Timing has never been my strong suit.As soon as I stopped my daily commute to New York City, the Morgan Library and Museum opened a display titled “Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders.”To appreciate the irony of this fully, you need to realize my office was just across the street from the Morgan Library, and the daily visits would’ve provided a good opportunity for a lunch-time break with my beloved monsters.Instead I was spending the time moving further west and unpacking.Still, displays like this are a tacit form of validation.Those of us who admit, as adults, that we like monsters huddle under a cloud of suspicion.Monsters are a matter for kids—like dinosaurs and fairies—not something on which an upwardly mobile adult spends his time.We’ll take whatever validation we can get.
Perhaps we’ve been too hasty to dismiss our monsters.Even the Bible, after all, has them.They help us cope in a chaotic and uncertain world.A world of hurricanes and Trump.A world lacking compassion and sense.Monsters have always been symbols of the borderlands.Creatures that cross boundaries and that shouldn’t exist but somehow do nevertheless.Science has helped us understand our world, but in our desire to grow up enough to use Occam’s razor, we find that it shaves a little too close.Besides, what can be more unnatural than shaving?When we lose our ability to believe in monsters, we lose a piece of our ability to cope with an unpredictable world.Monsters have their practical uses indeed.
If the world were more predictable, I would still be teaching instead of editing.Or I’d still be living in an apartment rather than a house.Moving is chaos embodied.Like monsters, it’s best left to the young.It’s just like this world for a monster display to open just across the street right when you’ve moved out of town.I should expect no less in a cosmos marked by uncertainty.Medieval Monsters isn’t the only museum display of the weird and wonderful.Monsters have a way of showing up again once you think they’re safely gone.Family and friends share with me their visits to other monster exhibits at other museums.They may wonder at my fascination with them—an adult with a sober doctorate in the field of history of religions, biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern religions, whatever. It’s kind of a monster in its own right, on display here daily. If you happen to miss it, don’t worry. It’ll remain lurking in its own corner of the internet.