In The Age

Sometimes I wish I had been born in the age of the great artists and poets. It seems that there was a time when creativity flowed much more freely than it does now. Men sculpted and painted, wrote sonnets and built cathedrals.  In many ways, the amount of beauty in men's creations seems diminished. Things have been reduced to various layers of binary code and javascript.  My mother told me the other day that they've stopped teaching cursive writing in schools. Another thing of beauty discarded. We're slowly losing the art in things.

I went to the Smithsonian's West Gallery yesterday, hiding where the sculptures are because the tourists tend to shy away from them. Everyone wants to see pretty acrylics spread across canvas, but figures in bronze and marble they can usually do without. I like them though. They're silently beautiful, and in the quiet of the galleries, they play their own kind of music. I saw a piece by Auguste Rodin called "Evil Spirits:" a white marble statue of a seated woman, bent over with her elbows on her knees. Two human-like figures clung to either side of her. None of them showed their faces, but one had the woman's hair wrapped around its head in a shackle made of tresses. It hit a bit close to home. In the age of great artists and poets, they were able to mold predicaments of the soul into shapes of marble and onto stretches of linen. If only we still did.