Worldbuilding Notes | Do Old Objects 'Remember'? A Few Sayings the Museum Guidebook Won't Print

(This is a compilation of folk sayings; it does not represent the position of any museum or academic institution, and is offered merely as a story.)

Ask a veteran artifact restorer whether old objects 'remember' things, and he'll usually smile and say no — then, a few seconds later, add: 'Though some things are best not touched carelessly.'

'Remember,' of course, is not a scientific term. But within this circle, from restorers to old curators to antique dealers, there circulates a set of sayings that no one will write into a guidebook. A few of them, collected here, to be heard as after-dinner stories.

Let it be said first how dull this trade normally is. The environmental conditions for a loaned object are fixed in the loan agreement: 21°C ±0.3, 50% RH ±5, with the panel logging a reading every 10 minutes. With a system that fine-grained, anything that does not add up stands out.

Saying One: Some Objects Are Never Loaned Out

Every great museum has a few 'treasures of the house' that are never loaned out, year-round. The official reasons are standard: too fragile, the insurance can't be agreed. But insiders will occasionally lower their voices and give you another version — some things grow 'restless' when moved, and leaving them in place is the least troublesome course.

One provincial museum had a lacquer object on a wooden core; the loan was negotiated for 3 years, and a week before it was due to travel it was declined on grounds of condition. The man who handled it gave another version after he retired: on the morning of the handover check, a sound came from inside the crate, both couriers heard it, and neither of them wrote it into the record.

Saying Two: Don't Recite the Inscription in Full, Alone

Faced with an object inscribed with ancient writing, old-school restorers have a habit verging on superstition: you may study it character by character, but don't recite the whole passage aloud, alone. Ask why, and they can't quite explain — they only say, 'My master taught me so.' One retired old master put it more bluntly: 'The characters are a door. You stand alone at the door and recite the whole string of keys, the door opens — and who's standing outside, you don't know.'

Similar warnings turn up in several places. On the excavation sites around Luxor in Egypt, the old foreman's version for a new hand is shorter: after sunset, don't speak aloud at the wall. In the sutra-copying rules of a few old East Asian temples, certain passages must be copied by two people at once. These rules have nothing to do with one another, yet all of them hinge on the same two conditions: alone, and in full. The 1974 edition of the conservation manual has a clause of its own, unchanged to this day, which has never once been illustrated with an example:

Where an object exhibits a change that cannot be explained by environmental factors, work shall cease immediately, the present condition shall be recorded, and the matter shall be reported to the supervisor.

Saying Three: Restoration Records 'Don't Match Up'

Restoring an artifact, every step must be recorded, photographed, archived. But some restorers privately complain that for certain particular pieces, the records 'don't match up' — the step you wrote yesterday, looking again today, has gained a line, or lost one, and the handwriting is still your own. Most of them don't make a fuss. In this trade, when records and memory don't match, the first to be doubted is always the person.

These records are hard to alter. One treatment record card per object, signed once by the person who did the work and countersigned by the person who checked it. What is meant by 'gaining a line' is usually a line in the remarks column, and what that line says, the next day, concerns something that happened before the object entered the building.

A Few Things People Get Wrong

Hearing this, most people's minds go toward ghost-hunting television. Insiders tell it with far less excitement, and the words they use are flat: this one is difficult to handle, this one can wait. People also assume such talk only circulates in small museums. Large ones say the same, only more obliquely.

Do these sayings hold water? Probably not. Ink runs, people tire, and by the third day of a rota memory goes wrong on its own. Every one of them has a perfectly ordinary explanation.

Only — when so many calm, worldly people in one circle, all in unison, say softly of the same kind of object, 'best not touch that,' you can hardly help asking: what exactly are they being careful of?