The best museum exhibits are always just out of reach for me. I might not make it to New York in time to catch Poiret: King of Fashion at the Met, and I haven't figured out yet how to get to October 2000 - January 2001 to see Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 at the National Gallery. Curses, but that time travel is late in getting here.

All that being said, there's some value to exploring museums on the web. Not much, but some, I guess. The aforementioned National Gallery has a decent enough site on the aforementioned Art Nouveau exhibit, although it has one fatal flaw: it presumes that the visitor is far more interested in the exhibit itself than in its content. Bad form, National Gallery.

This is cheating, a little, as I actually saw this exhibition in person eight years ago, but it was outstanding: Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia. It's presumably more depressing than was the Art Nouveau exhibition, but I rather like being so engrossed by a museum exhibit. Besides which, the items were stunning.

Then there's the most fun exhibition site I've found so far -- for the Victoria & Albert Museum's International Arts and Crafts, which ran in 2005. This site actually includes a program that lets you design your own Arts and Crafts tile and, subject to site approval, add it to an online gallery. Whee! It's the little things that amuse me, sadly.

Beginning at the Beginning

I tend to write introductions well after I've written most of the body of a text. So with that in mind, I've decided to let etymology do the talking instead.

The word "begin," according to the lovely and talented Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Old English word beginnan (sometimes onginnan, for some reason or other, except that it's apparently a stronger verb than the former), which itself derives from the root bi-, "be," and the West Germanic ginnan, which might mean "to open" or "open up." This possible definition links it to an Old High Germanic word in-ginnan, which means both "to cut open, open up" and "begin, undertake." Scintillating start to this blog, right there.

So given the fairly mundane etymology of "begin" (there are seriously better ones out there, and they will be presented randomly and with little actual relevance to anything, really, other than pure entertainment value), I'll give T.S. Eliot, from 1941's "Little Gidding," the last word:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.