Since I was asked to explain how I come about the various topics for the blog, here is another example of chain of thought, linked to yesterday’s Freud essay. Freud on my mind, I thought back to my visit to the Freud museum in Vienna this summer.

 

First I thought about the fact that I never understood people’s pilgrimage to these kind of places. I don’t say that condescendingly. I truly don’t understand what people get from visiting places where their idols have lived, walked, worked, that they can’t get from the output of their work. Is it a form of paying respect? Is it a form of experienced closeness by sharing a spatial environment which only contains surviving traces of the famous person? What new insights can be provided? Perhaps these person-oriented museums organize information in a way that have you truly learn more?

All this pertains to the Vienna Freud Museum which is in the process of reorganizing, renovating and extending its physical space – the actual house and office where he lived and practiced. The throngs of visitors could barely be accommodated in the small rooms, there was no access for people living with disability, and the waiting lines disturbed the neighborhood.

 

How will it feel to the pilgrims if they see the photographs, the mementos, in spaces not hallowed by his presence, or distinctly changed? (Much of his stuff is in the museum in London to begin with, the Vienna collection rather rudimentary, since he was able to take his personal belongings and household goods when he had to leave the country to escape the Nazis.)

In any case, I went to look up the museum website to dig further. I learned that there are crowd funding campaigns to finance the renovation, and also a big bash fundraising event at the Neue Gallerie in New York two weeks back.

https://www.freud-museum.at/en/

At this first annual NY Celebration dinner a married couple, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, were among the three honorees. Have you read their books? She is a fearless, fierce intellectual, bordering on subversive, and her novel The Blazing World is among my favorites.  (I wrote about the novel in an earlier blog: Her protagonist deals with issues of aging and trying to make it as a woman in a male-dominated art world. She resolves to take her revenge, in a way that exerts an incredible emotional toll. My admiration for the novel can be traced to the fact that it brilliantly describes suffering, but then balances it out with hope, all the while challenging you intellectually to rethink all the issues of gender wars, specifically located in the arts.)

He is a whiner. There, I said it, about a Nobel candidate, no less. Here is a more elaborate version of that assessment.

https://www.vulture.com/2017/01/what-happened-to-paul-auster.html

One of his favorite topics is coincidence/fate, which finally brought me to think of what I am currently reading: a thrilling debut by 28! year-old Daisy Johnson, Everything Under, shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Loosely following Sophocles’ telling of the Oedipus myth, this novel propels the belief that all is fated into a visceral nightmare. The woman can write with a vengeance, and the raw anger is directed at the traps of womanhood.

(I love how my arm is reflected on the right next to the other in a painting in Freud’s study…)

Which brings me back to Freud and his affinity for Greek mythology and philosophical musings: here are photographs of the place where he lived.

 

Here is on of those pilgrimage for another famous son of the city:

And one of my favorite, romantic recordings of Mozart’s 40th – Bruno Walter rules!