London

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For some reason I feel a little strange writing something without posting it right away. It is not really that the actual writing is any different, but posting it feels odd because it isn’t really current anymore. It almost feels kind of dishonest, like a baker selling yesterday’s bread. That is, however, what I am pushed to due to the lack of good internet access in London of all places. Well… I could have as much internet as I want at the hotel (which, after hostel hopping, has been glorious) for 15 pounds a day. So I remain wifi less. At any rate, London has been an interesting change from Ireland and the continent. The first thing I noticed when I arrived after a frustrating flight with Ryanair, your leading low cost airline, is the abundance of green and public space and relative lack of density. After meeting my Dad and sister at the hotel room (whose jet-lagged forms were splayed across the bedspreads), we set off through Regent’s Park for dinner. Looking at the map, the park looked pretty big, but walking through it proved a bit of a hike. I think the place kind of fills the gap between the idea of a neighborhood park and a national park. It was apparently supposed to be made into someone’s estate, but it never happened and was made into a park with expansive fields, exquisitely planned and executed gardens, and even some kind of summertime theater. We have spent most of our time in London sight seeing. We have, I believe, ticked of a number of the big things to see here, from Big Ben and the houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the London Eye, the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, and a few others. We saw the Queen’s collection of valuables adjacent to Buckingham Palace. Something about that place in particular really brought out the Marxist in me, as I think it might in anyone. It probably did not help that I was reading a book about poverty at the time, but I could see nothing but tasteless and expensive trinkets assembled by unimaginative royalty who could think of no other way to legitimize their rule and existence. All this finery accumulated whilst even Dickens and Marx stuggled to find strong enough language to describe the poverty in which the masses toiled, whilst the British empire laid the foundations for poverty and violence across the globe that they might plunder each and every colony of its wealth, dignity, and even art, which I happened to see at the British Museum. If King George were before me then, I probably would have run him through his blue blooded heart with one of his jewel encrusted swords. But, I suppose that was just the way things worked then. A system, just like many others that have come and gone. I always knew it, but today at the British Museum I could really feel that even ideas and institutions that today seem so immutable, so fixed and inevitable, like the written word, science, the nation state- are washed away in the current of time like anything else. To think that the entirety of today’s world will one day be reduced to nothing more than abstractions and bits of this and that in a museum is strangely comforting. The prevailing attitude seems to be that we as are today somehow the pinnacle of human accomplishment. It is a very childish and, alas, very human kind of point of view. Well, there’s my rant on the British. There is, however, no doubt that the British Museum is one of the world’s finest. Particularly interesting to me was a piece of about the size of a comb that caught my eye in the Chinese section. One would probably overlook the little piece, since there are overwhelming thousands of artifacts throughout the museum, but I had a little background to the story of the bone. It is called an oracle bone named for its original divinatory purpose inscribed with a number of characters. This bone was used, perhaps by a Shang king or an acolyte, to determine the will of various divinities and see the future. What is special about this bone is that it and others like it are the only written record of the earliest known Chinese dynasty the Shang, who peaked a full two thousand years before the birth of Christ. Four thousand years later and we still trying to see into the future with inanimate objects: so much for progress. I guess I just realized that each of the thousands of pieces in the museum probably has a story just as incredible, and such vast expanses of time and stories, not to mention the physical amounts of marble and stone, made me feel small, but not insignificant, since it would seem that everything is passing.

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