I was in a museum recently, looking at some Art with a Capital A.
Now, I work in a museum but, even so when I go away, such is the aching sadness of my little life that I find it hard to keep myself from visiting others, especially when they are full of Very Beautiful and Important Things.
So, there I was with the Art with a Capital A, not absolutely sure why I was there, other than some vague, nagging sense that I ought to be.
I reckon we often find ourselves visiting places without much sense of why we’re there. My children would probably argue that that is the very essence of a British family day out: being somewhere no-one wants to be for reasons no-one can articulate, and then staying slightly too long to prevent a cataclysmic argument kicking off about absolutely nothing.
Anyway, after the Art with a Capital A, I found myself, inevitably, in another museum, but this time looking at machines. Important Machines, of course. Here, for example, was an early flying machine in the shape of a giant bat.
Yet just along, practically next door to it, was an egg whisk.
Not even an Important egg whisk either. After all, what egg whisk could be important? I mean, there’s nothing you can do with an egg whisk that you can’t do with a fork.
In the Bible there’s a story about an unimportant man. Gideon describes himself as the least significant member of the weakest family in the smallest tribe in Israel. And yet God saw something great in him and put him to work, saving his people.
Now, no one is getting saved by an egg whisk. But just like the flying machine, or the Art with a capital A, it was worth saving. Because museums aren’t just for the Important and the Beautiful. They are to remind us of what we have done. What we are. What it means to be creative, ingenious human people. Being important and beautiful are not the only criteria by which their contents are to be judged.
And I reckon the same is true of us. Some of us are beautiful. Some of us are important. But like Gideon, we are not more human if we are important and beautiful. We are important and beautiful because we are human.
Above is a picture of the flying machine, Clément Ader’s Avion III (1897). It never flew. Doesn’t matter. The museum is the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
This Pause was delivered on the Friday of the Lord’s test against Australia. I have been at almost every Lord’s test since India in 1974, but this was the first and only day I ever spent in the pavilion with my father, brother and sister when we were all MCC members.