The fantastical and fiction often
holds more truth than simple claimed fact.
This is so in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and in the other
various Wunderkammern told about in the book. As Weschler discovered, it was
some of the more outlandish and absurd exhibits that turned out to be true. He
had caught on to the “ironylessness” of Mr. Wilson, but soon discovered the
root of why Mr. Wilson had dove into his bizarre collection. Balancing the line
between doubt and wonder was the initial intent of the Wunderkammerns and this
is precisely what Mr. Wilson desired. The outcome of this experiment, if that’s
even an appropriate term, is the discovery of what it truly means to be human:
curiosity matched with skepticism and awe.
Weschler found even more examples
after publishing his first paper on Mr. Wilson’s museum about collections of
the bizarre from “lost ancient civilizations” to centaur skeletons. What Mr.
Wilson was doing was nothing necessarily unique, but nonetheless important. Weschler kept trying to verify each exhibit,
and with this slurry of attempts he found a majority of them to be true. Call after call after fax by Mr. Weschler
confirmed his doubts, and the stories he had at that point believed to be all
part of a false experiment, were actually more or less true. It was this
research that reinstated the suspension of disbelief for Weschler, or at least
to bring back the true wonder of the museum. This odd story was met with odd
research and found quite odd results indeed. Orthodox, no. Appropriate, very.
No comments:
Post a Comment