When I was seventeen, I met a striking young woman named Victorine Meurent. She wore her hair tied back in a blue ribbon and an embroidered white blouse. She had eyes like brown beach glass and a bold gaze that held me without blinking as we stared each other down, for the first time, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Victorine had been Edouard Manet’s model and muse, and now she was mine. Silent though she was, long gone from this earth, still she spoke eloquently from the paint and canvas with which Manet had transformed her, 150 years ago, into his gift to the world.

And this is what she said to me: What you’re doing today, young student from way out west—getting out of your dorm room and onto the right train and here to this museum to have this stare-down with me?—this will teach you more than all the books in the world. You say you want to write? Then it’s good you’re not writing right now. It is good that instead, you’ve chosen to look at art, the first great art you’ve ever seen, some of the best paintings in the world.  How terribly sad it would be if instead of coming here, you had just stayed in your room and scribbled in that damned journal about your homesickness and your loneliness. Instead you are here, making friends with me. Learning to look at the world, boldly, like me. To drink it in, as is your right. And I assure you, learning this now will enrich your whole life!

From Manet and his model, I learned early one of the best lessons a writer can learn: Fill the well.

In Kim Stafford’s memoir, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, he writes of a moment than changed his life. Unhappy in his marriage, empty and lonely and at a crossroads, he poured out his feelings to a fellow writer. She responded by urging him to give her his notebook—“the one in your pocket over your heart”—and not write for 30 days.

“You have become a person who does not live,” she said. “Instead, you write about living.”

Stafford took her advice. He learned, finally, to live first and then to write.

Manet took long breaks from his studio, strolls down the avenues of Paris and through the Louvre that inspired him to paint Victorine in different poses: as a street singer, holding cherries to her mouth (in another painting owned by the Boston MFA) and even more famously, as the nude lolling casually in Olympia and Luncheon in the Grass, two paintings that turned the French art world on its head and to this day gather crowds at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where you’ll find Victorine looking out at the students and the tourists as directly as she did in that first demure portrait.

Manet had his model, but he still needed to fill the well: to walk, think, listen to music, admire ancient art.

A few weeks ago, I visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts again for the first time in 35 years. Victorine was waiting for me. I rounded a corner, and there she was, her eyes as amber-bright as ever.

I gasped a little, at her eternal youth. I teared up, remembering our first meeting and how much it meant to me. I was so grateful to see her. So ready to let her to stare me down. To remind me, once again, to take in the world with a bold and hungry gaze: and keep on filling the well.