Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” begins with the words: "I met a traveler from an antique land," and I had always wondered where the antique land was. When I came to Long Island, I discovered that it was right here, down in the Hamptons, where buying and selling antiques seems to be a major industry in whole towns and villages. There is a mysterious force, like gravity, that attracts old furniture and what are humorously called “decorative objects” to certain places. This force has not been definitively identified by scientists, but I believe it is called money. It's much worse over in Europe, because there’s so much more history and their ancestors had so many centuries to fabricate the antiques of the future, a surprising number of which seem to have made their way over to these shores.
The lasting popularity of the Antiques Roadshow on Public Television has fostered the illusion that historic treasures lie all around us, just waiting to be discovered and turned into cash. The meaning of the word "antique" has been damaged in the process. The official definition is that antiques must be at least one hundred years old. The Oxford English Dictionary says: "Having existed since olden times, old, aged or venerable." But the frontier of antiquity is moving closer all the time. The Antiques Roadshow has been going since some of today’s antiques were brand new
Some antique stores contain items that look perfectly familiar and serviceable to me, like manual typewriters, dial telephones, and Kodak box cameras. Rusty garden tools, push lawnmowers and wind-up clocks are displayed like relics from an Egyptian tomb. It seems that anything without a motor or an electric cord qualifies as "antique," because it reminds us of the ancient days when life was full of brutal, physical tasks, like winding clocks and banging typewriter keys.
The word "treasure" is also used more freely than a strict dictionary definition would allow. Nothing I saw on my antiquing expedition could, by the farthest stretch of the imagination, be called a treasure, or have been treasured at any time in the past.
Real antiques do exist. Colonial objects are highly desirable and expensive. They are also remarkably common, which raises the delicate question of their authenticity. The entire population of Long Island in colonial times would have fit three times into the Nassau Coliseum (16,000 seats). These few colonists had to work long hours at farming and fishing, just to survive. It's hard to imagine how they found time to make the vast numbers of genuine colonial antiques that fill the boutiques and auction houses of New England more than three hundred years later.
It is of course possible to enjoy antiques without irony, and without caring in the least about their authenticity. They offer such an intriguing window into the past. What must it have been like to have all this junk in your home? Our honored ancestors seem to have had a passion for glass and china objects of incredible ugliness, hideous lamps, uncomfortable chairs, and dreadful oil paintings. People really were made of sterner stuff in those days.
It is also intriguing to wonder about the antique stores of the future. How will our children's children imagine this century, as seen through the tacky leftovers of our busy lives? It’s a sobering thought that, when and if the twenty-second century comes around, the present may look as tasteless in the future as the past looks in the present.
