Museums

As a child I was attracted to museums. First, the Natural History Museum. What a building! Gigantic, Babylonian, inexhaustible! On the ground floor, hall after hall of stuffed mammals and birds thronged in the dust. And the arches, smelling of bones, where the whales hung from the roof. Then one floor up: the fossils, the invertebrates . . .

I was taken to the Natural History Museum when I was only about five years old. At the entrance, two elephant skeletons met the visitor. They were the two guardians of the gateway to the miraculous. They made an overwhelming impression on me and I drew them in a big sketchbook.

After a time, those visits to the Natural History Museum stopped. I started to go through a phase of being quite terrified of skeletons. The worst was the bony figure depicted at the end of the article on “Man” in the Nordic Family Lexicon. But my fear was aroused by skeletons in general, including the elephant skeletons at the entrance to the museum. I became frightened even of my own drawing of them and couldn’t bring myself to open the sketchbook.

My interest turned to the Railway Museum. Nowadays it occupies spacious premises just outside the town of Gävle, but back then the entire museum was squeezed into a part of the district of Klara right in the center of Stockholm. Twice a week Grandfather and I made our way down from Söder and visited the museum. Grandfather himself must have been enthralled by the model trains, otherwise he would hardly have endured so many visits. When we decided to make a day of it we would finish up in Stockholm Central Station, which was nearby, and watch the trains come steaming in, lifesized.

The museum staff noticed the zeal of the young boy, and on one occasion I was taken into the museum office and allowed to write my name (with a back-to-front S) in a visitors’ book. I wanted to be a railway engineer. I was, however, more interested in steam engines than in electric ones. In other words, I was more romantic than technical.

Some time later, as a schoolboy, I returned to the Natural History Museum. I was now an amateur zoologist, solemn, like a little professor. I sat bent over books about insects and fish.

I had started my own collections. They were kept at home in a cupboard. But inside my skull grew an immense museum and a kind of interplay developed between this imaginary one and the very real one that I visited.

I visited the Natural History Museum more or less every second Sunday. I took the tram to Roslagstull and walked the rest of the way. The road was always a little longer than I had imagined. I remember those foot marches very clearly: it was always windy, my nose ran, my eyes filled with tears. I don’t remember the journeys in the opposite direction. It’s as if I never went home, only out to the museum, a sniffling, tearful, hopeful expedition toward a giant Babylonian building.

Finally arriving, I would be greeted by the elephant skeletons. I often went directly to the “old” part, the section with animals that had been stuffed back in the eighteenth century, some of them rather clumsily prepared, with swollen heads. Yet there was a special magic here. Big artificial landscapes with elegantly designed and positioned animal models failed to catch my interest—they were make-believe, something for children. No, it had to be quite clear that this was not a matter of living animals. They were stuffed, they stood there in the service of science. The scientific method I was closest to was the Linnean: discover, collect, examine.

I would work slowly through the museum. Long pauses among the whales and in the paleontology rooms. And then what detained me most: the invertebrates.

I never had any contact with other visitors. In fact, I don’t remember other visitors being there at all. Other museums I occasionally visited—the National Maritime Museum, the National Museum of Ethnography, the Museum of Technology—were always crowded. But the Natural History Museum seemed to stay open only for me.

One day, however, I did encounter someone—no, not a visitor, he was a professor of some sort. We met among the invertebrates—he suddenly materialized between the display cases, and was almost as small in stature as I was. He spoke half to himself. At once we were involved in a discussion of molluscs. He was so absentminded or so unprejudiced that he treated me like an adult. One of those guardian angels who appeared now and then in my childhood and touched me with its wings.

Our conversation resulted in my being allowed into a section of the museum not open to the public. I was given much good advice on the preparation of small animals, and was equipped with little glass tubes that seemed to me truly professional.

I collected insects, above all beetles, from the age of eleven until I turned fifteen. Then other competing interests, mostly artistic, forced their attentions on me. How melancholy it felt that entomology must give way! I convinced myself that this was only a temporary adjustment. In fifty years or so I would resume my collecting.

My collecting would begin in the spring and then flourished of course in the summer, out on the island of Runmarö. In the summerhouse, where we had little enough space to move around, I kept jam jars with dead insects and a display board for butterflies. And lingering everywhere: the smell of ethyl acetate, a smell I carried with me since I always had a tin of this insect killer in my pocket.

It would no doubt have been more daring to use potassium cyanide as the handbook recommended. Fortunately, this substance was not within my reach, so I never had to test my courage by choosing whether or not to use it.

Many were involved in the insect hunt. The neighborhood children learned to sound the alarm when they saw an insect that could be of interest. “Here’s one!” echoed among the houses, and I would come rushing along with my butterfly net.

I went on endless expeditions. A life in the open air without the slightest thought of thereby improving my health. I had no aesthetic opinions on my booty, of course—this was, after all, Science—but I unknowingly absorbed many experiences of natural beauty. I moved in the great mystery. I learned that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us.

I caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in my boxes, which I still have. A hidden mini-museum of which I am seldom conscious. But they’re sitting there, those insects. As if biding their time.