Boston Notebook

My wife laughs that my love of gadgets is a remnant of my Communist upbringing, when western toys were objects of veneration. A couple of days ago, I found myself on a Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic indulging precisely that love: using an app, I could see live pictures of our house in rural Poland via the security cameras. I could also check that the alarm is on, heating system off and the new photovoltaic farm is producing more energy than the house is consuming. I suppose that’s the consumerist heaven we fought for in those days, just as much as for freedom and democracy.

Back in Boston, I am reminded why I prefer museums created by the whim of a millionaire to those assembled by committees. The equivalent here of the Frick Collection in New York or Sir John Soane’s in London is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. At a time when you could still do it, she transported most of a Venetian palace to Boston and adapted it to the climate by building a glass roof over the courtyard. The collection is wonderfully idiosyncratic, reflecting her travels and contemporary fads, but that’s the beauty of it. You get to see the objects, a feel for the era when they were assembled, and the personality of the collector. Every face lights up entering the cloister around the courtyard garden — which is how she had planned it. There is a nice Polish touch: a signed photograph from the celebrity pianist and future Polish foreign minister Ignacy Paderewski, the Michael Jackson of the fin de siècle. And all of it on an inheritance of $1.6 million. A million dollars is clearly not what it used to be.

Across the street at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is an extraordinary collection of Georgian furniture and paintings from Boston just before the revolution.