On Being Surrounded by the Real Thing

I went to a book club. (That sentence would once have been the preamble to a story, but in these pandemic times, it is the whole story. I went to a book club!)

I could not get enough of all the new faces. These lovely, un(mask)obscured, glorious faces. I felt a sense of abundance, going from one person to the next, over apple crumble and paperbacks. I wanted to drink them in.

I had a similar shock to my system when I visited a museum for the first time in the pandemic. It was at an exhibition on Jean-Paul Riopelle at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, at a moment when museums were still closed to the public. I was overwhelmed by the materiality of the paintings, sticking my nose right up to the canvases to fully soak in the colors and textures.

In art, there’s the concept of the real thing, where reproductions or photographs cannot capture the essence of an original artwork. Walter Benjamin called this the ‘aura’ of the artwork, its presence in time and space.

That is why seeing Michelangelo’s original David is different than looking at a bronze cast. The experience of standing in front of the marble that was carved by Michelangelo himself, that has traveled through space and time to be in front of you on this very day, is a different experience than standing in front of a reproduction or holding a tiny plastic replica.

Sure, you can learn a lot from seeing the shape and scale of a copy, you might even really enjoy it, but the mystical element of encountering an original object is not replicable.

At book club, there were a few awkward moments where I took a little too long to respond in conversations, distracted by the delight of gazing into a new face. I was caught up in this beautiful, mystical element: the aura of people. Something that is not fully translated in video calls or text messages, something for which I am starving.

I was surrounded by the real thing.