Always New Depths

“If you promise to paint me as a work of art”

I went to the art museum recently with my kids.  As we walked around the deserted hallways on an early Friday afternoon, we were surrounded by priceless works of art.  We read the plaques for a few of them and worked out the math to determine how old each piece was.  Hundreds of years?  Thousands of years?  Was this piece older than that one?

As we walked around the museum — from the Egyptian wing to the armor room — Middle Ages to Renaissance — it occurred to me just how much change all of these pieces have been through.  Billions of humans have been born and died.  Empires have been built and burned to the ground.  The Earth has circled the sun thousands of times.

And not only have the pieces been through change — there are some that are literally about change.

The last stop on our visit was the room of French tapestries.  The youngest was getting hungry and I asked her what she wanted to see before we left.  She pulled out the map and said, “let’s go see the French tapestries.”  When we got there, we sat and stared at them for a few minutes.  We were all alone in a dimly lit room; well off the beaten path of the rest of the museum.

I got up and read the description of the tapestry in front of us.  It was a tapestry titled, “Time” from the early 1500s.  The words in the tapestry were in French. 

The translation on the plaque read:

One sees Time adorned with green foliage,

Sometimes as pleasant as an angel,

Then suddenly change and become quite strange

Never does Time persist in one state.

Never does time persist in one state.

I couldn’t agree more.

Bloc Party — “Always New Depths”