This morning, as I look out the second story window
of the little Ruskin Hotel onto Montague Street below, most people are sauntering easily in groups of two or three, going in
either direction along the sunny sidewalk in front of the high, spear-pointed
iron gratings of the fence surrounding the British Museum. This ambulatory pattern is quitge unlike
yesterday or the day before, both workdays, when people passed quickly and with a
determined gait, usually walking alone in the direction of a bus stop for downtown London.
The stay in London has been marvelous; it could hardly have been
better. The weather was warm but not
hot, the sun shone almost every day, all day long. Though I was inside the Museum most of the time, the
sun shining through tinted glass into the covered courtyard was marvelous. The
B&B I stayed in was minimal (shared bathroom & shower rooms in the
hallway), but cheap, and right around the corner from the museum. I was lucky to be here Thursday, Friday and
Saturday, because the museum stays open late (8:30 pm) on Thursdays and Fridays,
so there was time to see essentially everything I really wanted to see, and I heard several enlightening mini-lectures. It all required
nearly the three full days I had allotted for my stay in London.
What did I see and learn at the British Museum that
I could not have experienced on my own, reading a book or watching a
documentary video? I think the
difference is in actually being there, being in the presence of the artifacts
rather than simply seeing images of them.
It’s true that they’re not in their original provenance, and that’s a
bit off-putting at times. But somehow their mere presence makes me want to think back on the history, to understand those times better, to
imagine the artisans, and, all-in-all, to savor the present reality of the past.
I have to say, though, that the Rosetta
stone was not the thrill I’d hoped it might be. After all, it was the key to
deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs that brought to life the ancient civilization
of Egypt, so long preserved in impenetrable mystery by dry desert. And it is a
sacred symbol to all who love languages and translation. But the actual, original artifact, the thing itself, was surrounded
by thick plates of Plexiglas. Around that swarmed a mob of tourists, jockying and jostling for a camera shot that first day. After their photos, they
squeezed through the crowd to photograph other famous artifacts. On the second
day, however, I went to see it again in the evening, just as I was ready to leave, and
only one other woman was there. We both had a full view of it, and I took a couple
of photos.
I had already seen a replica
of the Rosetta stone in the Cairo Museum when I visited Egypt a few years ago, and there was also a replica in the British Museum's
Enlightenment Hall. I knew something of its history – how it
was discovered by French workmen, how Napoleon had ordered it transported back
to France. But then the British defeated Napoleon’s navy (off Alexandria) and appropriated it, along with most of the other French loot. Then how Thomas Young, the British physicist
(the wave theory of light), and Champollion (the brilliant French linguist)
both contributed to deciphering the hieroglyphs by using both Greek and Coptic
scripts that were fortunately preserved along with the hieroglyphs. But none of that drama, the intensity of
those driven men – warriors, scientists, linguists – emanated from that solid,
jagged block of black rock set on an angle on an artificial, gold-hued plinth, surrounded
by thick Plexiglas reflecting the glaring lights bathing it, mobbed by curiosity seekers flitting
from one tourist token to another in that long hall, in which salvaged and
stolen artifacts from ancient sites sit or stand placidly next to small plaques engraved
with labels and summaries that do little justice to the lives, passions and
skills that were spent creating them.
The last full day (yesterday), I rode one of
those double-decker tour busses, open in back on the top deck, and spent two and a half
hours touring the city, during which time I saw all (and photographed most) of the
“sights of London:” Trafalgar Square
(where a noisy St. George’s Day concert was blaring over loudspeakers to the
crowd jamming the square), Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, Westminster
Cathedral, Covent Gardens (sort of), three bridges over the Thames (including
the Tower Bridge), the London Tower itself (built by William the Conqueror?!),
the Houses of Parliament (House of Commons and House of Lords) and… What did I
miss? I don’t know.
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