At the Pitt-Rivers 2.0

     In the story, "At the Pitt-Rivers" by Penelope Lively, the narrator is a sixteen year old who visits a museum almost every week. While he is there, he notices an older woman that he doesn't find especially pretty. He also noticed that she had an expression on her face that simply made her glow. He didn't see what was making her so happy until he came up alongside her and saw an older man, very drab, about 50 or more, who she was looking at. He starts off with a contorted view of love: "All the girls I know, at school or round where I live-are either attractive or they're not. If they're attractive the have a lot of blokes after them and if they're not they don't." He goes to the museum quite often after that, and does a half-writing, half-following routine. He had been writing a poem about an old man and a young boy swapping opinions and observations, and then they find out they're the same person. While he is writing, he notices the old man and the woman break up. For no apparent reason, he tears up his poem and storms out of the museum. There are probably a lot of reasons he tore up the poem.
     In the end of "At the Pitt-Rivers," the boy/narrator shreds up the poem he'd been working on and storms out of the museum in a huff. The poem was about an old man talking with a boy when they find out they're the same person. I think there are many reasons the boy tears up his poem. One of the reasons is possibly because he had a new outlook on love, because of the age difference made him think that not only two good-looking people could be together. "I thought he wouldn't be much because of her not being pretty, I mean, in films you can always tell who's going to fall for who because they'll be the two-good lookers." Another possible reason is that maybe he needed to get past his youthful arrogance of I-know-it-all-about-and-life. "And that time is was shocked. Really shocked. I don't mind telling you that I thought it was disgusting." Or maybe he realized that love and life aren't all hard fast rules. "I suppose you could say I'd learned something else in the Pitt-Rivers by accident. Lively left some ambiguities in "At the Pitt-Rivers and does what she wants fiction to do.