Japandamonium!!!

These are posts I wrote during the day while working on my Chaucer paper. Still.

1:54 PM

We got out a bit late, but not too badly today. Senate House is closed for the Easter Holiday so we’ve been forced to relocate our studies. That’s the name of the UCL library which we normally study at, and incidentally, the building which George Orwell modeled his structures on for 1984, while he wrote the book inside of it. We study in the home of Big Brother, and yes, there are CCTVs everywhere. I feel like they should call them Orwelloviews or something ironic, but they don’t – and they say we don’t understand irony. P’shaw.

So anyway, we’ve had to relocate our studies – and right now I am in the King’s Reading Room of the British Museum, and I feel like a God. The room is a gigantic dome with inside curves of blue and white and gold, huge vaulted windows and a glass disk at the pinnacle. It’s 200 feet high if it’s an inch, and filled with light and space and history. Apparently most of Karl Marx’s important work was written in here, as well as many others’. Place is completely amazing. The desks are padded with blue leather, and equipped with pull-out shelves and book rests, and they’re large enough to actually let you do work. And all around us are books! Thousands upon thousands of books in three tiers, encircling us with the knowledge of an age. The structure was built and donated by George IV (I think it was the IV), and suits a King’s pleasures. And now, surrounded by inspiration and wisdom, I go to write.

9:33 PM

I’m back in the British Museum after going out for dinner and a movie with John and Aikido Mike. This time I’m in the Great Court, which stays open till 11 even though everything else has closed down. The Great Court is, visually, what Rome would have looked like if they had added some steel, glass, and electricity to their architecture. It is an enormous expanse of marble with great pillared doors on each of the four walls, and the Reading Room is in the center, a massive irregular hub made of more marble. An opaque glass ceiling covers everything, a thousand triangular sections of aqua and steel. In each far flung corner sits some large piece of ancient statuary, a Colossal Marble Lion from the Assyrian Empire, a jet black obelisk with Egyptian hieroglyphics down each side, a figure of Tiberius on horseback. It’s amazing in here. You’re at once relaxed by the clean polished stone, cool air and calm lighting, and still totally awed by the scale and weight of the space around you.

It overjoyed me to spot a mouse scurry out of a walkway vent and sneak around under one of the open tables before disappearing with a newly won scrap of bread. If I’m blown away by the size of this place, something as small as that mouse must be positively flummoxed. How does he cope with it? Maybe he just hasn’t seen the Colossal Lion yet.

10:12 PM

Ooh, another one! God, it’s smaller than a tooth from one of the granite Egyptian Pharaoh heads. I couldn’t manage living like that. Still, it’s very clean here, and there are no cats. In fact, I’m sure the Museum staff have no idea that they have mice in here. Well I’m not gonna tell them.