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A Trip to Patience and Fortitude
Second in a series of columns chronicling my recent travels from Paul Revere’s gravesite in Boston to John Steinbeck’s writing cabin in Long Island, and more.
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Patience and Fortitude are the nicknames of the two grand marble lions regally standing guard before the New York Public Library’s entrance on Fifth Avenue.
Fortitude and patience, lower case, were also part of my maiden visit to our nation’s largest public library. I had intended to go the previous spring, but en route on the subway my right index finger was filleted by the train’s doors. An urgent detour for 16 stitches derailed my plans.
Eleven months later, my patience was rewarded. Again visiting my son in Manhattan, I again headed to the lion sentries. This time, I avoided mishap on the subway.
Exiting the station, however, was a different matter. In the shadows of skyscrapers, I had no idea which direction was my intended west. The fourth person I asked for help, a young woman, pointed me off with the assuredness of a compass.
Moments later, I flinched at a tapping on my shoulder. It was the young woman. Realizing she had erred, and defying the rude New Yorker stereotype, she had hustled two blocks out of her way – in heels! – to catch up and turn me around.
Days earlier, the Boston Athenaeum, that city’s original library dating back to 1805, had taken my breath away. The New York Public Library, founded in 1895, knocked me out. It is not a library so much as a museum.
Patience and Fortitude out front are complimented inside by a collection of masterful bronze statues and marble busts. Too, priceless paintings and monumental murals abound.
Even the ceilings are artworks. The dome of the McGraw Rotunda, for example, brings to mind the Sistine Chapel. The Rose Main Reading Room, meanwhile, surpasses the rotunda roof. Nearly the length of a football field, its ceiling features exquisite wood carving and gilded tiling forming an elegant frame around a painted blue sky filled with clouds.
It is my experience that travels take on themes and have common threads, some intentional and others serendipitous. Occasionally these threads weave together past trips with present ones. So it was this time.
Just as the Boston Athenaeum has on prominent display a statue of George Washington, the New York Public Library features two oil-on-canvas portraits of our first president by Rembrandt Peale. This shared thread appeared front and center in the Salomon Room: to the left, Washington in his general’s uniform; beside it on the right, in dress attire.
Another interwoven strand surprisingly appeared: Henry David Thoreau. Two summers past, I visited the writer’s revered cabin site in Concord, Mass. Now, on exhibit in the New York Public Library, I saw an 1854 first edition of “Walden; or, Life In the Woods.”
Other artifacts on display from Thoreau’s life included two pages from his voluminous journal that became the manuscript of his most famous book; a letter to his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson; a daguerreotype portrait, taken in 1856, of a bearded Thoreau in a suit jacket and bowtie.
Many of these items – plus a pencil actually made by Thoreau – I had not seen on my previous pilgrimage to Walden Pond. The best travels have such surprises.
Around the corner from Thoreau’s pencil was a temporary exhibit titled “Peace, Love, and Revolution” about the 1960s. Among the memorabilia was novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern’s typewriter.
The bulky Olympia unexpectedly proved to be a sentence that connected past pages of my travels with the next paragraph on this road trip.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …
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