Through the looking glass

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I Corinthians 13:12

All the 18th century mirrors in the museum make me think about St. Paul.

"Memory, that winged host that flew above me" - Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is my favorite book. Ever since it was on my summer reading list senior year of high school, I've re-read it about once a year. On every return visit I've changed a little, and so I notice or enjoy new things. The notes my 17 year old self made feverishly in colored pencil seem a little silly today.

I did put BR aside during my year in St. Louis, however. Around this time last year, I raced to see the new film adaptation at the Chase Park Plaza theater. The trip had an air of nostalgic melancholy, like realizing you and an old friend no longer have much in common. I realized I was coming to say goodbye. My days of Oxford Arcadian fantasies were over.

But it wasn't really goodbye, apparently. Like the Flyte family in Charles' life, whole sections of the book keep popping into my mind now that I spend my days at a "museum and country estate."Maybe my old friend and I have found a new way to connect.

"Is the dome by Inigo Jones too? It looks later."
"Oh Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it's pretty?"
"It's the sort of thing I like to know."

On my first visit to Winterthur, I scoffed at its opulence and seemingly redundant acres of antique furniture. Now, as I'm learning to guide tourists through those Chippendale corridors, I'm also discovering the joy of knowing about style and connoisseurship. The other day, I did some exploring one my own and was genuinely wowed by the beauty of the Blackwell Parlor. The information binder in the corner was very helpful. Historical context is the sort of thing I like to know.

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing-room, adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fret-work, from the Pompeian parlor ... to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out over the terrace.

Welcome new VSCs!

It's hard to believe, but a new VSC year has started. The last of my roommates left on Friday, and the new volunteers arrived yesterday. WELCOME! Right now you still barely know one another, and you are probably still confused by all the random artwork and objects around the house. Sr. T will be keeping you busy with orientation and field trips to your service sites. It's a tough week, but an important rite of passage. (Here's what I was feeling this time last year.)
I can't wait to receive the VSC newsletter and hear all about you!

As for me, I have moved yet again, to a lovely little apartment in Delaware. Grad school summer classes started last week. I am again in a community of 8, only this time we are all museum people. We even have not one, but two token males!

I've only been here a short time, but already it feels like home. I remain woefully ignorant about antiques, but have had little trouble getting back into a school schedule. Today I studied (and handled) trade bills from the 1880's, ate lunch in the Enchanted Woods garden, then communed with 1760's Chippendale-style chairs. Can someone pinch me?

Alumni update

I am a guest blogger on my high school's alumni website today, thanks to an invitation from one of my former English teachers. He had visited this blog, and so asked me to write about my VSC experience. It was a good exercise to try to distill a year into one short article. I hope the stories I chose to tell will help people realize what a volunteer year is all about.

While I was killing time in San Antonio, I was able to read Pope Benedict's new social justice encyclical Caritas in Vertitate (Love in Truth). Besides making me look business-like in the hotel restaurant, this was serendipitous, as I discovered a great quotation to use in my article.

“Only through an encounter with God are we able to see in the other something more than just another creature, to recognize the divine image in the other, thus truly coming to discover him or her and to mature in a love that ‘becomes concern and care for the other.’” You can't get much more Vincentian than that. The Holy Father also cited a scripture verse that is the Daughters of Charity motto: The charity of Christ urges us. (2 Cor 5:14)

P.S. Fun Fact: The teacher who requested this article also got me on the road to Museum Studies. I wrote my first public history paper for his class my sophomore year of high school. He forbade any "depressing" topics, so I researched the history of the Smithsonian Institution. I liked the idea, but it turned out to be even more fun than I expected.

New adventures in living simply

Yesterday I got my first grad school stipend payment. Yay for money in the bank! It's a good bit more than my VSC allowance, but then I have to factor in new expenses like rent, utilities, the car that St. Joseph will find me etc. After some mental math I was in sticker shock.

Good news kids - I am still going to be poor. My "pocket money" will likely be only slightly more than in St. Louis. Good thing I like rice and beans.

Right now I'm in the midst of packing mania to prepare for the big grad school move. As usual, I have too much stuff. Today I spent much more at Wal Mart than I anticipated. I almost cried when I saw the total. Sure, I need a lot of miscellaneous things to start out in a new place, but not that much.

Finding more patrons

Well, it's official. None of my other potential graduate programs worked out, so I will be a Winterthur Fellow next year! After making it through interview weekend, I am not sad about my other rejections. Instead, I'm relieved to be wondering no longer about what happens next. I can finally start planning ahead!

I've decided that I need a patron saint for my master's program. Here in STL I'm connected to a whole crowd of historic figures, most of them Vincentian in one way or another. There's Vincent de Paul, his colleague Louise de Marillac, visionary Daughter of Charity Catherine Laboure, Elizabeth Seton the first American Vincentian, and of course Louis himself. A "cloud of witnesses" indeed.

So who is the patron saint of museum studies? After doing some research I found there is not even an official patron of historians. Our best bet is St. Bede the Venerable, who chronicled early British history. I'm rather partial to that idea since he was the namesake for my Williamsburg parish. (That's him behind the baptismal font lid.)

Yesterday was the feast of a more obscure Briton: martyr Nicholas Owen. He was a Jesuit laybrother who assisted priests during the Elizabethan persecution, designing and building elaborate hiding places for them in homes. Like most, he was eventually captured, tortured, and gruesomely killed. To me, the Jesuit English martyrs have always been rock stars, both learned and courageous. If one of them was also a clever architect, then we need to be friends. I think he would approve of my fascination with historic buildings.

So. St. Bede and St. Nicholas Owen, pray for us!

You never know what your fortune cookie will say

Yesterday the VSC house went to P.F. Changs to celebrate New Yorker volunteer's birthday. She and her boyfriend eat there nearly once a week, so they know the entire staff. I can't blame the "creepy-eyed" manager for saying hello every time they come in - they are such an adorably nerdy couple it reaffirms all our faltering faith in true love.
My gluten-free shrimp with lobster sauce was delicious, and I got double the fortune in my cookie.

Everywhere you choose to go, friendly faces will greet you.
Many pleasurable and memorable adventures are in store for you!

Those were definitely true this weekend, from the Creighton students who slept on our floors to the Winterthur fellows who drove us around. Nowhere did I count my blessings more than when I returned to the NFNF office. Everyone welcomed me back and wanted to hear how the interviews went. Even if they don't understand or care about material culture, they were excited for me. It felt like home.

The adventure continued because..I got in to Winterthur!! I am still shocked. Getting the news was such a fun experience - I broke the news to my freshman roommate in real time over Gmail chat. (She got in to Winterthur as well!) Then I ran to the break room, where the NFNF girls greeted me with hugs and shrieks of joy. All day I got to share the good news with yet another co-worker. The office manager said she is "as proud as if my own kid got into grad school." How fortunate I am to be part of the NFNF family.

An Emotional Tire Swing of a Weekend

Behold the "extensive grounds" and "happily situated" Winterthur museum and estate. Even in cold gray weather it's an impressive setting. The 7 (or is it 9?) story house houses early American furniture, rugs, art, and tableware by the truckload. Henry Francis Dupont collected it all after he got bitten by the antiques bug.

Needless to say, arriving there after a day of intense grant writing about poor people was serious culture shock. When I heard the other interviewees nerd-out over silver marks and ceramics, I felt in way over my head. I did my best to tread water, selling myself as the plucky church architecture enthusiast with lots of raw talent and love for museums. In interviews, I was pleased to realize that I have the makings of a good writer and educator. I wanted to start giving museum tours that minute. Whether Winterthur and I are right for each other remains to be seen, though.

On the postive side, everyone there is wonderfully friendly and kind. The faculty were nothing if not encouraging. They spent hours getting to know everyone, including a "speed dating" swanky dinner at a country club where they rotate tables at the change of every course. The current students, or Fellows, were also amazing. With snacks, coloring pages, play-doh, and tours through the museum, they kept us from going insane. Each class has a great sense of fun and comraderie. They also wear lots of cardigans and and old-fashioned-looking jewelry - my kind of wardrobe!

It was so wonderful to be back in the land where a person's favorite Founding Father is not only a legitimate conversation topic, it tells a lot about a person. (Luckily most of us agreed that Thomas Jefferson was a jerk who would toolishly own a Snuggie were he alive today.) It was exhilarating to proudly proclaim myself a Virginian and an historian.

On the other hand, there were many, many moments when things did not feel right. Unlike some of my peers, I did not gaze upon acres of furniture and feel that this was my calling in life. I do not currently give a care about metal curating or ships anchors or needlepoint or china patterns. Does all that stuff really matter to anyone? The beauty-loving and social-justice-loving halves of me were at war. It was jarring to finally visit a place I had revered for so long, and not immediately feel at home.

They call me with their decision tomorrow, so we'll see what God's will is for this one.

Studying "Stuff" for a Living

Tomorrow I'm heading to Delaware to interview for the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. (Historians like long wordy titles.) Here are some of the things you can study there:

"Gee whiz, don't you just love Flemish bond?" those brick students seem to be saying. At "history camp" last summer we got high schoolers to feel that way, I kid you not.

Obviously, I'm excited and nervous about the chance of attending such a great museum studies program. If it can help me learn to better get teenagers pumped about dead people's belongings, then I am all for it. Still, it's going to take some mental gymnastics to switch from today's grant proposal mayhem back to all the public history papers I wrote in college.

They like me! They really like me!

Last night was informed via voicemail that I made "callbacks" for the Notre Dame history PhD program! This literally means that they like my application and so have decided to call me and chat about my graduate study plans. After rounds of calls they pick who actually gets accepted.

So this morning I had a short interview with a professor who specializes in American religious history (yay!) He was very interested in my Modern Catholic Architecture project - he suggested that a liner study of the "built environment" in a single community would make a nice thesis. He also was interested in my time in CW - he's familiar with Handler and Gable's scathing study of it as a "Republican Disneyland."

Overall I think it went well, although it was 8:30am and I was feeling ill so you never know how coherent I sounded. Then again I improved by GRE scores while feeling profoundly feverish, so you never know.

A few reasons wny I am applying to graduate school

With Thomas Jefferson in the St. Louis Arch museum

“One can accept the view that the historical record is fragmentary and incomplete, that recovery of the past is partial and difficult, and that historians will never finally agree in their interpretations, and yet can still believe intelligibly and not naively in an objective truth about the past that can be observed and empirically verified. Historians may never see and represent that truth wholly and finally, but some of them will come closer than others, be more complete, more objective, more honest, in their written history, and we will know it, and have known it, when we see it.” Gordon Wood in The New York Review of Books, 1991.

"The intellectual life is indeed an intense and ongoing conversation (occasionally a brawl) into which young academics seek entry and from which scholars draw vitality throughout their careers."(xiii)

"Popular culture is of great interest to me because I am fond of thinking of homes, churches, local libraries, and municipal buildings as the prosaic side of collective memory. In these often unassuming buildings are found things that tell us who we are by shaping out memories of the people, places, institutions, and events that have formed our lives-often in forgettable yet utterly tenacious ways. Religious stuff is a particular category of the things that mark the halls and walls and countertops of everyday life. Why bother to study it? In a nutshell, because there is something irresistable about the fact that human consciousness owes so much to cardboard icons and plastic buttons." (xi)

"And what will enrich our understanding of the worlds in which we live more than an historically informed analysis of the artifacts that articulate the worlds of others?" (pxv)

Visual Piety by David Morgan (Berkeley: Univ of California Press 1998)