House Museum

In the house museum, objects that remain [or may have remained] from the life of one “important” man are immobilized and placed on display. But Pushkin’s quill is only important, magical, and full of culture because in the years since he used it [or might have used it], we have canonized him—literally made him holy, mythic, spiritual. To really feel something in the house museum, you have to forget that history, time, and your own mind are the things that have given the objects their meanings—not “reality,” and certainly not “the things in themselves.”

The same kind of forgetting is at work in social mythologies about history. When we visit ruins, museums, foreign countries, antique shops, archives, etc. for the sake of recapturing the “past”—we often forget the role we ourselves have played [and the role played by time] in giving that past its meaning. Give objects a break. They have no meaning without us.

-Storm