Yesterday, I told (texted, really) a friend I had been out — walked, had a drink at a cafe and enjoyed the music there. She replied she had gone to an exhibition. It doesn’t seem like an unusual or deeply meaningful chat but this led, on our 40th-or-so year of knowing each other, to realise that I prefer just hanging out to museums and she prefers museums and exhibitions, which led to writing this post today.
I was in Budapest recently and I didn’t enter any museum. The only ticket I bought was to a pool and the only sightseeing site I specifically visited was Gellért Hill and Liberty Statue.
I’ve never said it out loud that I don’t really like museums in general. I like some but there’s usually a specific reason.
I’ve been somehow led to think that you have to like museums, exhibitions, theatre, concerts. And if you don’t care much about these, you’re, you know, not cultured. In my musings, I started to think, first, what’s actually different in me and my friend, or in general, in the preferences of experience. And then, what is even culture?
To answer the first, I suppose people differ in how they want to experience the world, foreign countries, life in general. I want to immerse myself in the now - the smells of the city, the general air, how people live, what they do, how they talk, what they eat. This is why I’ve often said I prefer to stay in a city for work-related reasons. It takes me closer to the reality of the place. Other people want to get to know the history of the city, see its highlights, its traditions through a guide. I’ve always thought the second to be more “right”, while of course immersion in the present is different but just as good.
People can be curious about a place either way, but I get my answers from the streets, cafes, places where people live and work, while others’ curiosity gets their food from museums, concerts, and probably also from the environment. It doesn’t mean the no-museums type is uncultured, just experiencing differently. And what is culture anyway?
Looking for the definition took me down different lanes and different approaches, different branches of how it’s studied. Reading about what culture is, is not something that we’d normally do because, well, we know what it is. But I do recommend maybe just the Wikipedia entry to broaden the understanding of culture.
Because the way I see things now, after reading the definitions and then some more, I am extremely cultured :) Because culture includes social behaviour, knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, habits, and more. And this is exactly what I choose to experience. Get a feel of how everything works and feels.
Maybe it's worth stopping, once in a while, to look at the thought castles we've built and whose blueprints we're following. I'd been living in a house that had "museums = culture" built into the plans — and it didn't occur to me to question it.