When young and mostly alone, we used to frequent museums. Initially, and for a good while thereafter, the activity was fraught with an aching self reproach — as often we weren’t interested in even looking at “the works” — at times not even knowing why we were there. On some days we would walk straight through the vaulted hallways directly to the cafeteria — the museum simply becoming a sort of giant lobby for a middling diner, where we’d get a slice of lemon meringue pie or three (pending funds). Doing this though, that is stuffing our face and ignoring the few millennia of brilliance and/or gorgeousness, made us feel like a shiftless, unloveable glutton. But a genuine desire is the most powerful of inner voices — and sad as it was for us at that time, eating some shitty pie in the bowels of a museum, ignoring the Tinterettos and the Dürers often was an unassailable compulsion.
When we eventually emerged from suspension in the sad aspic of that time, we had more clarity. We now see that rounding the edges of loneliness with cheap lemon custard is more than fine (if a bit unhealthy). As well, we understand that we simply liked being within those conspicuously appointed environs, walking the seemingly endless, large quiet rooms and soaking in the aesthetic of clean and collected stuffs in vitrines. Ultimately, we can now appreciate that there really isn’t any right way to be or right way to do — no matter how unmixable one is with the world.
