“These are old forces. The magma and the tremors. The famine and the want. The way we love rocks and birds and old boats and brass rings, and the way we survive this world because of the stories we fashion from its shards. We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things just to carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without.”
“You would think the old traditions are strange because they’re old. You can easily imagine that they made sense once but have hung around too long, have outlived their purpose and grown anachronistic, vestigial. And surely sometimes that’s true. But if traditions are often strange, perhaps those acts and objects and stories and songs are traditional precisely because they are strange. Is it not the very strangeness, the unique curiosity of a thing, the arresting transformation or the essential contradiction of expectation that makes it worth sharing and repeating and passing along?”
“With every visit and article and affirming word, collectively and by degree, whole groups of people select for the collections they fancy, the ones that somehow have something to add. And with silence, with indifference, they select against the rest. Museums are the expression of those collective determinations. They are rooted in a network of cooperative affirmation long before anyone whispers the word museum. What a quiet democracy.”
“There are so many flavors of loss. There is deprivation and disappointment. There is sacrifice and grief. There is trifling. There is needless. There is missing and forgotten. There is, though sometimes it is hard to imagine, necessary. There is, though we hardly need reminding, catastrophic.”
(Iceland achieved independence from Denmark in 1944, sovereignty in 1918, home rule in 1874; first act by parliament upon independence was to build house for national museum)
“The museum logs starts from the very first item collected, but in all that time from then to now it has never been the what of the thing that matters, compared to the import of the who and the where. It’s always been the story that mattered most, the connections inferred, the object not as a thing of inherent properties but as a touchstone to who we are and where we come from. In a certain light, these records aren’t even a matter of provenance so much as a kind of alternative genealogy.”