Book Excerpt
Rooms of Wonder and Curious Places
How to curate your own personal Wunderkammer or Atlas Obscura
Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit who taught at the Roman College during the seventeenth century, was a dazzling polymath. He distinguished himself as a linguist (he discovered a link be- tween the Coptic and Egyptian languages), historian (he wrote an encyclopedia of China), geologist (he studied volcanoes and fossils), physician (he hypothesized infectious microorganisms as the cause of the plague), inventor (he created a magnetic clock), and biblical scholar (he analyzed the distribution of Noah’s animals).
Kircher also curated his famous Wunderkammer, or Room of Wonders. In this cabinet of curiosities were objects reflecting his eclectic interests, including Egyptian obelisks, mastodon bones, stones from India thought to draw out snake venom, magic lanterns, an organ playing birdsongs, a statue of an eagle that could vomit, and a configuration of mirrors that could reveal ghosts. Kircher fashioned a tube leading from the exhibitions to his bedroom; through it, he could listen to his visitors’ comments and answer their questions.
If Kircher’s Wunderkammer could be guilty of exoticizing non-Western cultures (his well-traveled Jesuit brothers donated artifacts from Africa, India, China, and Japan), a more recent Wonder Room respects cultural differences. In her installation New World Wunderkammer, on display from 2013 to 2014, Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains created curiosity cabinets devoted to Africa, America’s indigenous peoples, and the New World’s intricate blending of race and culture. Drawing from her own collection and the collection at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, Mesa-Bains organized objects under the categories of “memory, struggle, loss, and wonder.” This classification challenged traditional European arrangements based on scientific concepts and the whims of the collector. Included in Mesa-Bain’s collection were artifacts of “war, religion, and culture” as well as digital prints of lost objects. Mesa-Bains wanted these images to “heal . . . loss and displacement.”
Make your own Wunderkammer. Set aside a space in your dwelling — could be one shelf, a corner, an entire room — and install there any objects that you find interesting and odd. You might display objects you already possess. A favorite old book, for instance, or a worn playing card, or that cicada shell your daughter found.
Once you have a basic idea of your quirks, your eyes — like magnets — will seek out things that suit your energy. These can be objects you find lying around your house or out in your neighborhood. They can be things you acquire in antique and thrift stores, or artifacts from obscure travels, or things handed down by your family.
Perhaps you will find over time that these objects reflect more than your personal inclinations. Do they represent your family’s history, or the concerns of a social or ethnic group of which you are a part? What is the abiding emotion to the collection? Joy? Sadness?
Regardless of the collection’s mood, your search for oddities has made you more alert to the world. You are always on the look-out for something strange. When you find it, you grasp more than the object; you hold a piece of your heart.
Athanasius Kircher is the main inspiration for another kind of collecting — not objects but experiences. In this role, he is the main inspiration for Atlas Obscura, an internet magazine and touring company that imagines the world itself as an immense cabinet of curiosities.
Launched by Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras in 2009, the website now describes 18,000 “wondrous and curious places.” These range from oddities hidden within everyday locations (a 1,611-foot tunnel under the intersection of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue and Court Street), to out-of-the-way museums (Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, exhibiting the largest carousel in the world, which contains 269 animals, 182 lanterns, and 20,000 lights), to out-and-out sci-fi eeriness (the Buzludzha Monument commemorating communism, a huge saucer-shaped structure abandoned in the Bulgarian mountains).
Create your own Atlas Obscura.
What places in your daily routine are strange? Did you travel to any bizarre locales when you were a child? What about as an adult?
In a notebook, briefly describe each odd place you’ve already visited. Make sure you explain why the site is curious.
Now your goal is to find more wondrous locations for your atlas. As you make your daily rounds, be alert for odd phenomena. They don’t have to be big. A splotch on concrete, a knot on a tree, a mangled rusty rod of metal. But big works, too. Puce water tanks atop old buildings. Smokestacks tilted over empty factories. Rotted- out bridges near collapse.
What matters is, is the site uncanny?
As you search, you will probably find what Ross Gay discovered in scanning daily for a delight: the more you look for strangeness, the more likely you will develop a “strangeness” radar. The more you brood on the strange, the more strangeness there is to brood on.
Excerpted from How to Be Weird: An Off-Kilter Guide to Living a One-of-a Kind Life by Eric G. Wilson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Eric G. Wilson.
