You get to pass through the gate, cross through the stone courtyard (through vendors selling caramel peanuts and roasted chestnuts and something smelling like funnel cake), and enter between the massive pillars into a veritable world of polished marble. The first room is all black.
The second room, though, which is basically the hub of the museum, is all white, with an impressively high ceiling (or ceiling-like thing; I think there may be another ceiling on top of that) formed in glass triangles, which webs from the top of a gigantic circular room in the center of the larger white room, and extends to the edges of the big white room (let's just go ahead and call it the BWR, ok?). It reminded me vaguely of the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre if they rolled it out and draped it over the museum. Which of course would never happen because the French are incredibly touchy and don't want to change anything or change it back once it has been changed, and plus it's impossible, but that's not the point and I digress.
Anyway, out of the BWR I ambled through the spotlight exhibit, which is called Life and Death and explores living and dying at different times and in different cultures throughout the world. The first think on the way in is this big Easter Island head thing, but what I actually thought was most interesting was the long, long, long display in the center of the room. It was a long piece of netting with clusters of pills sewn into every inch. Along the sides were pictures and stories and small vials of medicines and hypodermic needles and such. The display told the stories--birth to present (which is death for one; the other is 84) of two British citizens, a Tom and a Susie, and included reproductions of every single pill/bit of medicine they took throughout their lives. So every one of Susie's birth control pills was there, and there were her kindergarten shots, and treatment for breast cancer, and her daughter Ruby's birth certificate. Tom has high blood pressure, so there were pills for that. The display was meant to illustrate how much medicine is prescribed to every person nowadays through the course of their lives. Personally, I felt it was brilliant.
After that exhibit, I went to check out the classics collection, which is sort of like an exhibit about exhibiting, if that makes any sense. It's housed in a huge long room, beautifully styled with elaborate crown molding and elegant tan walls and chandeliers and mahogany bookcases floor-to-frescoed-ceiling, all glass-fronted so you can admire the antique leather bound books they house. Books with titles like "Antiquis Roma, Vol XIV" and on like that. There are display cases everywhere, lit up, which hold some of the museum's earliest acquisitions. This doesn't mean the oldest stuff in the museum at all. It means the stuff that has been in the museum the longest. Some of the things are even fakes! Of course, in the 1700s-1800s when the stuff came to the museum, the curators didn't know that or have the scientific advantage of carbon dating, etc.
The exhibits' contents are explained, but they are also explained in context of their acquisition, so you learn why there's so much stuff from India and China, and you learn what the curators thought such-and-such meant and why they thought that, and you learn who collected this from whom, and what all of this meant in the Age of Enlightenment. It was very interesting.
I got lunch right after that in the BWR--a hot ham and cheese sub with nasty lettucey stuff and those weird dried tomato things I don't like. I picked that stuff off and ate the rest sitting cross-legged on the floor by one of the big pillars, though, because I was really hungry and there were no seats left. And plus it meant I got to take off my big heavy backpack for a little bit and rest. I spent some time after that in the shops, not buying anything but enjoying looking around. They have some nice stuff! I'm sort of flummoxed as to what to get for everybody for Christmas/gifts. So I go in lots of shops, and I enjoy it, but I don't usually actually buy anything.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I totally bypassed the Egyptian/African/Asian/South American/American exhibits, as nice as I'm sure they were, and went straight for the Britain/Europe through the Ages section, which encompasses like twenty rooms. It walks you through Britain's history from back when it was still attached to the mainland, to its earliest residents and their lifestyles on to raids and migrations in from different locations (Vikings, Germanic tribes), to the development of farming and through the jewelry and treasures of hundreds of hoards and burial grounds.
Just the information about the hoards is fascinating--cremations, mounds, ship burials, cart burials, tombs, and so on. Death is a great creative art in so many cultures. The exhibit continued to talk about the Romans, the advent of Christianity, the Normans, the Viking raids, the middle ages, the Renaissance, all the kings and queens, Mary and Elizabeth, the nineteenth century and industrialism, the age of inventions.
Which is where it ended. I would have liked to have seen it capped with a WWII display, but I guess maybe it's more of a US thing to have museums charging right on up to the present? I know at the Smithsonian they have the flag they hung at Ground Zero in 2001 and I'm pretty sure they have Michelle's inaugural ballgown, so that's going up to 2009. It's equally possible that I just didn't visit that particular branch of the museum or that there's another museum that houses artifacts from the nineteenth century to the present. Anyway. It was a wonderful display, and I think I learned a lot even though I already had a strong basis in the subject. It's always different to learn about something and to actually learn about it while you're seeing it.
The jewelry and weaponry were very interesting, and so was the Bog Man, although that also grossed me out a little. As the timeline progressed I appreciated the stuff a little less, I think, because I've seen Roman stuff before, and it's great but I still feel like it doesn't belong in Britain, and the jewelry at the end is beautiful, but cameos and coral bracelets just aren't as novel to me as golden torques and leather shields.
I did particularly love the room--two rooms, really--filled entirely with clocks. Grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, and an insanely comprehensive selection of watches, both pocket and wrist. The room positively gleams of polished wood, gold, brass, and glass watch faces. Some of the clocks are very, very intricate indeed. The room was warmly lit, and I felt very Victorian. I also felt that when I stood still that all the clocks were ticking around me like a heartbeat. I think Dedaddy and Daddy would have loved it.
Lastly, I went to the Rosetta Stone, which is really cool but which is also just a big black rock. I enjoyed the (extremely accurate) facsimile nearby more, because it wasn't in a case, it wasn't buried under Asian tourists taking eighty pictures of it apiece (come ON, people), and I could actually touch it and interact with it.
The totem pools were pretty cool, too, and I took some pictures for Daddy.
The store was my last stop, and I did stop and sit a while, just to get the backpack off--it was miserably heavy and made my back and shoulders just ache. They have some nice little souvenirs, but I ultimately just got some very small trinkets.
(this is me right before I left the museum)
I'd already passed the British Library, like I said way up at the top of the post, and so I knew where it was and it took me just a few minutes to get there. But oh. My. Gosh. HOW I loved it. I like the building and courtyard themselves, because they're interesting and because there are big signs everywhere with quotes about reading and knowledge.
And I have no idea how you'd set about checking out a book, even though it's a working (and HUGE) library. It's the archive that is so incredible. Actually, I sat in the room and wrote all about it. This isn't the archive; but it's pretty cool. There's also a museum about modern British inventions in the library, which I did go through. But mostly, it was all about the archives.
THIS is the entrance to the archives. No photos allowed. But do let me tell you about it, straight out of my journal, because I am lazy and don't want to reformat anything.
"The British Library is shockingly amazing. It's like being dipped into an alternate world, a wishing well hiding all the glittery rich dollops of literary amazingness at the bottom and then being shown an old wooden bucket so you can squeak down and actually see it for yourself rather than leaning over the edge straining to glimpse a folio corner or an ornate drop cap. This Gallery is a violet-carpeted paradise. And just to add to its majestic impression, the floor lights are purple and the cabinets are lacquered black. All the glass in the room is lit up so it looks like ice. And the floor-to-ceiling glass displays are etched with a collage of bluish text and illustrations. "Music," says one. "Historical Documents," says another. I am sitting between these two on a padded gray bench listening to a schoolteacher of some sort explain to what looks like a bunch of high school students of college first-years the importance of handwriting and the flexibility and liveliness of the English language. I know everything he's saying already, but I'm enjoying the free lecture.
More than that, though. I just saw pages from the manuscript of Beowulf. And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose illustrations are much brighter and more gorgeous than I'd expected. And i saw pages of sheet music from the 1700s. And pages on which the Beatles took notes. I saw the first manuscript--the one given to Alice Liddell--of Alice's Adventures Underground, and I saw two of LEWIS CARROLL's nine PRIVATE DIARIES, one of which was opened to the page of the real golden afternoon!!! I also saw about fifteen other copies of Alice, including Salvador Dali's, and the printing-blocks of Tenniel's illustrations. There is a map over here of "Longe Isleland" from the 1600s. There are covers gilded, engraved, tooled, painted, inlaid...they are art, and they're being treated like it here. THERE ARE MIRROR-SCRIPT PAGES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF LEONARDO DA VINCI! Audobon's life-size Birds of America is here. Priceless illuminated manuscripts.
Sacred Buddhist and Jainist texts on scrolls; sacred Hindu texts on panels. The re-bound Codex Sinaiticus, as well as the Codex Alexandrinus, and fragments of a papyrus codex in Greek of the gospel of St. John. Sultan Baybar's Qur'an, which is one of the most intricate and beautiful books I have ever seen. The sumptuously colorful Golden Hagadah. A copy of the Gospels well over a thousand years old. The Ramsey Psalter, and the Eadui Psalter. The Arnstein Bible. A stunning Bestiary. The Sherborne Missal! It's lovely--you could spend an eternity on any one page. Victorian naturalist books, and huge painting/writing combinations from old China. The Dering Roll, which is incredible, simply incredible. The exquisitely-calligraphied Macclesfield Alphabet Book. Prints from India, Persia, and Tukey.
Darwin's letters. A letter by Ada Lovelace which sets out in writing for the first time the principles of a computer program. A manuscript by Freud. Documents from British expeditions to Antarctica alongside Henry VIII's prayer roll. SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST FOLIO, among other quartos and copies of Shakespearean plays. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, CHAUCER, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson. Two out of the four existing copies of THE MAGNA CARTA. Handwritten manuscripts of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Lord Jim, the Commonplace Book of John Milton, John Dryden's An Opera. Jane Austen's teenage notebook, opened to a story dedicated to her sister Cassandra called "Catharine, or the Bower," JANE AUSTEN'S WRITING DESK (it's a laptop or desktop affair, very small). Wordsworth's "Poem of Childhood" and CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S JANE EYRE opened to the conclusion where (in excellent handwriting), she has written "Reader, I married him."
I am amazed. I am flat-out flabbergasted. And rather humbled. I keep feeling that if I closed my eyes, I'd be able to hear the murmurs and chuckles and broods and "little weeps" of the writers and illustrators who labored so long over the workds here displayed. They put so much of themselves into these things--it's practically tangible. You can nearly hear Falstaff's wisecracking, hear Alice's plaintive "What's the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" hear the low chants behind the monk laboriously applying ink to parchment in a cold monastery.
I remember feeling a little bit of this when my class at Davidson (I was twelve; it was a summer program) took a field trip to that very fancy library in Charlotte or Raleigh or wherever it was, and we were allowed to see a first-edition copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and marvel at the vast collection of colored spines on the shelves. I wanted to live there, too."
Please forgive me excessive wordiness and vomit of the pen. I may be an English/poly sci double, but in my heart it's all about the books, not the news channel. That's just how it goes.
The gallery closed at five, but the library didn't close until six, so I sat on a bench outside the gallery doors and read Enid Blyton's Book of Brownies (which was delightful and something I will definitely read to my children someday) until they began to kick everyone out.
This little stowaway is one of the touches from home I brought with me to Brighton, and the only one I brought on this trip. I thought she might enjoy being my Flat Stanley character now and then. And really, I think she looks pretty happy chilling here beneath the railing. I never actually checked to see who these guys were, but they looked very literary and imposing as they stared at me that entire last hour.
And I'm sorry, but this is absolutely the cutest possible name for a cafe you see exiting the library, is it not? If it hadn't been closed, I would definitely have gone in and had some hot chocolate.
