"MoMA, or heaven?" I texted Bill along with a photo of Braque's Man with a Guitar, on display in the 3rd floor cubism room.

Bill knows a lot about classic art. He's big on cubism, especially. And photography. And graphic design. He's just really smart.

As I witnessed my hands typing the words and attaching the image, a euphoric sensation rushed through my mind and body.

I was here once again, at the place I'd spent so many days throughout my life. It had been years since I'd been back, and it was better than I could have imagined.

In my long-neglected thirst I soaked up every morsel there was to offer. My wife and friends had to drag me out. So much for hiding somewhere, waiting out the closing, and spending the night there.

Here are some of the things I learned last Friday.

• Cubism can, but doesn't necessarily have all that much to do with cubes. In my limited experience, and by my impression, the term refers more to an act of taking a certain image, removing all boundaries (perceptions of depth, locations of objects in relation to one another), and then creating your own boundaries between objects as you see fit, often sparsely. As a half-baked analogy, it evokes the sensation of listening to a piece of recorded music before it has been mixed and mastered.

• In photography, a new picture can be seen as "a problem to be solved." This was the aim of Stephen Shore. This is a handy perspective because it leads to continuously taking on new challenges, and finding novel ways to solve new problems. I suspect it can be adopted for crafts of all kinds in life. Good for the brain muscle!

• Starry Night is the second most popular painting, period, behind the Mona Lisa. I think? Probably. It was the only image in the MoMA Friday that constantly had a crowd of 50 or more huddled around it, phones raised in today's universal sign of recognition.

• Bonus related follow-up: I don't get the act of taking a picture of the painting itself while you're at the museum. If you're taking a picture of the painting itself - wouldn't you get a better picture by Googling the image? What's the advantage I'm missing? On the other hand, if you're going to take a photo of yourself in front of the real-life picture, that would seem useful.

• Monet was really into gardens. He hired not three, not four, but five gardeners to tend assiduously to his own personal gardens. That way, he would always have new live muses to look upon for inspiration.

• The single most breathtaking moment was scrolling through the 30 3D photos they had on display. I've long lamented the photograph's reduction of a vast expanse (say, the Badlands in South Dakota) into a flat image. What all is lost in this translation? How much majesty, how much sensual saturation, how many dimensions are left steamrolled, sanitized and shrunken by this process? A 3D photo will make you think you are actually, right now, standing in the spot where it was taken, viewing the scene in real life. I must repeat that: A 3D photo, done right, will actually trick you into thinking you are standing right where it was taken, right now, in real life. It is that rich an experience. I may have been high off the fumes of returning to my second home after so long, but I walked away muttering that that was the single best highlight of my time there, and it wasn't close.

• The styles of painting that became popular throughout the last 150 some years often complemented other conceptual movements occurring at the time, and often rejected the established / consensus views on life at the time. One example that encompasses both sides of the coin simultaneously was the Surrealist movement that gained steam in the 20s. It was a rejection of the banality and relentless rules-based logic imposed by society every day. At the same time, it borrowed from Freud's concepts of the unconscious mind which had started to gain more legitimacy beyond the ranks of the psychological professions. The combination produced the classic surrealist idiom of a swirling, languorous dreamscape scattered with vivid, seemingly random images in sharp focus. Some believed the combination represented the constantly chattering blur of our minds, pierced so by the continuous nightmares or fears that frequently recur in our living experience.

• There was one question that haunted me over and over that day, and I never answered it: "How long did it take them to make this?" I wasn't invested in finding the answer, but in pondering the question. I don't want to know. Yea, whatever the answer may be, I think it's better that I don't know.

Thank you to the wonderful folks at the MoMA for doing what you do, and for making my life so much more enriched and enjoyable.