The Glenstone Museum – Fears for declining years – Gambrill State Park – Is the clerkless society imminent? – Evening statistics
I went with EG and HG to Glenstone Museum in Potomac, which is unlike any other museum I have seen. The museum consists of a 230-acre campus with a trail winding through it to various buildings devoted to displaying the works of art, all of which is contemporary. It is a requirement that in order to exhibit in Glenstone, artists must first have exhibited at least 15 years in other museums. Several of the large-scale sculptures are placed out of doors and the landscaping is every bit as elaborate as that of an English country estate in the age of Humphrey Repton. A boardwalk goes over a meandering stream, crossing it several times, and the buildings themselves are works of art. They include, for example, three stone-walled houses, with the stones intricately fitted to each other, and the Pavilions, a building of precast concrete sections that were poured at different seasons to produce color variation and which, although it is in fact a single building, has the appearance of several different buildings as one approaches it. The Pavilions offers numerous vistas both of the interior courtyard, with its water garden, and of the outdoor riparian scenery, which is breath-taking even in winter. The galleries are lavish with the amount of space they allot to each exhibited piece; several contain only two or three in a room. It is the largest private contemporary art museum in the country. We saw the museum to advantage yesterday, inasmuch as it was a bright sunlit day, so that the riotous profusion of pale straw-colored grasses had a slightly golden tinge when viewed from the panoramic window view in one of the gallery rooms.
And what of the works of art themselves?
“These consist largely of tantalizing abstractions: an egg balanced on cone, an erg balanced on a bone, a hag balanced on a roan.”
Such is S. J. Perelman’s facetious description of the wall decorations of a fashionable Manhattan jewelry store and, by extension, of the modern art scene in New York generally. Some of the artworks in Glenstone are a bit like that: obvious attempts to impress the viewer with the artist’s originality, but holding little intrinsic interest otherwise. But others are much more impressive, including, housed in a separate gallery building , those by R. H. Quaytman, an artist of extraordinary range and power. She is listed as an “abstract artist,” but that is really too reductive a label for her. Her works are an intricate blend of realist and expressionistic techniques, and the results are riveting. We were particularly delighted by a series of 22 panels ranged along the wall depicting the meeting of field and sky at the horizon (“Morning, Chapter 30”), with the tints of the sky varying from one panel to the next and ranging from pale bluish gray to deep indigo. The room contained other works that were so completely unlike in style from the panel series and from each other that at first it was difficult for me to believe that they all came from the hand of the same artist.
Afterwards we returned to EG’s and HG’s house, and had tea together. Our conversation, though animated as usual, took a somewhat melancholy turn, touching upon how the efforts of modern medicine to prolong life has been something of a mixed blessing, resulting in numbers of people whose last years consist solely of pain or oblivion and who would ask for nothing better than to able to put a swift end to them. EG and HG mentioned a neighbor who is 92, whose infirmities are increasing on an almost daily basis, and who awakes in the mornings with an emotion akin to despair in the knowledge that she must somehow or other endure another day; while I, of course, spoke and thought of my unfortunate mother, who has been in a semi-comatose state for years on end and who is now unable to recognize anyone or indeed to respond to external stimuli of any kind. EG, HG, and myself are all active and alert; we enjoy our respective periods of retirement greatly; and yet we are each of us old enough to feel the presence of that specter of ill health, both physical and mental, hovering in the background, ready to pounce upon us at any given moment, and it is not surprising that we occasionally wonder what form it will take. For my own part, I certainly do not desire to outlive my mental faculties.
Today I went with LM and others in Gambrill State Park, where I had not been for several months. We had another fine day, going first along the Red Maple Trail and the Catoctin Trail, then going along the greater part of the Yellow Poplar Trail and stopping at the North Frederick Overlook. This overlook is one of the best to see the city of Frederick from above, as well as the isolated peak of Sugarloaf Mountain to its south. A rather amusing incident occurred during the meandering path of the Upper Yellow Poplar Loop. While waiting at a junction I encountered another hiker who went on; then, after I regrouped with the others and went forward again, I met this same hiker coming in the opposite direction and looking anxious. “Am I going in the right direction?” he asked me, as we approached each other. “I overtook this group of hikers some minutes ago and now it looks like they’re coming towards me.” I assured him that he had not gotten turned around; the illusion was created by the fact that the trail bends frequently and uses many switchbacks, so that it could easily appear to someone a hundred feet or so above one such turn that he had reversed his direction.
A rather amusing article in my AARP magazine was devoted to the plight of the “overworked consumer.” Businesses are using clerks and cashiers to a lesser degree than they have done in the past, for obvious economic reasons. Not only do they have to pay fewer people for checking customers out, but transactions tend to be swifter. A customer has little temptation to linger over the counter if there is no one to talk to. On the other hand, customers (and older customers in particular) are less familiar than clerks to be familiar with bar code locations and the machines themselves can be slower than a register operated by an efficient clerk. I actually prefer the self-checkout option myself; I like to be able to arrange the packaging of my shopping bags, which I can safely say I do somewhat more efficiently than the majority of clerks. I well remember one shopping experience, when I purchased six items that clerk proceeded to store in four plastic bags. It is a little less of a problem now, ever since Virginia started charging for plastic bags; before that occurred I would have to thrust my reusable shopping bags practically under the clerk’s nose in order not to be overwhelmed with plastic bags that I didn’t need and didn’t want. I suspect that while personal service in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants will not die out entirely, it will become much less frequent. No doubt younger generations will look back with wonder upon footage showing stores in which customers hand over cash or credit cards to an actual, breathing person.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 674,692,946; # of deaths worldwide: 6,758,403; # of cases U.S.: 104,111,747; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,132,254..