"At the Pitt Rivers" -- By Penelope Lively

“At the Pitt Rivers” by Penelope Lively is a short story about a boy who realizes that although he thought he knew a lot about love, he really knows very little.  At the beginning of the story, the boy describes how he enjoys wandering around in the Pitt Rivers museum.  He goes there almost every day to work on a poem he has been writing. The poem is about an old man and a young boy who have a conversation about life:

They swap opinions and observations (it’s all dialogue, this poem, like a long conversation) and it’s not till the end you realise they’re the same person.  It sounds either corny or pretentious, I know; and what I could never decide was whether to have it as though the old man’s looking back, or the boy’s kind of projecting forward -- imagining himself, as it were (30).

He is writing the poem as both the young boy and the old man, as though he already had the wisdom of someone much older and wiser.  He realizes that this is pretentious, but he still attempts it.  He thinks he knows a lot, and even says at one point, “I’ve seen films and I’ve read books and I know a bit about things” (25).  One day, however, he sees a woman at the museum.  Because he always notices girls, he observes that, "this girl was definitely not attractive. In the first place she was in fact quite old, not far off thirty, I should think, and in the second she hadn't got a nice figure; her legs were kind of dumpy and she didn't have pretty hair or anything like that"(24-25).  He is dumbfounded when she meets an older man, somewhere in his fifties, and they seem genuinely in love.  He at first is disgusted by the couple, but as he sees them more, (they are together at the museum almost every week), he begins to like the idea of them.  Their relationship goes against everything he thinks he knows about love.  He thinks only attractive people should date each other and that they should be the same age. Even he, a 16 year old boy, with a deluded view of love, can tell that despite their big age difference, they are in love.

One day, the boy is confused because the couple seems detached and sad. They don’t talk; they just look at each other. At one point, she takes out a comb and brushes her hair, most likely because she is stressed. When she drops it, she doesn’t bother to pick it up. In fact, she ignores it. The young boy observes this and is terribly affected by this sudden change of heart. He goes home and tears up the poem he had been working on. Lively does not make it clear why in fact the young boy tears up the poem. She, instead, lets the mind wander. This is intentional.  Her view of fiction’s job is that is should “illuminate” life’s “conflicts and ambiguities.” The boy tears up the poem because he feels conflicted about watching what he had come to think actually was true love, come to an end.  He realizes that just as he couldn’t understand why they were together, he can’t understand why they are apart.  He realizes he knows very little, if anything, about love.  Trying to write his poem, as though he had all the wisdom of the old man, is ridiculous. He realizes that this is a poem that should only be written by an older man or woman who has been through life’s troubles and truly knows how to deal with the ambiguity of love.