”Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.” Said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

Miranda is home from college for winter break. Not completely home, she’s staying at her mother’s house, and she has her own life now. She’s studying art and would rather spend time having lunch with gallery owners in New York than dinner with her dad and his family in Connecticut. Of course the best of all worlds might be if she could go museum hopping with Fiona, Kim and I in New York.

Kim had to work, but we decided to take Fiona out of school for the day. She has been longing to see her half-sister and a trip to the Whitney Biennial could be a great educational experience. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, I did not expect Miranda to be up with the lark, and we planned a late morning train.

What a lark! What a plunge! My thoughts shifted to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. I discovered Virginia Woolf in my college days and fell in love with her writing. She captures a world from a viewpoint so different than I had developed growing up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts and that diversity of viewpoints I found so intriguing. Slowly, I grew out of my fascination for the outsiders that Hermann Hesse portrayed to the crazy older men of other great literature. What did Mr. Ramsay struggle with as he tried to get beyond ‘R’? What opium induced visions did Augustus Carmichael see as he shuffled past Mrs. Ramsay, reminding her of the inadequacy of human relationships.

Some one had blundered.

As I thought of these characters, various idealists from Anton Chekhov’s plays came to mind. Marcel Proust joined the fray and the opening line, For a long time I used to go to bed early comes to mind. Fiona went to bed early before the great trip to the museum, and my thoughts mingled together into strange dreamlike sequences as I drifted off that night.

The train ride in was uneventful. Fiona was full of excitement about seeing her big sister. Miranda was full of excitement about seeing the Biennial. I settled into my role of the crazy old uncle. I had thought about titling my blog post something like, “Having a Crazy Uncle for a Dad”. As we talked, I asked Fiona what she thought ‘art’ was. I explained that it sounds like a very simple question, but really, it is very complicated. She admitted it was complicated and started talking about things that are painted. I asked if a painted house, car, or mailbox is art. As we talked, Fiona decided that everything was art and moved on to other topics.

Is this blog post art? How does it compare to the video of people talking about America projected on to the cracked windshield of a 1960s era ambulance? What is the purpose of art? Miranda was less interested in those installations that were making some sort of political statement. If she were older and more cynical, I could hear her deriding anything except art for art’s sake. Yet what is the ‘sake’ of ‘art’? Towards the end of the exhibit, we looked at a painting by Mark Rothko and Miranda talked about how he resisted his work being called abstract and berated using words like ‘juxtaposed’ to describe it. We joked about so many of those little write-ups on the walls using words like juxtaposed and deconstructed. I remember the old joke about people who can’t do, teach, and wandered if something similar applied to these art write-ups. Those who can’t do art, write little descriptions for the walls of museums.

At one point during the visit, I glanced out of one of the rare windows in the Whitney to the scene outside. I remembered the old homeless man that Miranda and I had seen dumpster diving at Grand Central. What is art? What is its purpose? What do we learn by juxtaposing the homeless man against the Whitney?

More immediately, what am I doing here, writing my blog post about going to the Whitney with two of my daughters? How do blogs fit into the greater picture? Where does other technology fit in?

For me, perhaps some of it comes back to the crazy old men who look at life a little bit different. Perhaps I’m becoming one of them. Perhaps, I might even cause someone else to stop, if even just for a moment, and look at life a little bit differently. I know that my experience at the Whitney has caused me to look around a little more closely, and I hope it has had a similar effect for my daughters, as well as for others that visit it.