T A B L E_T A L K Does the Windy City have too much testosterone? Discuss this and other aspects of Chicago in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Into the heart of China By Joshua Cohen Two English teachers glimpse the realities of rural life (05/12/98) Road Warrior By Brent Gregston Insider's guide to Brussels (05/11/98) Sex and the salaryman By Dave McCombs Changing fortunes are altering one of Japan Inc.'s most cherished relationships (05/08/98) Road Warrior Dawn MacKeen Airfare roulette (05/07/98) Mondo Weirdo Come back soon An ambiguous encounter in Switzerland (05/06/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives		| | |_______P o s t m a r k:_E n g l a n d __There'll always be a London A wandering wonderer ponders the passions of collectors and cabbies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK John Soane's problem was that he couldn't stop collecting fantastic things and cramming them into his house on Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Soane is long gone, but the house (actually three adjoining houses that he ingeniously remodeled and strung together to accommodate his ever-expanding collection) is now -- as it has been for 160-some years -- the eclectic Sir John Soane's Museum, and it is still chock-full of fascinating, often bizarre stuff. In deference to his wishes, the look of the house and the way the objects are arranged has been left virtually unchanged since Soane gave it to his nation (instead of his disappointing, "flint-hearted" sons) in 1833. Soane was one of the late 18th and early 19th centuries' most prominent, prolific architects -- he designed the Bank of England, among numerous other public and private buildings -- and walking through his rambling home is much like wandering through his quirky, acquisitive brain, or the world's largest Joseph Cornell box, or a multistory wunderkammern. He was one of those splendid and productive wackos who make life worth living for the rest of us by leaving behind something astonishing to remind us that the secret to being interesting is being interested. The compulsion to collect seems almost genetic in the English, and there is no city in the world that houses more collections -- great and small, scholarly and fanciful -- than London. Collecting is a way of pointing, of selecting something, holding it up, mounting it, encasing it, of calling special attention to it with the hope that your interest will be contagious, and that others will see the same importance in the thing that you see. In the case of Sir John Soane's collection, his still very much alive enthusiasm is hard to resist, as is the architectural exuberance with which he transformed his house. Working with narrow hallways and mostly small rooms, Soane employed mirrors (many of them round and convex), skylights, mezzanines, glass, brick floors, curling staircases, alcoves, walls made of giant doors and various other architectural sleights of hand to give the crowded quarters a feeling of spaciousness and grand scale that is entirely illusory. (The only wide-open spaces on view are Canaletto's panoramic portrait of Venice and the marmalade skies in several paintings by England's romantic god of the sable hairbrush, J.M.W. Turner, who was Soane's fishing buddy.) The point of Soane's collection was, so he said, to educate aspiring young architects, but it's really a monument to the state of wonder and a celebration of glorious relics and beautiful fragments, especially, though not exclusively, architectural ones ("Cast from the cornice of the temple of Castor in the Roman Forum, AD6," states the hand-printed label on one plaster confection). The selections, of course, were filtered through his singular sensibility, which was sometimes peculiar, but never dull. Soane's vast cabinet of curiosities, which you enter through a heavy green door (admission is free; you ring a buzzer to be let in, then sign your name in a book while a man in a mold-colored lab coat supervises), is packed with more than 3,000 objects. These include plaster casts, bronzes, gems, jewelry, medals, Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, an 8,000-volume library, silver, clocks, barometers, Peruvian pottery, Chinese ceramics, all manner of sculpture, paintings and drawings (including Hogarth's picaresque eight-canvas series, "The Rake's Progress," and another series, "The Election," drawings by Piranesi and a winning red crayon sketch of a dog done by Rubens), roughly 150 architectural models, the head of a mummy, mummified cats, the sarcophagus of Seti I (which was let in through a hole Soane knocked in the back wall) and a mummified rat. Oh, and the tomb of Mrs. Soane's lap dog is outside in what's known as the Monk's Yard. "Alas, Poor Fanny" reads the inscription. The tidy chaos of Soane's Museum is what makes it so enchanting -- unlike other museums, the collection is not organized according to any perceivable linear or thematic thread. He arranged his exquisite hodgepodge the way he wished, juxtaposing objects for his own aesthetic satisfaction. Great cooks don't bother with recipes. Chronology, style, country of origin and similar concerns were of little interest to Soane as organizing principles. It is a welcome contrast to, say, the British Museum, which bludgeons the visitor with its daunting volume of antiquities. After walking through Soane's great house three times, I'm finally sated. Across the street I sit on a bench in Lincoln's Inn Fields, a large rectangular park, and watch a young man and woman standing in the middle of the sunlit walkway necking while an older woman takes pictures of them. Sitting on the bench next to mine are two men in suits talking on cell phones, though not to each other. A teenage girl walks by wearing a daffodil behind her ear. She's followed by a rakish Great Dane decked out in a red neckerchief. Spring has come early to London this year and either the "Cool Britannia" marketing campaign is jamming my radar or there is indeed a new climate of optimism in the city. And why not? Hyde Park is in blossom, New Labour is on the job, the pub flower boxes are overspilling, the Spice Girls (say what you will, they seem harmless) are coptering off to Highgrove for tea with the young princes, traditional British irony has a new polish on it (Nick Hornby is producing one shining novel after another) and there may be a real peace in Ireland. Credit for every bit of the above, many seem to think, should go to the supernaturally buoyant prime minister, Tony Blair. "The sense of well-being he generates is as undeniable as it is infuriatingly undeniable," grumped the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, one of the few outposts of the Fourth Estate that still supports the Conservative Party. And the Telegraph's former editor, the right-wing and stupendously named Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, concedes, "I am disposed to like him, but I don't quite know what I am liking." N E X T+P A G E | The poor Kray lad