The Stories The Museum Tells

January 16, 2016 9:48 AM

The whale is so big, the frogs are so bright, the Hall of Biodiversity an astonishing swarm of life. The planetarium space show tells a story, but it holds your attention by engulfing your senses with an experience. And then maybe this excitement inspires a little girl to go home and learn the names of the constellations and all the planets and their moons, and the night sky is no longer spooky darkness, but a beautiful realm full of things she can name. The museum today teaches you about science, but it makes you care by getting you to fall in love.

posted by ChuraChura (10 comments total)

One of the highlights of my youth was being taken to The Museum of Natural History. And then the Hayden Planetarium. I knew I had grown up when I could bring myself to stand directly under the whale. Not without fear, but still.
posted by Splunge at 10:03 AM on January 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

"... There are things here worth seeing; you just have to have patience for the fact that they will be unremarkable and small. ...Each little story could seem so small, but they would all be told with generous patience and care." What a lovely collaboration between storytellers and listeners: visitors actively engaging with caringly-presented material. A good read, ChuraChura; thanks for posting.
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:17 AM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I basically grew up inside the AMNH as we lived just a few blocks away. It was where I would go when I was grumpy and wanted to run away from home FOREVER, although my nanny came with me every time (and pretended to "drop me off" while actually following me a few feet behind; a mutually agreed-upon polite fiction of independence) and always packed me a lunch first. No one ever made me feel small or silly or, godforfuckingbid, "adorable" for asking questions, or for just wanting to sit still and take everything in. The Museum - and I call it "The Museum" because though there are many many museums in NYC, this one is the only one I really care about - was the primary motivating source of my interest in actual learning, something virtually no class or teacher was ever able to inspire within me.

I've been in love with the Museum ever since I knew what love was.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:32 AM on January 16, 2016 [9 favorites]

> The museum today teaches you about science, but it makes you care by getting you to fall in love.

So true: Ubi amor, ibi oculus. A wonderful piece, thanks for posting it. It says "Daily life has us all pressurized; science is the fresh air"; longform writing is also fresh air.
posted by languagehat at 11:34 AM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

This piece was lovely and actually made me sniffle a little. When I was a little girl a museum was a magical place that existed. . . somewhere else. There weren't any museums nearby. In my mind it grew until it was the MUSEUM, a place just as foreign as the ocean and as fantastically not real as Santa or unicorns and probably the ocean too. In my mind the MUSEUM was like the library, a place of warmth and quiet respect, only instead of books it held wonderful things like stuffed zebras and dinosaurs, but like books each one of those things held an entire world just waiting to be discovered by me if I would open it up. (For the longest time I thought museum exhibitions had long rows of stacks of things that you checked out like a book.) People worked at the MUSEUM doing MUSEUM things that could not be described because it was magic. It had to be magic. How could something so wonderful be so real?

Then I actually got to go to a MUSEUM. It was real. It actually existed. And this museum held things from books I'd read at the library. It had things from the ocean and thus the ocean did exist. It was better than Santa and unicorns. And everything there was waiting, waiting for me on the walls and in the display cases, and everything had its own story and here were all the thousand worlds of the library I'd only seen in words actually existing in reality, and just like that a thousand imagined worlds became real. But even better, oh how even better - there were a thousand worlds I didn't even know existed and thus couldn't imagine: here was another thousand worlds about which to learn!

Museums don't just awaken curiosity - to the already curious, they're a message that your curiosity is not just okay and right, it's something to be nurtured.

To this day every museum is still the MUSEUM.
posted by barchan at 12:37 PM on January 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

(It made me get a bit teary, too!)
posted by ChuraChura at 12:52 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

“What’s that?” “What’s that?” “What’s that?”

I spent my morning volunteering, surrounded by fossils and children (and adults!) asking questions just like these. I hope they had moments as treasured as the ones in the article and as the ones above; I hope, even if they never come back, they will have fallen in love just a little bit. Thank you for sharing this.
posted by jetlagaddict at 1:29 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is a lovely article, thanks! My aunt took me to the Museum of Natural History as a kid, we took our kids many times, (one three year old's comment on first seeing the dinosaurs,"oh no, they are all dead!")and I am looking forward to taking my grandkids when they visit. We never walked quickly through this exhibit, and some of my favorite childhood memories of the museum are the huge cross section of the redwood tree, and the diorama of what lives underground, with the giant depiction of ants, millipedes and more under giant leaves. The whole museum is a wonder for people of any age, including this charming section so lovingly described in the article.
posted by mermayd at 4:49 AM on January 17, 2016

I just took some friends there who were in town from Pittsburgh, and I made a point of bringing them through the New York hall because every time I go I'm sure it will be cordoned off and scheduled for renovation. It really is like going back in time. Like right around a corner is a payphone which costs a dime and has an ad on the top for Gimbel's.
posted by Mchelly at 6:19 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, the new space center is fantastic and I'm glad they renovated the planetarium, and the NY Hall is mostly dumpy, but I love that there are still pockets of New York where the old NYC still exists. The New York City Panorama in Queens is another one of those touchstones for me -- why is it never crowded?

My lawn, I shall wear my trousers rolled, etc., etc.
posted by Mchelly at 6:24 AM on January 17, 2016 [2 favorites]