Behind Every Museum, a School
We have been taught that youth is a stage of life.
I am no longer quite so sure.
There comes an age when the wrong compliments begin.
‘You do not look your age.’
As though the aim were to win a contest against the mirror.
In truth, I have no interest whatsoever in looking younger: I am interested in remaining young.
Youth is not a period of life.
It is a way of being in the world.
It is the willingness to learn, to doubt, to change one’s mind and to become excited by what one does not yet know.
That is why I like to imagine every person as a building with two façades.
At the front is the museum.
It is the part that everyone sees.
The wrinkles.
The grey hair.
The scars.
The joints that protest.
The spectacles whose prescription changes with alarming regularity, until cataracts cease to be a medical term and become an appointment in the diary.
The museum is inevitable.
Every day, a new exhibit is added.
Every experience finds its display case.
Every memory receives its label.
Behind it, however, there should be a school.
A place where one does not go to display what one knows, but to discover what is still missing.
The school is not a building; it is a state of mind.
It means continuing to ask questions while others hand out certainties.
The courage to change one’s mind.
Recognising that one does not know.
Trying.
Failing.
Trying again.
The richer the museum becomes, the more material the school has upon which to reflect.
Experience becomes a laboratory, not a monument.
The mistake begins when experience is confused with truth.
At some point, some people stop learning and simply begin quoting themselves.
Every opinion becomes final.
Every conviction becomes a relic.
Every past success becomes proof that there is nothing left to learn.
From that moment, the school closes.
Only the museum remains.
The difference between an elderly person and an old person is not written on an identity card.
It is written in the number of things they believe they have understood once and for all.
I know twenty-five-year-olds who already live in a museum.
They stopped learning long before they left school.
And I know eighty-year-olds who still inhabit their school.
They read.
They travel.
They learn.
They change.
They are still capable of wonder.
They are still able to say what I consider the most intelligent sentence in any language: ‘I did not know that.’
They do not seek confirmation.
They remain open to surprise.
They do not defend their ideas as though they were possessions.
They continually put them to the test, because they know that a conviction survives only if it can withstand doubt.
As the years pass, the museum inevitably grows larger.
And that is as it should be.
The museum tells the story of who we were.
The school writes the story of who we may yet become.
I would merely like the sound of lessons still to be heard behind that façade.
Because the museum preserves the past, while the school builds the future.
What matters is remembering which of the two buildings should stand at the front.
And which must stubbornly remain behind.