...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.”-Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
In Donna Tartt’s masterful 2013 novel The Goldfinch, Theo Decker—the hero—accidentally commits art theft when he rescues Carel Fabritius’ “Goldfinch” painting from the Met museum during a terrorist bombing which also kills his mother. Theo clings to the painting throughout the novel, haunted and mesmerized by all that it represents: love of beautiful things, the potency of memories and the past, the ephemerality of human life coupled and contrasted with the permanence of art. Theo is plagued by guilt over his theft but, to me, his act is a powerful expression of cultural preservation. Tartt’s message is important: art is inherently human, created by human minds. Yet, art far outlives the individual human, the civilization. It is through art that we understand the past and the foreign. Yet, art is also an essential, common link between civilizations.
I feel deeply moved to speak on behalf of the cultural destruction occurring in the Middle East, a fertile cultural crossroads in antiquity and medieval times. Yesterday, the Islamic State (ISIS) released a video of men purportedly destroying ancient artifacts located in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, dating from as early as the 7th century BCE, stating that Islam dictated that idols should be destroyed.
I want to be as clear as possible that, in writing this, I do not intend to add to the ever, widening gap between “us” and “them,” that seems to always weigh heavily on many analyses and in many discussions of Middle Eastern relations from an American perspective. This gap leaves us in a void of misunderstanding and that is dangerous. For, in this void, it is easier to justify hating the “other.”
Instead, I’d like to suggest and beg that we actively seek to preserve what little we have left of the past, that which exists only in fragments as it is, and that which critically links us together as human beings. We cannot even try to understand one another or hope to heal the wounds of the present, without understanding the past, through its finest and most beautiful creation of all: its art.
