The Moments That Make Up a Millennium

The other day, we found ourselves in a crowded museum, gathered around a white, plaster-cast figure on a pedestal. Hunched and ancient, it had been carefully placed under a clear plexiglass cover. Its arms were wrapped around its shins, its knees pressed to its forehead. It was so lifelike, it seemed almost to be breathing, though in fact this life had ended nearly 2,000 years ago.

The figure was part of a long-running exhibit on Pompeii at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We’d hurried to see it because it leaves town at the end of this week. Leaves town, and leaves the country. Los Angeles was the sole U.S. venue for “Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town,” a collection of artifacts from the Italian city entombed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

It had been said that the exhibit was especially pertinent to Southern California--one populace on a fault line, the other under a volcano--but frankly, we’d gone for the kids. People will risk almost anything to possess great beauty. Anyone who lives here knows that already. More compelling to us was the promise of that cool figure on the pedestal.

And it was cool, as well as pertinent, not only to this place, but to this time. There was, it turned out, a kind of perspective, not so much in the particular items on exhibit, but in the way they evoked the random moments that, in the end, are the stuff of all lives.

Among the artifacts, for instance, was a building permit carved into a block of stone, in Latin. It gave a certain builder permission to block some homeowner’s view. It wasn’t art, exactly, but it conjured a whole world in its chiseled letters. You could imagine the foreman, the dickering over the price, the way the dust probably rose and settled around the feet of the construction crew.

There was a glass pitcher, perfectly preserved, as if someone had just set it out for company. And a limestone-and-glass mosaic, depicting, with anatomical precision, the sea life off the coast of Pompeii. You thought of the craftsman, of the people who had once walked by and admired it. There was an ornate, three-legged bronze table, waiting for someone to dine.

There were contraptions too--an early odometer, a crane, a model of a foot-powered treadmill--that made you think less of actual lives than of the poignant vanity of the culture, so advanced in its technology. Aqueducts, indoor heating, spigots, weights and measures--it must have seemed, in Pompeii’s moment (as it sometimes does now, in this one) that everything that could be invented already had been, that nothing was left but for genius of the present to be refined.

This, supposedly, is the focus of the exhibit--the science and technology of an ancient town. But it was impossible to focus only on the science and technology because the people behind them were so present. You’d look at a human-powered piece of equipment and think of the slaves who’d once run it. You’d see a sign depicting a merchant and his wife, tricked out in finery, and imagine them as the earth beneath them began trembling. You’d stand before that figure on the pedestal--one of hundreds of plaster casts taken from the buried city--and find yourself indescribably moved by the fact that, though its face was obliterated, you could still see the faint outline of its sandal straps.

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There are some who, over the years, have sought a kind of moral “lesson” in Pompeii’s fate. And there are some who think the exhibit is dull. Critics have dismissed it as a hodgepodge of technological and scientific gizmos, devoid of artistic meaning. Maybe it would have struck me that way too, at a different moment in time.

But coming on top of all the pre-millennial falseness--which has, interestingly, almost instantly been forgotten--the exhibit seemed true and refreshing. “This was one moment among billions,” the plaster-cast figure seemed to say. “This did not happen in a year of round and magical numbers, it didn’t happen to a different species. It happened in the blink of an eye to people just like you, there, on the other side of the plexiglass. People who, like you, were so much more than the sum of their possessions. People who, like you, were so much more like their neighbors than they often wanted to realize.”

In that moment, on the cusp of the New Year, there was the paradoxical sense that what abides is not the past or future, but the present: A place of great risk and great beauty where the air needs cleaning and the schools need improving and the poor are still with us and the traffic remains jammed. As they used to say under the volcano, carpe diem. Happy Monday, Southern California. Today is the first day of the rest of your millennium.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.