December 2007
Essay: The Museum
(This essay was written for college applications.)
If, by a strange twist of fate, there should be some apocalyptic disaster and I am trapped inside a building, doors barricaded by huge boulders of rock, I would like that building to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met feels infinite, as though you could never find the end of it. There would always be more art objects to see, positioned in their display cases like silent ambassadors from another time and place. Still, there would be more stone Buddhas from 12th century Cambodia, softly suspended in their cool, gray gazes; still, there would be more foliate relief carvings in stained cherry wood, protruding from a door which once led to the dank study of some 18th century aristocrat; still, there would be more early Renaissance tapestries depicting ancient sackings of Jerusalem, soldiers marching in faded red ochre, the curator's favorite decorative platter surreptitiously concealing the image of someone draining a foe's intestines; and still, the musical instrument gallery would offer more viola da gambas, more spinets and virginals, lavishly painted with charming miniatures, pregnant with the possibility of warm, harmonic sound.
This impression of endlesslessness is compounded when I wonder about the quantity of the Met's collection which isn't installed. A gallery tour guide once informed me that there was a whole world underneath the floor. There are piles upon piles of Victorian ladies' gloves and hats stuffed into archival boxes, fated never to be revealed in a special exhibit alongside their flashier roommates (some rare Rembrandt, or a Greek funerary urn). What else is awaiting public display? The Islamic art galleries are undergoing renovation, scheduled to open during my sophomore year of college. Meanwhile, the curators are displaying a little row of illuminated manuscripts from Rumi's Persia: a gold-leafed amuse-bouche. The renovated Greek and Roman galleries opened recently, and the oversized stone head of Constantine, beckoning his subjects' unquestioning worship, looms large in my memory. What other oversized stone heads await installment from beneath those well-traveled floors?
I've been fortunate enough to take regular visits to the Met. Every time I go, I interact with a time or place that I normally experience on a purely intangible level. While teaching myself World History I've witnessed its cultural products first-hand. The pottery and gold of the Aztecs and Incas are realities which I have seen for myself. These distant civilizations exist not only in concept, but in physical space. Stepping into the little gallery underneath the main staircase, I can encounter remnants of Byzantine Egypt between walls of bare brick, where low lighting protects sensitive textiles. I feel like the privileged witness of a secret as I decipher ancient handwriting on broken pottery, passages of scripture placed alongside grocery lists. Moving backwards in time, I walk into the huge windowed gallery of the Temple of Dendur, where marble pharaohs perch above a black moat. Walking the lengthy floor, I breathe in sacred space.
© 2008 Nell Shaw Cohen