T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 23 Maret 2014 | 17.35

My mother-in-law hates to travel. As a consolation, she's turned family trips into shopping trips that over the years yielded a staggering collection of quirky egg cups and flower frogs (those things that go inside vases to hold stems in place). The search for these oddities gave her a way to enter strange places on her own terms. They led her into local shops and outdoor markets, introduced her to interesting people and gave purpose to her wanderings when her husband and children decided to hit the second or third major museum of the day.

John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, writes about how he, like my mother-in-law, seeks out a singular experience in every locale he visits: a barber shave. When an expert takes a sharp blade to Freeman's neck, he momentarily joins an informal cabal composed of local characters and their conversations, customs and idiosyncratic styles of shaving.

Travel, of course, can open our eyes to the various high points of civilization and the course of world events. Even the names we use to talk about places reflect their political histories — Myanmar or Burma, St. Petersburg or Leningrad — as Liesl Schillinger points out in "The Geopolitics of Name-Dropping."

But just as the grand sweep of history leaves the ordinary moments and regular people of a place obscured, so too can spending too much time ticking off the list of national monuments and big museums. A huge part of the pleasure of travel is seeing how other people live and broadening our understanding of them and, in turn, ourselves.

The main feature this month is a plea of passion from the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, who has taken a belief in the value and profundity of the singular, personal experience to its most poetic extreme. He believes that truth is found in everyday objects, experiences and individuals, more than in the great and powerful expressions of culture in evidence at national museums.

Pamuk's 2008 novel, "The Museum of Innocence," traces a doomed love affair set in the 1970s through the detritus of regular life: cigarette butts, matchboxes, sneakers, stockings, billboard advertisements of the day, etc. "The Museum of Innocence" is a unique literary conceit, but also a physical place called the Museum of Innocence, which the writer opened in Istanbul in 2012. For years before he even began writing his novel, he painstakingly collected the banal and innocent objects that would pass through his fictional lovers' hands. In his museum, he has artfully arranged these objects, so that, liberated from the novel, the viewer experiences the narrative of loss and obsession in a more direct way.

In the years that he cultivated this idea, first collecting, then writing, then building the museum, Pamuk traveled the world, always seeking out small personal institutions and collections. Many of us know the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, or the Phillips Collection in Washington, or the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, but there are countless more less-discovered gems like these. Small, singular places created from an obsession, a longing and the particularity of one person's vision.

Pamuk has written a manifesto on behalf of small museums, in which he claims that places like the State Hermitage Museum or the Louvre glorify the nation-state over the individual. But for him, it is only the individual who holds the truth, and is capable of expressing the depth of humanity.

As quite likely the pre-eminent connoisseur of the world's small museums, who better to recommend some of the best ones out there?

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M218 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sentimental Journey.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

Dengan url

http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2014/03/t-magazine-editoras-letter-sentimental_23.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

sebagai sumbernya

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar

techieblogger.com Techie Blogger Techie Blogger