Findings

I am officially done with training, and now they say I am a Teacher. Apparently I now have the authority to mold the brains of 300+ Czech students according to what I think proper. Or something.

So to celebrate, my mom and aunt flew down to Pasadena to spend the weekend with me. Yesterday we went to Huntington Gardens, where beautiful gardens imported from China, Japan and Australia (why Australia? There are no gardens in Australia) grace the rolling hills of Mr. Huntington's estate.

But that wasn't all; the estate also housed a gigantic library full of old books and manuscripts (Gutenberg Bible, anyone?), including an exhibit featuring the one and only Samuel Johnson. (Boswell: I asked, "If, Sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a newborn child with you, what would you do?" Johnson: "Why, Sir, I should not much like my company.") Next to Johnson's exhibit, a "double-elephant folio" of bird sketches by Charles Audubon filled a chunk of the adjoining room. Bah. As I looked at Audubon's larger-than-life sketches, I got a little twitchy and short of breath, and couldn't stand them for long. But the thing that caught my eye was at the bottom of the exhibit, on a little placard giving the history of the folio: "Almost all of Audubon's work was self-funded, and his neglected family was often poverty-stricken because of the consuming passion he placed on his profession." Audubon was so concerned with drawing pictures of nasty little winged rats that he drove his family into the poorhouse. But look what he has left us--the Audubon Society would be nothing without him, obviously. And Johnson was so consumed with using his gift of writing "correctly" and faithfully that we have more writings by him than almost any other author in history. He literally wrote himself into his grave.

And then, we stumbled into Huntington's art galleries. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Charles Gainsborough were suddenly transported from the British National Gallery to Pasadena, California. John Constable's "Salisbury Cathedral" loomed large in a forgotten corner. Canaletto. Rogier van der Weyden. Jacques-Louis David. Claude Lorrain. And then, I turned another corner and saw a J.M.W. Turner staring me in the face, as if to say, "Remember me?"
"What are you doing here?" I asked, more than a little bewildered. "Do you know you're in Pasadena?" I stared a little longer, shook my head, and went to go find the Americans.

But right before I left, Rembrandt tapped me on the shoulder. I stood there, dumbfounded. Rembrandt? In Pasadena? Why? The Lady with a Plume, with those sad, deep eyes, bore into mine. The placard said the painting was a collaboration between Rembrandt and a pupil from his studio, but the eyes were Rembrandt's. If you ever have a chance, look at Rembrandt's eyes. They are haunting, they dig down into your soul, and they will leave you shaken.

And then I ran headlong into the Americans. Lined up, one right after the other, was every single artist I had ever learned about in my art history classes. Motherwell. Frankenthaler. Diebenkorn. Bellows. Robert Henri. George Luks. Edward Hopper. Tears started to well up as I left, sorry that I only had fifteen minutes with them. They were old friends that I was allowed to only see in passing--reminders of the time that really wasn't so very long ago, when I immersed myself in their histories and wrote endless pages analyzing and critiquing, and reveling in their spirit of simply being. I sense myself drifting into a sort of post-college nostalgia, hence making this post much longer than it should be. But it was a good thing for me, to go back to those things that I loved. It was a reminder that it doesn't ever have to end, to be totally separated from the "real world." What Rembrandt paints about--that is the real world, really. He paints what we cannot say, what we can only express with our impotent tears and sighs.