Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Museum Musings
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
I’m a museum nerd. What would you expect from a mid-forties man who teaches high school civics to mostly bored and badly behaving students?
I’m answering my own question—proving my nerdiness—with a holiday to a city crowded with museums, museums and more museums. Small ones. Famous ones. Beautiful ones. Educational ones. Grand ones. Curious ones. Cozy ones.
Museums within museums. Museums without walls. Single-subject museums. Private museums and public ones. Limitless museums with unlimited treasures. Places for discovery and rediscovery.
My skin is wrinkly with goosebumps. My head is spinning.
Time’s emasculating journey—one endless mid-life crisis—has brought me to Vienna. I am searching for my provenance as a first step towards modernizing my middle-aged, moldering self. Aging, art and antiquities are of a piece—each one imaging the other and each one a reflecting mirror in which to see myself more clearly.
First stop is a museum showcasing the thief that is stealing me from myself: time. The Clock Museum is housed in a converted, cream-colored town house. Outside, there is a cobbled parklet with trees, benches and parked bicycles. Just the place for timely self-reflection.
Inside, a collection of timepieces dating to the 15th century spotlights the inevitability of time’s passage. In oil paintings of pastoral villages, clock towers are embedded with tiny, working clockfaces converting the canvases into useful, functional timepieces.
Nearby, the Globe Museum spins with whirling, spherical worlds. The cartographic artworks map three life lessons: What I understand about my world largely depends on where I stand on it. I am inescapably a global citizen, but I can only be in one place at a time.
The Esperanto Museum tombstones the dead dream that a synthetic language might linguistically unite humanity. As a survivor of way too many misunderstandings with first-rate English-speakers, I am deaf to the museum’s pitch for a utopian, universal language.
The 18th-century baroque Austrian National Library dazzles me. I gaze upward at its frescoed dome saluting human achievement and survey its library lined with 200,000 musty manuscripts, my eyes straining to take it all in. Humankind’s triumphs and trials are a continuum, not an endpoint. Behold, I am a museum piece in the making.
Taking a late lunch at a colorful outdoor street market, I order Austrian goulash. Goulash—a steamy mix of meat and vegetables, a comfort food—mimics my museum-going habits, not to mention mocks my meandering, miscellaneous life.
Vienna celebrates minds that mapped the world, measured time, wrote literature, composed music and communicated ideas on the edge of their futures. Amidst this humbling legacy, my place in the world unfolds petal by petal like a blossoming flower on an early Spring day in Vienna.
What pleasure is music without people to hear it? What is the point of a book without people who read? What function has a map without people on the move, without tourists like me? What value is in a clock without a romantic rendezvous to keep?
Without me in it, a museum is meaningless. A mortuary for dead languages, dead ideas, dead dreams.
My chest relaxing, my heart calming, I take a last spoonful of goulash before ambling off towards the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It needs me.
