unfamiliar locales. His last visit to San Francisco had been to visit a girl he’d briefly dated in New York, and he could still summon up the Pacific smell of the air when he first stepped out of the airport, the dark luxury of the apartment she was borrowing, the softness of her freckled, paper-white skin as they made love and fell asleep in a narrow guest-room bed. She had reminded him of a doe. Now, as he passed through the airport security line in New York, endured a two-hour delay caused by San Francisco air traffic related to the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, read the London Review of Books, crammed himself into an economy seat, watched half a movie on his iPad, and took a cab, at his cousin’s suggestion, to Bernal Heights, it all felt more like an errand, albeit a pleasant one, than an adventure. The air smelled of nothing. His own company felt like a childhood friend he was glad to see again, but with whom, because it had been so long, he felt shy.
First thing the following morning, Jonah accompanied his cousin, an accomplished video game designer, as he walked his dog in a nearby park. They hadn’t met in years, and Jonah felt shy with him, too — as well as rebuked in his own aimless financial irresponsibility by the cousin’s comfortably furnished 3-bedroom house with basement rental apartment attached. Looking for something to talk about, he asked whether there had been many protests about Israel’s response to the attacks of October 7.
“Not really,” his cousin said. “I did drive past one group of people with signs that said ‘Stop the Genocide.’”
His tone made clear what he thought of the protestors’ use of the word “genocide.” Not seeing any benefit in starting an argument with his host at 7:30 in the morning, Jonah changed the subject. He went and climbed a nearby hill for its view of the city; returned to the house, where his cousin fed him breakfast; and rode the bus to a still awakening Chinatown to see a show someone had told him about, work by an artist he liked at a gallery he had encountered at art fairs but never visited in person. He chatted with the young man behind the desk, asking what else there was to see in the neighbourhood and sharing his concern that the artist, a Native American ceramicist who had gotten very popular, might get boxed into grinding out the same thing over and over. Because the young man asked, Jonah also shared his name. There was a photography gallery a few blocks away, another one Jonah knew by reputation; walking there he saw a large protest of the summit that had delayed his flight.
He got past the desk and into the show — tasteful, boring photography by a successful Japanese artist, what he privately thought of as “rich people art” — with only a brief hello, but then turned around, just when he would have walked out again, to see that the gallery founder and two directors had emerged to greet him.
“They told us you were coming,” explained one of the directors, a pretty young woman in a severe business suit. Once the founder had shaken his hand and gone back to his office, Jonah let the pretty young director show him around the exhibit he’d already dismissed as well as the gallery’s back office and viewing room. He took his usual approach in such situations, making small talk as if at a cocktail party and biding his time. He admired the unique design of the display racks in the viewing room. He inquired after her family and asked where she liked to eat in the neighbourhood. As soon as he could he slipped out and hurried over to City Lights, where he bought two paperbacks by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, whom he’d never read before.
The restaurant she recommended turned out to be an ornate Szechuan spot, deserted at that hour, whose prices he could not possibly afford. Slinking out again after looking at the menu he felt foolish to have expected anything else. Fortunately he’d overheard the clerk at City Lights mention another place, an old-school Hunanese lunch counter where there was a television playing the local news and they did not offend Jonah’s sensibilities by charging for tea. Later he rode out to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see the exhibition of a grad school friend, another conceptual artist who made work about North American settler colonialism; the next morning, he visited a sculptor who had gone to college with Nadia and had just spent six months carving the impurities out of an enormous chunk of quartz salvaged from a commercial rock quarry.
This sculptor’s New York gallery had just closed and he had a new baby in a carrier on his chest. Jonah’s heart was in his mouth every time the sculptor leaned over his opus, bringing the baby’s head within an inch of a corner; he remembered the dirty looks he used to get from old women in Jackson Heights when they saw him carrying his own newborn infant under one arm like a football. He and the sculptor went out for dim sum and to a bookstore and the sculptor shared the advice another artist had given him about making money.
“‘Use archival material,’” he said, “‘and get used to doing the same thing over and over.’”
Then Jonah walked a mile and a half to the Asian Art Museum, which had been closed to the public to host a grand lunch for the spouses of the heads of state in town for APEC.
“Jill Biden was standing right here two hours ago,” the museum’s press chief told him, grinning and squeezing his arm, once he’d gotten past security and been led into the dim and empty gallery. “I’ll leave you alone.”
Publicists liked to talk, and curators liked to lecture, but Jonah had learned to be forthright about his need for solitude. This time they had agreed ahead of time that he would have 45 minutes to himself before the curator arrived to explain what he was supposed to think of the painting. When he was starting out, he had sometimes spent many hours over multiple days confronting a work that perplexed him. In this case, having already seen many images of what turned out to be a very easily photographed black and white art work, and having already begun to write down ideas earlier in the day, he could probably have made do with a glance. He was unlikely to experience any transcendence in such a tightly choreographed encounter, anyway. He was just too contrary. But showing up felt like a matter of principle, and after all, it couldn’t hurt.
When the press contact, a former dancer type who later surprised Jonah by mentioning his wife and two children, returned with the curator, a trim older woman in an embroidered jacket, Jonah prepared to joust. She was perfectly nice and had interesting things to say. But he needed her to understand that he was no mere journalist, to whom the Zen esthetic was news, while she, as an academic, had to demonstrate her mastery of the material. Once he felt they had both made their points, he looked at his watch, and they continued next door to a Japanese pop art exhibit. Then the curator excused herself, but the former dancer offered Jonah a tour of the rest of the museum, and Jonah couldn’t see how to refuse, even though his feet hurt and his eyes were exhausted. He hadn’t ever been there before and, as the dancer pointed out, there was no way of knowing if he’d ever be back.
When finally he left, with many thanks and professions of good will, he got on a train to a gentrified section of Oakland for dinner with a close college friend who had, after an interval in academia, become a corporate lawyer. Jonah held the friend’s new baby and then, leaving the baby and his older brother with either the night nurse or the mother in law — she wasn’t introduced — he, his friend, and his friend’s wife, also a corporate lawyer, walked to a nearby French restaurant. Jonah had been surprised, because his friend always seemed worried about money, by how nice his house was, but he supposed it made sense. The first thing his friend said, once they had been seated and had ordered some appetizers, was, “Flying across the country to see one painting is completely ridiculous.”
Jonah wasn’t sure whether he was meant to litigate this question, for entertainment’s sake, or to agree that he had wandered into an unbelievable life. He suspected the latter, but either way he didn’t feel up to it.
“Well,” he said mildly, “art is important to some people.”
“No, of course,” his friend replied, and Jonah stopped listening. In the morning he discovered that a train ran directly to the airport from quite close to his cousin’s house. There had been no reason to take a cab when he arrived. He began transcribing his notes on the airplane, and then began writing, and when this flight, too, was delayed, and they were all forced to deplane for several hours, he was delighted. The airline gave them food vouchers, there was a decent enough sushi counter, and this way he could finish his piece and finish watching Parasite on his iPad before returning to family life. It was a beautiful experience. He was engaged in what he was doing, but with something deeper than his anxious ordinary mind; he could feel himself pirouette around the ink painting’s formal qualities and Buddhist subtext like an ice skater. “The point of this minimalism isn’t to make anything simple,” he concluded, after about 1000 words, “but to cut away distractions and reveal how complicated the world actually is.”
He filed that evening from Kennedy Airport, and when there was no reply the following day, he wondered if he should call. But then the assistant art editor sent an edit, and he dared hope he could get through the whole process without talking on the phone at all. He did end up speaking to the assistant editor, because she would need a synopsis of his piece for a meeting the following week and called to ask him to write one for her. In the course of their exchange, he mentioned that some people called “Six Persimmons” the “Zen Mona Lisa.” She suggested putting this phrase in the subheadline, and to make this intelligible, he agreed to add the fact that some people called “Six Persimmons” the “Zen Mona Lisa” to his story.
When the piece was published, he got vastly more response than he usually did, which is to say that as many as three or four people emailed him about it. One was a former college professor, who said that he wasn’t sure either of them had brought their best to the class they had shared, but that he congratulated Jonah on conserving his energies for such top-flight art writing. The next week Jonah went to Chinatown to visit an artist he might profile for a museum catalogue, a renowned older Japanese woman who had lived like a squatter in an unfurnished loft for 40 years. The gallerist who would be paying him for this, if she decided to spend what he was asking, sat between them as they chatted, interrupting their rapport from time to time to underline the parts of the artist’s life that she felt were important art historically. When she got up to use the bathroom, the artist followed her with her eyes.
“She’s okay,” the artist said. “But I think something weird about her. Like whenever we travel, she insist on getting one room with king size bed.”
“To share?” Jonah exclaimed.
On his way to Tribeca, where he was meeting his father for coffee, Jonah ran into a different art dealer, the one whose conceptual art show he had just reviewed, and she invited him into her office for a chat. They talked about marriage and their children, as they usually did, and she thanked him for the review, which he shrugged off.
“No,” she said, “it’s huge.”
She had worked at a mega gallery before opening her own space, and she told him that reviews in his paper had been the only ones the mega gallerist cared about. They appeared in sales presentations. They played a key role in what she called the mega gallerist’s “ongoing pissing contest” with his peers.
“Yeah,” Jonah laughed, “and then I get $250.”
The dealer’s jaw dropped, and he in turn stared right back at her. He couldn’t remember having ever surprised her before.
“Yeah,” he repeated. “Two-fifty for the short ones.”
“But you have so much power!” she exclaimed.
He didn’t know what to say.
“How was the piece?” Alan asked him, once they were sitting side by side in the little cafe that now occupied the former boarding house where Frederick Douglass had first slept when he came to New York.
“To be honest,” Jonah said, “I think it comes through pretty well in reproduction.” He made a deprecating gesture. “You know, it’s black and white.”
“It’s still good you went,” Alan said.
“Oh, yeah, no,” Jonah said, “it was a great trip. I’m glad I went.”
He walked Alan back to the loft and went upstairs to say hello to his mother, to whom he couldn’t help boasting that he’d gotten some nice emails about his latest review.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” she exclaimed. “Because I saw someone on Facebook making fun of you for calling it the Zen Mona Lisa.”