ABSTRACT
Every life writes a text with hidden pages, some unreadable even to their author. But there are illuminating moments in museums, found in no other places, when such pages become visible and their messages become clear. In the case of the Smithsonian's reduction of the Enola Gay exhibit, the idea of a public story surrounded by engaged critical thinking was made impossible. Memory transcends the bland narrative and the perfunctory label; it can deepen and extend the human presence in things. Throughout the museum, apart from the identifications of objects and contexts, it may be useful to emphasize the continuities of things, the threads and ribbons that interlace artifacts with their human observers. There is power in reconstructing the everyday lives of objects through memory and human presence. For every visible thing, there is an invisible context that needs to be evoked, or rescued from where it lies silently in human experience.
