from Pepperdine University

I just happened to be driving by the Pepperdine University campus and decided I’d have a look. They were really nice about letting me in. And now I find a bunch of free internet terminals in a snack bar and can’t resist. Heck of an ocean view from Pepperdine, right on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

This afternoon I was at the Getty Villa in Malibu. I actually went there back in December 1994 on my only other visit to L.A., taken there by some Chicago friends who had moved out here. But alarmingly enough, I discovered today that I had almost no memory whatsoever of that visit. It was almost as if I were there for the very first time.

In first grade, age 6 or 7, I asked my teacher Mrs. Harrison: “Who is the richest person in the world?” She told me it was J. Paul Getty (correctly, it turned out; it was the first thing I verified when my father returned from a trip some months later and gave his three sons a Guinness Book of World Records as a return gift). I reported this fact about Getty to my brother a year younger, who was as impressed as I was, and for several years thereafter J. Paul Getty became a quasi-mythical figure of our discourse, as in: “How many of these bicycles could J. Paul Getty buy?”, followed by rough calculations or estimates. Adults were often amazed at how we would toss Getty’s name casually into conversations in that way. He became a running reference of our childhood.

And here I was again, at his villa-turned-museum. On one level there’s an embarrassing touch of Getty viewing himself as a wealthy Roman Senator, but on another level he actually delivers on that seemingly affected promise: it’s an incredible collection of ancient artworks, and the bookstore (whether pretentiously or not) sells a lot of stuff that I really wanted to and in some cases did actually buy, such as Xenophon and Juvenal, as well as all the tragedians in Loeb dual language editions. Gotta love a museum that does that.

But the highlight for me, the part that really made me gasp for air for several mintues, was the collection of ancient glass. I would have noticed this in 1994 for sure, but can’t remember having seen it. Did you realize that glass could remain in such excellent condition for so long? Not just Greco-Roman glass, but beautiful, colorful Mesopotamian glass from around 2500 B.C. was included in the collection.