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Museums of the Mind is an original and captivating book—one that is both deeply serious and deeply pleasurable to read. Ellen Handler Spitz engages the reader in a series of inquiries that are seamlessly connected by a profound insight namely, that works of art that we encounter at any age impress themselves with force on our minds and sensibilities, and that our inner lives are in part constituted by these powerful images with which we remain engaged, both consciously and unconsciously. Museums of the Mind is divided into two sections: the first part, “In the Labyrinth of Rene Magritte,” is a series of interconnected essays on the work of that painter, and the second part, “Writing across the Disciplines,” is a series of essays on various works of art. Whatever the subject, the reader has the pleasure of becoming engaged by a mind that is disciplined and widely educated yet retains its playfulness, freshness and curiosity. Ms. Spitz brings to each work she discusses a richness of allusion and association. And she writes with a rare combination of passion and lucidity.
Spitz demonstrates a remarkable range as she moves with ease from the surrealist art of Magritte, to literature (with chapters on “Antigone,” on a play based on a Chekhov story, and on a sonnet of Gerard Manley Hopkins); to popular culture (with chapters on the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” on the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and on the movie “Dead Poets Society”); to music. Her final chapter concerns the children's opera “Burundian,” which was performed many times by the inmates of Terezin, a concentration camp outside Prague. In opening her discussion of this opera, Spitz says that Rene her “subject in this final chapter is the power of art to shape the mind as well as to be shaped by it.” In my view, however, this has been the animating theme that runs through all of these essays, me current that joins them together in spite of the variety of their manifest content, drawn from