Petrie Court

I like museums, good ones anyhow.  But how much museuming I can take at a time is a function of what's within.  I can spend a full day in the best large historical or scientific museums, and not just gain from it, but enjoy it.  Art museums I can spend a day in, but I fatigue: far better is a smaller, ninety minute visit to some corner.

One of the luxuries of being in New York City is that I can handle the encyclopedic art museums (the Met and MoMA) in just this way: buy a membership allowing me unlimited visits and drop in every month or so for a little while.

The MoMA has its joys, but it is the Met that provokes real feelings, thoughts, even works on me.  Probably not entirely, though mostly, to the good.

One sits in a museum cafe, in sight of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, looking out windows across Central Park at the Cleopatra Needle.  There is a burble of conversation within, a stream of joggers without.  One thinks of Tahrir Square, of Les Bourgeois de Cairo.  One thinks of how Rodin has made the hands and feet of his burghers relatively massive, there's a sense of movement and gesture dominating.  One sees the perfection of the bronze turtles bearing up the rounded, worn corners of of the Needles, the hieroglyphics rising up in ancient language to a point that is not stone - long broken away - but a sort of cheap modern prosthetic point, apparently of painted cement.  One sees that waiter pass, yet again, the dark Indian with the half turned smile and thrown back shoulders.  What does he know?  He looks as if he is the unrevealed king of the play, and knows it.  He owns.

And of course, in some sense, he does.  Look at where he is.  Glory surrounds him.  And I, sitting with my coffee and bread, feel the same way as I imagine he does, although I don't think my smile or shoulders betray it.  One sits with coffee, or another waits tables, and we - he and I - at least I - feel utterly rich.  A museum, a park, a gifted sculpture taken by a culture from its own ancient patrimony and given to the people of its modern patron, each offers itself.  And one partakes, one takes, one has.  There is no illusion here, no fantasy of material ownership.  Not at all.  What there is - being rightly placed here, as a visitor or employee, is quite real, and if one is taking it in - seeing and feeling and being - then one is taking all that is on offer, and that is such an all, that for a time one cannot imagine needing more of anything. 

Our species is great.  Mankind is unfathomably great.  We are each rich by inheritance.  You and I were born with silver spoons in our mouths.  Let us live worthy of our privileges.