Having found my copy of The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport, I turned to an essay I did not remember, "Travel Reconsidered", and saw
This past summer I was cooling my heels outside the Musée du Louvre, a shrine not to be missed by the passionate pilgrim (Henry James's phrase for the American absorbing culture in Europe). Two such pilgrims with whom I was on vacation had wanted to see the Mona Lisa, and I, having shown them what I wanted them to see, had declined to try to see Leonardo's painting over the heads of five Lutheran Sunday School classes from Oslo, two busloads of Japanese businessmen, and a contingent of Mexican Rotarians.
I recall seeing the painting at some distance in 2007, and supposing that the crowds were brought by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. But The Hunter Gracchus was published in 1996, so one can blame Dan Brown only so far. I do remember thinking that one could build a good small city museum around the paintings on any ten linear yards of the walls past which folks marched, eyes front, to see the Mona Lisa.
A couple of fellow Americans informed Davenport that the Mona Lisa was at the Louver, across town, and that what he was looking at was not the Louver but an old royal palace. Well, one can, as he goes on to write, get misinformation closer to home.
When I was working in downtown D.C. in the mid-1990s and presumably looked like a local in a shirt and tie, tourists often stopped me to ask questions. Among the buildings they wrongly believed were the White House were the U.S. Capitol, the Treasury Building, and, perhaps oddest of all, the Old Post Office. The experience made me realize just how few people looked at the pictures on the back of their paper currency....
ReplyDeleteWell, the captions on the back of the bills are pretty small.
DeleteI did this year hear a tour guide, standing across from the Hay-Adams, deliver several oddly incorrect statements in the space of a few sentences about John Hay and Henry Adams to a high school group. I doubt that any of this was on the test when they got home.