One of the formative events of my early years, was my first
visit to the American Museum of Natural History, shepherded by my grandmother,
in 1955, at a time when my academic preparation had not yet included
kindergarten. It was all a wonder,
to someone who had never previously been outside his native hamlet in
Tennesee; whose family owned no
television (we were, in retrospect, what might have been called poor), and few
books. And the most striking
feature, for a lad of that age, was (as you might expect) the great Hall of
Dinosaurs.
What they might have done in the ensuring half-century, to
tart the thing up, I do not know, and shudder to think. But at the time, it stuck to The
Facts. Not Gradgrind facts,
however, but huge facts, megaliths, a mystery in themselves. The fossil bones were genuine; their assemblage into the giant
skeletons, while the work of man, was an informed work and quite certain, given
the constraints of geometry and the extraordinarily complete preservation of
the specimens they presented, the few missing bones being scrupulously filled
in with artificial material of distinct coloration. The fossil eggs, arranged in a clutch, were WYSIWYG, with
no illustrative speculation as to the shape and structure of what once had lain
inside. The great hall, with its
imposing high ceiling (that in
itself was beyond anything I had seen or fantasized before), was disceetly lit,
and quite silent -- much like a church. There were no voiceovers, animations, videos,
push-button interactive displays, employees in dinosaur suits, or any other
claptrap. And it was very, very
impressive.
True, there was a gift shop on a lower floor, where you
could purchase small models of individuals dinosaurs in their hypothetical
fleshly shape. But even these were
serious, as playthings went: heavy
and expensive (made of bronze, I believe), in realistic and now “Jurassic Park”
dramatic postures, and studiously monochrome, the color of verdigris. They were nothing like the zippy-dippy
multi-colored cheap plastic throwaways available today, which are given in
scads to quieten fretful children who then take them for granted, until they
lie broken and neglected at the bottom of the overstuffed toybox; no. At the time, I could only afford one of them (a
brontosaurus), and cherished it, as being much the most precious of my exiguous
collection of toys (no more than three or four of them at the time; my grandmother, in whose care I then
dwelled, being of the old school);
yearned to someday also own a tyrannosaur, or a dimetrodon, or a
triceratops (a wish not to be gratified for several years thence); and it was a real blow when, one summer's day in the year of our lord 1955, a neighbor
boy there in Garden City walked
off with it, and I never could get it back.
But one thing I never did lose was the sense of wonder at
that vanished age, not disguised as anything more accessible or
contemporary by colorful
conjectural “re-creations”; a reverence
for the scientific labor that had gone into discovering the fossils and
digging them up, analyzing and measuring and painstakingly reassembling the
detritus of the past; and the
beginnings of an appreciation for the concepts of evidence, and epistemology --
of conjecture and confirmation.
~
A child who today should walk to such a place, after his
taste has been jaded, and senses blunted, by repeated exposure to the loudly
vocalizing twitching-twinkling Technicolor full-flesh megamodels of the
animatronic age, would no doubt be very little impressed by that spare and
spartan room, not very different from the paleontologist’s own workshop: any more than those born to a McMansion
could but sniff at the tiny, falling-apart, government-built white-painted
rented houses in which the scientists resided at that time in Oak Ridge. Yet in those bungalows dwelt minds
operating at the frontlines of physics and chemistry: footsteps in which I have endeavored to follow, though
Providence would ultimately ordain a somewhat different course. (Though in another way I did return to
those roots: my father had “Q”
clearance, and I…)
~
Sad is the lot of laudator
temporis acti. And truly
a great many scientific breakthroughs have taken place in America since those
days, particularly in the fields of mathematics, computer science, and
cosmology. Yet I generally do not
envy today’s children, encircled with pandering plastic.
Eheu, fugaces !
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