A good day at the Museum

The summer draws to an end, and my language requirement is finally, fulfilled. I'm very happy about that, yay! My Spanish final went well, I translated an article on Emily Dickinson and her poem "What Inn is this," which (of course) is about death. I also translated an article about John Keats and the "Art of Suicide," but I'm too happy to describe it. Instead, I'll write about life in the service of art, and my appreciation for Forest Park. Yesterday J.D. and I went to celebrate by taking a boat ride in Forest Park. We decided to go with the rowboat this time, and I learned something new about myself... I'm actually pretty damn good at rowing! I also learned that it's more fun to accidentally splash J.D. with water from the oar, then to try to soak us both in one of the fountains, although drifting near the spraying water was cooling and fun. We also had a very cute little duck swim right up to us, and all around us, and wished we had some bread for him.

Whenever I'm at Forest Park and the Art Museum I feel very lucky to have access to places like them. I've been thinking about libraries and museums in general a lot recently. I just read a passage in Jacob's Room where Woolf discusses the collective "Mind" of the British Museum:

The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from him. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the depths of it was safe and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to violate these treasures--poor, highly respectable men, with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.

Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato's brain and Shakespeare's; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, "Let me in! Let me in!" (Chapter 9, online)

I'm moved by the idea of people devoting their lives to protect this collective human brain. Their actions are just as important as the Elgin Marbles they watch over, but their devotion will never be seen or quantified except through the continued existence of what they safekeep.

I've often felt that when a person merely goes into a museum or picks up an old book, that this action gives the object a new life, a continued life. That's why for me, to read and understand literature, in some small way, furthers the collective existence of what is good and worthwhile.

It also reminds me of The Golden Bowl, by Henry James, where one of the characters wants to build a grand museum in a coal-mining town, to bring beauty to people who spend their whole lives working so hard. If I ever become a billionaire, a highly unlikely event, the idea appeals to me to build a world-class museum in Burley, Idaho. Of course, Idaho has a lot of natural beauty, but the delightful strangeness of a huge museum there, I admit, makes me smile. It would be very absurd, but very wonderful.

Although, now that I think of it, my little "museum in the clouds fantasy," probably reveals more about me than about Burley or museums. I guess it's my way of expressing how my two worlds will never really coexist. I'll always want to be home, but I will never have all that I desire or need there. I'll always be wandering through grain fields as I'm walking over the manicured lawns of a university.

However, in the end, I choose to believe that the mind is almost as vast as the heart; multiple places can dwell with you.