Days 79-83

Day 79: Normal Art History and Shakespeare day today. After class, I had dinner, then hopped on the Tube to Westminster Cathedral, where I'd bought a ticket to hear the War Requiem. The War Requiem, for those unfamiliar, was composed by Benjamin Britten, and consists of the Latin Requiem Mass being sung by a chorus, a boy's choir, and a soprano soloist, interspersed with a baritone and a tenor singing some of Wilfred Owen's poetry. The groups all sing separately until the last movement, the Libera Me, where all come together in a crescendo of sound.

I was the youngest person in the audience; everyone surrounding me was elderly and I got some strange looks. But then I've realized that people seem to find me strange for doing things on my own; wherever I go and buy a ticket for something or present a ticket to get in, they always ask "Just you?" with a peculiar expression, as though I'll slap my head and go "Oh, damn, I forgot my husband at home."

Anyway, the War Requiem was heartbreakingly beautiful (here's a link to the text, if you're interested: War Requiem Text). The tenor wasn't Peter Pears, but he was more than good enough. The Libera Me is the last movement, and for my money the most effective. The chorus comes in, begging God to liberate them on the judgment day, the drums rumbling in the background and growing louder and louder, the overall effect like that of thousands of men crowded in a trench, their hearts hammering, their voices muffled by the earth. The pleading reaches a crescendo, the noise such that it's almost unbearable, before cutting out entirely as a whistle blows, like an officer sending regiments over the top.

Then, to the quiet, doleful sounds of the chamber orchestra, the tenor comes in, singing the first half of Owen's Strange Meeting, a poem about the inevitability of war, and the commonality between all men that is lost by those wars. The baritone sings the last half, before the two combine as one to sing, "Let us sleep now," over and over, while the boy's choir comes in, followed by the soprano, than the full chorus, the funeral mass overlapping with the soloist's pleas for rest, the noise getting louder and louder and louder, before a bell rings out and echoes in the sudden silence.

Once. Twice. Three times. And all goes still. I'd never heard an audience reduced to complete silence for a solid minute and a half before, and I'm not sure I ever will again. I got up after the applause and left the Cathedral. Outside it was pitch-black and so cold my breath fogged, and fighting back tears I walked to the station in the rain.

Day 80: We had our normal British Politics and Literature class today, where we've moved on from Riddley Walker to the play A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More's fall from grace and execution during the reign of Henry VIII. For the person asking about the final opinion on Riddley Walker: a lot of the class disliked it immensely, but I feel like that was more a product of how we were analyzing it than any fault of the book itself. The class consisted of us sitting there listening to Dr. King lecture, and for most of us, learning through pure lecturing isn't that stimulating. I really liked the book, though, and not just because I love post-apocalyptic settings in general; the regressed English was unique and interesting to puzzle through, and Hoban stuffed incredible layers of meaning into the book. Everything can be analyzed six different ways, innocuous things end up having great meaning when looked at the right way, and the characters are interesting. About the only complaint I have is that the ending is weak, but that's a common issue with the book, according to Dr. King.

Day 81: I got up late and spent the afternoon bumming around the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately I entered near the Geology section, which meant I had to learn all about plate tectonics and how rocks are made before I got to my area of interest, which is biology. But on the bright side they had a very extensive exhibit of precious stones I got to check out, some of which are very rare, such as alexandrite, a mineral that changes between red and green depending on the quality of the light hitting it. I also unfortunately got stuck in between two school groups, which is always tremendously exciting. There was one exhibit about the span of history on Earth that was quite interesting. If you put your arms out to either side and look at that length as representing the history of Earth, life on this planet has existed for no more than your fingernail. A few swipes with a nail file will obliterate all of human history.

The biology section was a bit disappointing, mostly because it consists of lots of taxidermied animals. There are some interesting specimens, though, such as a Tasmanian Tiger, and a Passenger Pigeon. But all of my disappointment was obliterated when I emerged into the main hall and saw the Museum's pride and joy: a cast of a complete skeleton of Diplodocus, a massive dinosaur fifty feet from head to tail. The dinosaur section more than made up for whatever problems I had: Brontosaurus loomed by the main entrance, Deinosuchus (or 'terrible claw') hung over the catwalk, and a cluster of Iguanodon skeletons gazed blindly in all directions, 65 million years old and miraculously intact.

Then I started hearing children screaming in horror. The reason for this phenomenon was the animatronic T. Rex they had at, which roars convincingly and responds to the flash of cameras by swinging around to glare and roar. I found it absolutely amazing, but the children around me looked like they were about to keel over in terror. One day they'll grow up and realize how amazing dinosaurs are, even if the animatronic ones are terrifying.

Day 82: I finished my analysis of a five-page section of Riddley Walker today, which took far more time than it sounds like it would, Russell Hoban being fond of cramming as many multi-layered puns into every paragraph as is humanly possible. All in all, a terribly boring and productive day.

Day 83: Today I got up at 10:30, ate breakfast, got dressed, and took the Tube out to the O2 Arena where an exhibition of artifacts from the sunken RMS Titanic was being shown. I hadn't realized that the O2 was more like a mall than just an arena; there's food shops all the way around it, a movie theater, and people with little kiosks selling cheap kitsch like 3D portraits of yourself in Lucite and so on and so forth. Luckily one of the O2 security guards was able to direct me towards the exhibition.

Be forewarned: there's no pictures, because it cost fifteen pounds to get in and I didn't fancy being thrown out for photography. When you enter the exhibit, they give you a fake boarding pass for the Titanic with the name of a passenger on board, so that when you reach the memorial wall at the end you can check to see if your passenger survived. I got a ticket for a woman traveling in First Class (a one-way crossing in First Class cost the equivalent of $64,000 dollars today), and was a bit disappointed, since her gender and class made her survival a foregone conclusion. The only First Class woman I know of that died was Ida Strauss, wife of the man who owned Macy's, who refused to abandon him on the ship and so died beside her husband.

They did have some interesting artifacts: a pair of pince nez spectacles, several bottles of perfumer's samples that still smelled strongly, incredible amounts of china, a boot, the ship's bell. The design of the exhibit was awful, though; they played this tinny music over the loudspeakers through the entire thing, and it is my firm belief that whoever made that decision should be shot. I was also unlucky enough to be in a group with a lot of young children, who either got bored and cried through the entire thing or ran around like ninnies. I suppose that's the price one pays for going on a Sunday afternoon.

They did have mock-ups of the bedrooms on board, from a First Class stateroom to a Third Class room housing four people in bunk beds (it looked like a hostel). The First Class one wasn't that opulent to modern eyes, looking like any decent hotel room in today's world, certainly not worth paying 64 grand for. The strangest bit of the exhibit was how quickly they passed over the sinking; that section consisted of one room with a few screens playing a CGI render of the Titanic sinking. They did have one very cool thing in that room: a giant freshwater iceberg. The Atlantic is saltwater (duh) and thus has a lower freezing point than freshwater, so the liquid water that the survivors landed in was colder than that iceberg. Most of the people on Titanic that escaped the Third Class sections but still died didn't drown, but died of hypothermia.

There weren't many personal accounts of survivors, which disappointed me. A few stories were quite poignant: the five people in charge of the mail (the RMS in RMS Titanic designated it a Royal Mail Service ship) dragging bags of mail out of cargo and dying at their posts; the captain, Edward Smith, crying "Be British, boys!" as the bridge flooded; the last sighting of the designer of the ship, who had only boarded because the person who was supposed to be there dropped out, being him standing alone in the First Class Smoking Room, staring at a painting of Plymouth Harbor, his life belt not even on.

And then you exit into a gift shop, full of tatty little knick-knacks like a reproduction Third Class bunk blanket, or a bit of coal from the Titanic's steam room, or your picture in front of an imitation Grand Staircase. I didn't buy anything, being starving, and went and broke my embargo on British beef by having a burger. It would probably have been a middling burger were I in the U.S., but I had been so long without one that it tasted like Kobe beef. Yum. Then I took the Tube back to the flat, where I've been ever since, working on my final paper for Shakespeare. Tomorrow I will go and coop myself up in Senate House Library again, and I'm sure my excitement is just palpable.