Museum piece

I consider the most memorable meal I have ever had as worthy of nostalgia not for the gourmet cuisine that it probably was, but for its setting. It was in the main exhibit room of a natural history museum where our view of the hall was fenced by the re-assembled skeleton of an entire dinosaur. Beyond the rib cage, samples from Darwin’s Beagle expedition to the Galapagos were nestled in the walls of this unusual yet awesome dinner place that had been set up. Two things happened. One, the attendant "pomp and circumstance" promptly subdued my appetite for meat. Second but more importantly, I realized how these encounters with the extraordinary, in nature as well as in human intellect and creativity, which are what museums offer, can simply take one’s breath away, and give it back to you, recomposed.

Museums are not simply the repositories of things that should have otherwise been forgotten. That is your closet. Museums highlight the story of life, natural and what we have made of it. One of the best natural history museums start with as far back as science could take us, to that immensely dense dot that exploded in all directions, suitably coined the Big Bang. From the dot, take a foot-long step and 45 million years pass you by. Then two more steps and a hundred million years had whizzed away. This exhibited story goes on in a spiral path to complete the 13 billion years of the universe story we know of so far. The path tapers to when life on Earth began as bacteria around 3.9 billion years ago and ends at that stretch where you find, in that scale of the sphere enclosing the space museum, that human history occupies only the width of your hair strand. At the end of the spiral, you just leave your old self. You recognize the unmistakable message as it zooms across the cosmos, through Whitman’s thoughts and to his Leaves of Grass: a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars. Like a twin comet, you also remember the Desiderata declaring you as "the child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars." Grass and you, made of basically the same stardust, occupying the same quarter-footage in the story of life in the scale the best museum lends to human perception. In very few other instances could human conceit be so crushed but at the same time, human understanding be so encouraged, in equal, perhaps even greater measure, to cultivate gratitude and explore ways of being alive.

You reach further on to other parts of the museum and bathe in wonder. At each step, corner, wall and crevice, what is revealed to you in sound, sight, feel or insight, simply takes your breath away. You peer, read, touch, even hover and your jaw drops frequently and you put your hand in your mouth in an attempt to mute the all too obvious shock to your former self. Yes, flowering plants date as far back as 140 million years; reptiles, 300 million years; human ancestors, four million years – tops. Yes, the fastest physical movement by a living thing is the wing-flapping of an insect called a midge: 950 beats per second. In fact, 2,000 times per second if you scare it a bit. Yes, bears knowingly use herbal medicine. Yes, a stupefying number of monarch butterflies travel 1,800 miles from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico every winter. Imagine that Mexican ground, the trees, the leaves, all covered with butterflies that would make subtle movements as if the whole space breathed!

Then in art museums, you gasp at these exquisite figures made of marble and brass. You squint to examine details intricately etched in glazed terra cotta. You sense an upwelling from within you, seeing the beautiful paintings that speak of the depth, breadth and richness of human creativity. You see single-digit aged French kids spread out on the carpet underneath Monet and Degas. You wish all Filipino kids, as part of a normal school course, are also stretched out underneath Luna, Hidalgo, Amorsolo.

To visit a museum is to encounter the extraordinary – the genius of nature as well as of human intellect, creativity and imagination. And we need these encounters with genius to go on and endure the ordinary, and perhaps even to elevate it. This is what we should be doing when we get tired of the daily emergencies, the humdrum politics and the self-beating. We refresh our humanity by confronting the extraordinary – the genius. And as writer Harold Bloom aptly stated in his recently published book Genius, even if we are not all geniuses, we should all inspire in each other the desire to be "geniuses in appreciation." I think that is the very least we can do to earn, as the Desiderata stated, "the right to be here."