Museum Musings

A fictional travelogue; three minute read.

Vienna is a city crowded with museums. Museums so large I can wander in them for days.

Small ones. Famous ones. Beautiful ones. Historical ones. Museums within museums.

So many museums spinning around me. Goosebumps.

One museum even has prancing white horses carrying riders in 18th-century uniforms with tailcoats—both horses and riders in the prime of life. Watching the horses and riders, I’m reminded that I’m passing my prime. In my mid-forties, I’m touristing on time’s relentless journey.

It’s a good thing I’m a museum nerd. And why not? As a widower, museums are memories. Holding hands in front of a Greek amphora. Lost and laughing in an obscure wing of an obscure museum.

The first museum on my itinerary showcases the thief that is stealing me from myself: time. The Clock Museum is housed in a cream-colored town house. Outside, a cobbled parklet with trees, benches and parked bicycles is a good spot for timely self-reflection. A breeze rustles the leaves, whispering “come sit and spend some of your time here.”

Inside, 15th century clocks tick away time’s passage. In paintings of pastoral villages with clock towers, tiny working clockfaces were embedded to convert the canvases into functional timepieces. Like the oldest of the oil paintings, a bit of the skin around my eyes is cracking.

Moving on to the Esperanto Museum, I’m going to a museum that tombstones the dead dream of a universal language linguistically uniting humanity. I’m deaf to the museum’s pitch. Too many faculty lounge misunderstandings between first-rate English-speakers have worn me out.

The 18th-century Austrian National Library—its baroque walls lined with 200,000 musty manuscripts--dazzles me. The frescoed dome, the scent of aged paper, the crinkled leather bindings. On marble floors my footsteps anticipate the echo others who will walk here long after me.

I’m a museum piece in the making.

Aging, art and antiquities are of a piece—each one a mirror of the other. From traipsing in and out of museums, and climbing one too many grand staircases, I look my age—my breathing is jagged and my legs hurt.

Taking a late lunch at an outdoor street market crowded with people busily ignoring their mortality, I order Austrian goulash. Goulash—a steamy mélange of meat and vegetables—mimics my meandering, miscellaneous museum visits.

Vienna celebrates minds that mapped the world, measured time, wrote literature, composed music and communicated ideas on the edge of their futures. Coming face to face with this legacy, my small place in the world unfolds petal by petal like the Edelweiss (the Austrian national flower) blossoming on a spring day.

What pleasure is there in music without listeners to hear it? What is the point of a book without readers to read it? What function has a map without travelers on the move? What value is there in a clock without a lover hurrying to a rendezvous?

Without me in it, a museum has no meaning. A mortuary for dead languages, dead ideas, dead dreams.

My chest unbends. My heart relaxes into a slower, steadier beat. My face is warm. My skin is flushed, alive.

I take a last spoonful of goulash before ambling off towards the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

It needs me.