Monuments to Our Better Nature
A visitor returns to the National Mall to find not just history, but also decorum.
By MICHAEL BYERS
Growing up in the '70s in Bethesda,
Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C., I had the good
fortune to be takend regularly to the National Mall
by my mother. She was a scientist, and in the aftermath
of the Vietnam War she found much to be disheartened
by. The immense Smithsonian museums on the Mall acted,
for her, as repositories of truth and exactitude in
an age of cupidity, paranoia, and evasion; they were
her solace.
In the National Museum of Natural History,
the gargantuan blue whale hanging above us with its
great grooved throat was a fact about the world
that could not be denied. The stuffed African elephant
on its circular dais in the rotunda was composed of
billions of skin cells and tiny cilia, and its ivory
tusks wore an unfalsifiable brown patina of age. The
chambered skull of the brontosaurus, the irrefutable
chain of his vertebrae, his ponderous thighbones,
and his sculpted metatarsals—each the size and
heft of an anchor—had been painstakingly recovered
from a stony Canadian grave, cleaned, and finally
pieced together again, eons after the original owner
had ceased to have any use for them.
Certain truths, the museum assured us,
were undeniable.
Michael Byers is the author of
The Coast
of Good Intentions.
To read more of this essay, pick up
a copy of Best American Travel Writing 2004
or buy a back issue of Preservation by e-mailing
David_Montiel@nthp.org.
A Certain Somewhere collects 30 essays originally
published in Preservation magazine. Writers
were asked to describe a place that is significant
to them, to decipher what makes it mysterious and
meaningful, and to examine the nature of attachment
to a specific locale. Gathered here are pieces by
writers of all kinds—essayists, novelists, literary
critics, poets—on disparate and enthralling places,
from Madison Smartt Bell on Haiti to Thomas Mallon
on the New York Public Library. These writers examine
how they came to invest a part of themselves in the
places they have inhabited, and how these places have
consequently inhabited them. Most of all, the writers
transport you to places that have enchanted them and
will charm you as well.
"This is a book of love-of-place stories. The writers
confess their attachments to certain cities, houses,
islands, countries, rooftops, sandlots, coastlines,
rooms. As you walk with them through this subtly meaningful
book, you may have to admit to a certain attachment
of your own." E.L. Doctorow
Read our current
issue online, look for the January/February
2003 issue of Preservation on newsstands,
or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
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