The Mindful Museum

Though Darwin was obsessed with long time, he was equally interested in short time, the time of a human life. And what he understood was the difficulty of articulating those two times together. His beloved daughter Annie died shortly before he began On the Origin of Species, and he wrote that book in light of her death — he realized how difficult it is for us to simultaneously understand the vast expanse of geological time and still recognize the pain and pathos that this tiny expanse of human time brings into each of our lives. He recognized, too, that traditional religion had always tried to bridge the space between human time and deep time — between our time and the rock’s time — by pretending that our human time is simply a prelude to a vast time — that deep time is under the control of human time. And he knew that that wasn’t true.

Darwin recognized that the fundamental human dilemma is the struggle to pay attention and understand the absolute importance of human time to us humans, while at the same time accepting the fact that it is merely an incident in deep time. The human time that connects us all is something that the museum, in all of its many incarnations, is uniquely good at articulating. The museum articulates human time exactly because it enables us to understand things in chronology; the simple act of putting things in temporal order makes us remember that they were produced in lives as brief as ours and still belong to a sequence of invention that can stretch out, sometimes, across millennia. As an instrument for the understanding of human time, the museum is supreme among human inventions — better than the novel, better than the epic poem, better even than written history, because history always depends on a particular narrative, whereas what the museum, however much of a story it seems to tell, still offers us is the opportunity to create a narrative. Books and poems flow away from us on a sea of signifiers, and even music is inert notation and then suddenly a sweep of sound. Art and human objects, the objects of civilization, are always here in both times, present and past. We look at them in Darwin’s two times at once, that long time ago when they were made and that immediate moment when we’re looking.

In all of the museums I have described — the mausoleum, the machine, the metaphor, even the mall — the act of recognizing the shape of human lives in the traces of old objects goes on. Works of art exist simultaneously in the past, from which we draw them, and in the present, in which we see them, and each of us parses the formula of time past and time present in our own way. The museum enables us to grasp human time as something that belongs to us, and as something that is outside us, at once social and, in a way, sacred.

How do you build the mindful museum? There’s no recipe, nor anything that we can put into a fixed program. And yet by engaging with the idea, by trying to make the mindful museum, we have at least the chance of understanding our human experience of time. To enter a museum is to see things that were made by living human beings, often a long time ago. Which is what we talk about, until our feet hurt enough to send us to the theatre, where we can at least shut up and sit down.