Culture matters. It matters because it expresses meaning, it impacts individuals and communities, and it builds a legacy of human invention that supports future creativity. I’ve asked some of my friends to share what culture means to them, how it has shaped their lives. Here are 500 words on culture from Ann Patchett…
–Yo-Yo Ma
Ann Patchett: The first time I saw “On the Beach” I cried myself sick. It was the early 1990s, and I was in the middle of nowhere in eastern Wyoming, miles from anything but snow-covered sheep. As moving as the story was, I wasn’t crying because the characters played by Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner were going to die (without even getting to be together). Gregory Peck would die and Ava Gardner would die and eventually I would die, that was the natural order of things. I was crying because if everyone died at more or less the same time the way they did in the movie, it would mean the death of culture. No one will ever read Shakespeare again, is what I was thinking as I sat in front of that television set in Wyoming. Never, never, never, never, never. This occurs to me now when I watch our president trying to bluff his way through a nuclear standoff with North Korea — not so much that I will die and everyone I’ve never met will die, but that there will be no more Shakespeare. I have to stop and close my eyes until the feeling passes.
Death is the sad business of life, but culture lives on. Culture is the golden thread that binds us to the very best of what came before us and what will come after. It’s as close as we’re going to get to immortality in this life, and I don’t just mean for the people who create culture, I mean for the people who experience it as well. My grandmother was born in Kansas seven months before Tolstoy died in Russia. For seven months they were alive together on this earth, and then she and I were alive together, then she was gone and for awhile longer I’ll remain, rereading Anna Karenina. That’s why the Russians filled two trains with art from the Hermitage and sent it to Sverdlovsk before the Siege of Leningrad. They did not fill two trains with children.
It’s why we stopped in March of 2001 to watch the Taliban blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the monumental figures that had been carved into the side of a cliff in the 4th and 5th centuries. Many regimes throughout history had tried to destroy the statues before but had failed. These days we know more about weaponry. The world begged the Taliban to spare the Buddhas, relocate them. Those of us who had never been to central Afghanistan and would probably never go could recognize that these enormous works of art belonged to the collective culture. To obliterate them was to disconnect from humanity itself, and when such steps are taken, well, anything is possible.
But remember, part of what’s possible is genius — Bach and the double helix and those bright collages Matisse pieced together when he was nearly blind. Just last week I walked through a tunnel at the 86th Street station of the new Second Avenue subway in New York and came face to giant face with the Chuck Close mosaics. I hadn’t known they were there. Suddenly I didn’t care where I was going. I stood, looking, and the people around me stopped and did the same. The colors, those incredible patterns that only make sense from a distance, it was astonishing. We were in a subway station, for heaven’s sake, and the art was breaking us open.
