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| Jared Thomas ('20) |
There’s no quiet on the Great Wall. Once upon a time, sure, maybe, it’s easy imagine stone-faced young guns with more freckles than facial hair looming out over the misty mountains cold, eyes squinted against the sun, hands clasped on bronze handles, waiting for the dreamy sound of war drums rattling just over the horizon, all alone at the end of the world except for the almost silent sound of the wind’s whistling retreat from somewhere far away.
Of course, by the time I came around, that was all gone, more or less. I mean, what else did you expect? The Wall’s barely a wall anymore-It’s glorified stone Swiss cheese winding and grinding through decapitated mountain tops that steam with tourist sweat more than they do anything else. The quiet’s been replaced by the constant clicking on and off of camera lens, with the shivering slivers of shutting shutters and by a verifiable Babylon of different languages that drench the whole place in a globalist soup of sound.
If you try to breathe and take it for what’s all worth, or what it was, you can’t. Whatever once was there, just isn’t what it used to be. And it’s not just the Wall. Take a long walk through a cramped market street and you’ll find the same clattering cadre of sun stained salesmen hawking the same half-dozen trinkets from the same half-dozen factories down south to the same half a million tourists everywhere you look. Any street worth walking down has been power-white-washed to oblivion and back and it shows in the way English seems to be a reflex and the dollar an absolute blessing.
Which begs the question, what’s there to see when the rest of the world seems to have the same set of standards as your local corner store? Artists mostly sculpt in solitude. Painters don’t share their brushes. But we never view art that way, at least most of us. Sure, there are mustache-twirling millionaires out there who can pay for all the private shows money can buy and they can soak in the art steeped deep in its intent, but for the rest of us? Monuments have to be viewed in public, oftentimes surrounded by thousands of other furious frowning Americans who are just there at best for the picture and at worst for the good ol’ Gram. When I visited the Louvre for the first time, I could barely see Mona Lisa’s signature smirk over the teeming crowds of people there for the same reason I was. Now, I’m not excusing myself from being part of the problem. I know I’m just as guilty of obstructing views, annoying locals and feeding the vacation machine as anyone else. But, regardless of that, here’s the problem distilled.
“Hype” is killing history. Art is valuable. Any reasonable human being with half a brain could tell you that, but the real coup of an idea is that art’s value is malleable. It’s flexible. It shifts and changes with each passing day and I’m not just talking about market share or the scattered valuation of some shredded Banksy in East London. For all the talk about the intrinsic value of art, about how each stroke of the paintbrush matters just because it does, art, really, only crosses our minds when we can appreciate it. It’s the same age adage about falling trees and careless lumberjacks- If a sculpture leaves a bust in the middle of the Adirondacks, what does it matter to the birds that nest in its deftly cleft chin? The short answer is, to society, that is simply doesn’t. Our perception of art, our ability to see and judge it in a way that allows us to appreciate all its carefully constructed ebbs and flows, gives the piece value to us. But here’s the problem. Everyone knows that. There are no hidden masterpieces. And because everyone knows what art can do, everyone wants to experience it for themselves… and because everyone wants that, no one can.
Think of it this way- What’s easier? Telling me what a painting means to you in the quiet of your own home or fighting for a glimpse of a single corner in a crowded humid museum hall? The answer’s obvious. The ubiquity and popularity of the great works make them impossible to appreciate, to understand, when we’re confronted with them. Sure, there are a million paper copy images of the Mona Lisa online, but nothing compares to seeing it in person. Michelangelo’s David should stand tall in Piazza della Signoria, not cramped in an 8x12 frame in front of your google browser. That’s the tragedy of it, in a nut shell. We can never really contemplate and think about the masters in their workshops. We have to stare at hollow moon reflections and completely miss out on the awe, the wonder, the feel of it. And that’s a shame.
I’m not saying we should hide art away, cordoned off so only the rich, the powerful or the lucky get a glimpse at it. That’s even less productive than forcing us to look at shadow boxes instead of the whole chest. This is, fundamentally, a problem without an easy, clear solution. Maybe there are just too many of us to appreciate what the great minds have to offer. In every meaningful way, it’s better that we saturate the timeless instead of forgetting about it altogether.
Being in China, surrounded by all those people fighting for the same glimpse of history, captured over and over again, has forced me to reflect on what exactly it costs society to be a tourist. Because just looking at a painting on a wall isn’t the same as really considering it and visiting a monument where you can’t get a breath of fresh air doesn’t mean we’re contemplating what it meant to the ghost of the builder. They’re just there. Landmarks.
We’ve reached a point in history where our collective culture no longer is really about the culture at all. Our history serves as a glorified set of waypoints that guide us through the night, shepherding us from place to place so that we might, if we’re lucky, get a ghost of a glimpse of a hint of a feeling of what once was. The real view, the unspoiled sky, is gone.
Travel is one of the most valuable things a person can do. I have firmly believed that firmly believe that and will always firmly believe that. But when you go abroad to see the world, if you’re interested in really seeing it, venture off the beaten path and see things that have been seen less. The cardinals you’re expecting to see are, in almost every meaningful way, gone. The soul of a place lies where you can appreciate it, where you have time to think about it, beyond where the geo-tags are pointing you.
There’s no quiet on the Great Wall, not really. But if you look hard enough, I guarantee you can still find the silence.
Jared Thomas, of Cynthiana, Ky., is a member of the McConnell Scholar Class of 2020 studying political science, economics, and French.