I’d been fantasizing about getting locked at the Met after closing
for more than a dozen years by the time E.L. Konigsberg won the Newbery
Medal in 1968 for her book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
Frankweiler. Then everybody wanted to do it. Even now, decades later,
you can hardly mention a field trip to the Met without having droves of
students get misty-eyed recounting tales of their spiritual kinship with
the Kincaid children. Fine and dandy, I’m always happy to hear that
people are reading books, but, honestly, it was my idea.
I
grew up three blocks from the Metropolitan, and a walk across Central
Park from the Museum of Natural History. Whenever bad weather obliged,
prohibiting park time after school, Micheline, my vicious French
governess, took me to one museum or the other. It was almost always the
Met, not because I favored mummies over dinosaurs, which although I
did, I was not permitted the agency to convert into choice, but rather
due to its proximity to home. Micheline could easily yank me to or back
from the Met by the arm, or sometimes by the ear, in under five
minutes. The inclemency of New York weather assured plenty of time at
the museum, which solidified my belief that the Met was my playground.
And if playground didn’t fully encompass what the Met meant to me, the
use of the possessive did. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially
the Egyptian gallery, was mine.
Being Egyptian by birth, and a
political refugee from that country my parents never stopped
considering home, made my visits to the Egyptian gallery all the more
poignant. I felt particular empathy with the multitude of grave goods
that underscored the quotidian, the very number of which -without even
considering their artistry- attest to how much ancient Egyptians loved
their lives and their culture. I spent hours examining the model ships
and all the dioramas of house interiors, workshops, granaries and so
forth that accompanied Meketre on his journey to the afterlife, a place
that these people clearly hoped would be exactly like the beloved land
they’d left behind. Life in Egypt was so full and rich that their idea
of heaven was a recreation of the life they’d already lived and loved;
nothing could be better.
Over time the museum has changed.
Most of exhibit space has been redesigned to the highest state of the
art of curating. The Egyptian galleries have been redone with great
success, offering visitors a far better view. The Temple of Dendur
arrived and the playground I went to when it wasn’t raining was torn
down to accommodate it. A parking garage was installed at the north end
on 5th, and the sledding hill lost the straightaway at the foot of the
piste. It is impossible for me to cross the 86th street transverse or
travel down 5th Avenue and see the museum revealed without being
accosted by memories that well from deeper than just my past .
At night, the less than significant Temple of Dendur, graced with
flawless lighting and ideal architecture, transcends to the
extraordinary. It is an apt trope for Egyptian art, whose makers were
consumed with cataloguing the infinite variety and beauty that defined
the gorgeous profusion everyday life offered the ruling classes in
everything they made. Egyptian art, after all this time, is suffused
with extraordinary life and afterlife. And it’s all in my museum.
