Someone Else's Time

When I was little one of my favorite books was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The idea of living in a museum, especially at night, fascinated me. It still does. While I’ve always loved paintings and am into sculpture, what really does it for me in some wacked out, time-travel kind of way is the furniture. I never think about it until I’m actually standing there, inside the museum or estate, surrounded by the paneling, clocks, candlesticks, sideboards, and beds of another era. It overtakes me.

If I ever feel mystical it’s then, when I’m taken into the past in a rare moment of silence, surrounded by someone else’s things from long ago. Last week I was at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and it happened to me there. I looked into a gold framed mirror, the glass a murky black with age. I couldn’t see my reflection but I stared anyway, wondering who used to look into the same space, whose reflection used to smile back at her.

While I’m always a sucker for marquetry and those huge, oddly shaped aristocratic beds, what really causes me to stop and stare are the clocks. I’ve been searching for a wall clock for my house and after studying those jewel encrusted or elongated golden beauties, I wonder if introducing a little rococo madness into my environment wouldn’t actually be a good thing. Wouldn’t necessarily go, I know, but I can’t help love splashes of insanity.

At the Getty I was admiring another mirror, large and ornate, when a girl came up from behind me. She did a little dance, checked herself out, and said she wanted the mirror for her bedroom. So did I. Only I wanted it more to be taken back in time than to watch myself dance. Once I looked into a mirror that belonged to Marie Antoinette in her Petit Trianon and it happened to me then too. For a moment I wasn’t in San Francisco anymore, I was in someone else’s head in another time.

Clocks and mirrors. There’s something so personal about them that the ghosts of their owners seem to come back to them. Or else reflections must linger throughout time. Clocks and mirrors. They’re simple objects that we use every day, yet they end up defining so much of our lives for us.

In reality I don’t really want to live out anyone else’s life. But let me be transported to someone else’s time every once in a while and I’m a much happier for what happens in those rare moments. And I would love it if that could mean staying all night in the museum.