#29 Why Aren’t Museums Fascinating?

Hey there,

This is about a failed attempt at storytelling.

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A pilgrimage for history professors, a numbingly dull rendezvous for children, the nonelective trips to museums were a pluck-my-eyeball-out-it’s-so-boring experience. And what boggled us further was the ignorance - we never learnt at a museum so what was the point? I’d rather pop some corn and enjoy The Da Vinci Code as Tom Hanks finds Audrey Tautou’s lineage.

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There are two sides to this coin. I found history bewitching, the civilizations, the stories, the narrative, everything. But every time I stepped foot in the failed attempt of what could have been a great way to tell a story (a museum), melancholia spread like the pandemic.

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It was not so long ago that it struck me - an amazingly captivating story can turn to shit if not narrated well. That explained why my history professor caught and held on to everyone’s attention for a considerable amount of time and the museum lost it before I even entered one.

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That explains pretty much anything to be honest. The phrases, “It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it,” “Watch how you speak to your elders,” and so on. The first phrase put a short, guilty smile on your face, didn’t it? There are many more, “The journey beats the destination,” “Enjoy the process,” “It’s the direction, not the destination.”

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A story is your escape from reality. History, which literally has the word ‘story’ in it, is the escape from your present to give you a glimpse into the past.

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While we learn from our own past, we ought to learn from other people’s past as well. Everyone lives a unique life in their own head, what’s stopping you from diving into someone else’s past and finding about what made them different. We can just plug-in The Zed Medium Podcast at this moment but you’ll find that in the P.S. Toodles.

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