When I was a young lad in Texas, second grade, my fellow kiddies and I hopped a school bus one rainy day and rode through gloomy Dallas streets for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. It was no less gloomy inside as our little group wandered dim-lit pre-war halls picking noses and loosening wedgies, our galoshes squishing past dioramas that imprisoned, beautifully, sadly, both nature and history.

The spot-lit fake deserts and fake woodlands and painted streams somehow conveyed a ghostly, spiritual quality – an ancient way tied to moon or sun or fire – that our patterned Dallas suburbs didn’t. But as melancholy a chord as the dioramas struck inside me, I daydreamed about passing through the glass and becoming a part of the primitive scenes – of bristly boar on the hunt in mesquite brush; wingspread hawks frozen mid-flight above desert mice they’d never rip apart with their beaks; squatting Plains Indians calmly attending daily chores as if they didn’t realize how barren life was without TV or baseball.

That was the first time I’d ever seen a diorama, and the last time I’d see one for twenty years, until I moved to New York (adulthood; sort of) and quickly sought one of the great benefits the City: the much vaster American Museum of Natural History. Nothing against the smaller Texas version; its dioramas cast pretty much the same spell over my boyhood brain as the AMNH’s zebras and gazelles and Neanderthals still do over my slouching middle-aged one. Meaning, there’s some DNA-deep part of me that still feels an original way of life that didn’t ride the 2 or 3 train during rush hour. Would that I, too, sometimes, could chew on leaves and beat my chest, or care lovingly for an ox as my tribe fattened it for slaughter.

These incandescent-lit, backdrop-painted, taxidermied hyper-fabrications harbor a strange truth: the power of the artificial to move us deeply; of the fake, the contrived, the manufactured to make us feel something below our skin that’s as genuine as fire and air and whatever.

When I looked at those dioramas as a kid, when I look into them now, I can’t help but catch whiffs of visceral emotions; a tang of bile from the panicked stag trapped by a baying pack of coyotes; a smell of sweat and merde from the crouched Neanderthal surrounded by hyenas; a homicidal adrenalin in the bull moose pissed off at another bull moose just because; and of course, the poor Indians without any TV…  C’est moi, all of them.

And this is, of course, art. These dioramas achieve perfect narrative – which is life captured within a frame that allows it to be comprehensible, or at least compelling. The balance of fabricated material and true spirit they realize is exactly the purpose that inspired every artist from cave men to Homer to Austen to Van Gogh and Cartier-Bresson: using the fake to capture the real, the artificial to kindle the genuine in man.

And hence, I think, the faint gloomy feeling I got as a kid walking through the dark hallways of the Dallas museum, and still get gazing into the AMNH’s gorgeous dioramas. The artistic theme, as I see it, of all diorams?  Sorry to say, but it’s mortality.  Theirs, ours, whoever’s.  The inhabitants of the dioramas once fought the hours of a day just like us, and here they are now – the stag, the boar, the cave man, the wingspread vulture, all trapped behind glass, taxidermied, frozen in their routine, very much not alive.

But before the ghost of Sartre rises to doff his beret with a sad face and his own slouching posture, I’ll temper my existentialism with a souçon of good news.  Because we can melt through the glass and smell our animal nature, our cave nature, in these fabulously created scenes from the everyday lives of creatures and peoples we’re not, we get to experience a much larger context for our own life – however trapped or wild and tied to rush hours it may seem.  They’re all us; all those lives once traced a common thread that runs through the natural history of the world.  Eating, fighting, screaming, dying, chores.  And 250 years from now, when a group of kids gazes through glass into a tiny room tricked up like a 21st century NYC apartment (bike hung from the ceiling, dining table for a computer desk, TV tray with Pakistani takeout), maybe they’ll look at the reclining middle-aged man who looks like me and feel a mysterious kinship, wonder how on earth he ever lived that way, and give someone a wedgie.