Natural Laws (1 of 2)(April 5, 2010)

Hello all,
The last two weeks have been busy--hence the delay in sending out this email. Strap yourselves in for a long one, folks.
Picking up from two Mondays ago:
In fact, I can't recall anything remarkable that happened on Monday the 22nd; we had class, continued discussing Middlemarch ( I have to confess that I daydreamed through much of it), and that was about it.
Tuesday saw the weekly Commonplace book reports, followed by the presentations for the Tapestry. The period in question was the World Wars, and being a cinephile, I took advantage of this opportunity to do a presentation on Hitchcock. We were joined in class by Ken Bratt, who is a Classical Studies professor at Calvin; he is to oversee the semester in York next year, and he had just arrived for some preliminary coordination with York St. John.
On Tuesday evening, I hung out with members of my small group, taking an evening just to chill in celebration of the imminent Easter holiday. There were about six of us altogether; we ordered pizza and watched "Wanted", a film based on a graphic novel that chronicle a white-collar worker bee's discovery of purpose and self-determination once he's inducted into a clandestine fraternity of vigilante assassins known as...The Fraternity. Oh, and these trigger-happy punks discern the identities of their next targets by interpreting imperfections in a continuously-weaving bolt of cloth. Mix in some gratuitous violence, frequent profanity, and dialogue that would have meshed nicely with a Saturday morning cartoon, and you get a notion of what "Wanted" is like. I had seen it before.
I was sitting next to Ben, who's kind of the black sheep of the small group. He likes to dress up in striking black costumes and attend rock and metal concerts. Before the film, he was mixing drinking vodka and apple juice; he said he normally doesn't drink so much alone, but he had bought the vodka just for the bottle--a limited-edition monstrosity that came in a metal-studded leather sleeve--that he intended to add as a complement to his goth costume. Ben likes to talk, especially to debate, and somehow he started rambling admiringly about how easy it is to obtain firearms in the United States compared to the procedures in Great Britain. I think he expected me to engage him in political discussion, but I was ill-equipped to do so. I merely lampooned the movie instead.
Wednesday morning brought the second class period on the British empire--the motives of empire, running the gamut from missionary initiatives to the naked greed of conquest and imperialism. This gave rise to some other meditations on empire that I'll cover later in this email. I returned briefly to my flat, took care of a few things, then returned to the campus for a Q & A session with Prof. Bratt. After an hour of that, the entire group boarded a charter bus and we visited Castle Howard, which is half an hour from York.
Castle Howard is not, in fact, a castle--it's a manor house that was constructed in two phases by members of the Howard family, who used to possess the title of Earl of Carlisle. (Incidentally, the Howards trace their lineage to Catherine Howard, ill-fated wife of Henry VIII, and two other noblemen who were executed by that capricious monarch.) As we waited to enter the grounds, all the girls in the group mobbed one of the students whose boyfriend had come to visit her and taken advantage of the situation to propose. As the girls admired the trinket, the five guys in the group--six if you include the visiting fiance--stood off to the side and tried our best to be aloof.
We got admission to the grounds and immediately strolled out into gardens surrounded by walkways, just waiting for spring to go into bloom. A person could easily spend an hour or two just wandering those grounds. There was a large lawn sprawling out in front of the house edged hedges and boasting a large fountain, with a bronze Atlas on one knee, supporting the globe on his shoulder. At the far ends of the lawn, other statues depicting Proserpine's abduction by Pluto (as Cerberus snarls and looks on) and Hercules' wrestling match with Antaeus.
The interior of the house was phenomenal. After mounting a large staircase inside a side wing entrance, one encounters a portrait of the current owner and resident of the house, who inhabits one wing of the house with his wife and twin children (a boy and a girl who have wonderful, original names which I can't remember now), while the rest of his house remains open for tours nine months out of the year. There are portraits, lavishly furnished rooms, and ancient copies of classical sculptures that previous members of the Howard family collected on trips to Europe over the years--all displayed in the hallways that bring the entire estate together. A grand central room sits beneath a dome that collapsed in the mid-1940s following a fire that swept through one of the wings--this space was restored, but much of that wing remains in its damaged state. A suite of three rooms remain as they were dressed for two adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that were both filmed at Castle Howard. As if all this wasn't enough, the house boasts its own chapel, complete with painted walls, mosaic floors, and a pipe organ. In short, it was incredible--definitely one of my favorite destinations of the semester so far.
Following the grandeur of Castle Howard, the entire group bid adieu to Middlemarch in class the next day, and I sat through my final class before break, Grammar and Text. I spent that evening doing laundry and hoping like mad that I could accomodate a week's worth of supplies in a single suitcase.
I awoke Friday, spent the morning finishing packing, and met the Calvin students on campus at 2:00 to walk to the York Rail station. We were quite a spectacle, walking as a mass, loaded down with suitcases, duffel bags, and internal-frame backpacks--I could just imagine pedestrians fleeing before us, crying "To arms! To arms! The Americans are coming!" We boarded our train to King's Cross only to discover that the railway hadn't marked our seats as reserved, so Professor Ward and one of the rail staff had to spend some time evicting disgruntled passengers from seats that were supposed to be reserved for us. Our route to London was direct; I read Henri Charriere's Papillon for most of the ride. When we pulled into King's Cross, some of the Harry Potter fans in the group kept their eyes peeled for Platform 9 3/4.
The hustle and bustle of London was evident right from the start as we took a short walk down the street to the British library. I joined the first of two shifts of students to enter the library in search of intriguing and famous manuscripts as the second shift waited to look after our luggage. Turns out that there's a single gallery that's open to the public, and all other materials require an appointment to view--but we didn't know that. We walked out 20 min. later having seen nothing. From the British library we took the London subway, or "tube" as it's colloquially known, to our hostel. For this we were issued Oyster cards, which are plastic passes that one can use indefinitely to ride the tube, just "topping up" more fare on the cards at automatic machines from time to time.
Our hostel was situated in northwest London, not far from the Abbey Road studio made famous by the Beatles. We checked in and got situated, then I joined some fellow students in going out in pursuit of dinner. We ended up at a nearby Italian restaurant, where I split a calamari, mussel, and prawn pizza with another student--it was a lot more appetizing than it sounds. Five of us dropped in at a pub after the meal to end the day with a pint of ale, then retreated back to the hostel and called it a day.
We began the day on Saturday by arriving as a group at Westminster Abbey, emerging from the tube to find Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament staring down on us immediately. The current structure of Westminster Abbey is the second to occupy the site; the previous abbey housed an order of Benedictine monks and was the site of Harold II's spurious coronation just prior to the Norman conquest. The current structure was begun in 1245 under Henry II, and somehow the Abbey has managed to ride out the waves of religious turbulence that have marked English history like the growth rings of a tree. Its proximity to the royal palaces of London prompted a continuous relationship with royalty, and became the burial site of certain English monarchs. Henry VIII spared Westminster from the dissolution of the monasteries, and Elizabeth I established Westminster as a Royal Peculiar--a religious institution under the leadership of the monarch rather than a diocese. Traditionally it has served as the site of coronations, since William the Conqueror, and burials of prominent English citizens. At the Abbey, I enjoyed an audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons, and saw the resting places of Elizabeth I, "Bloody Mary", Chaucer, Dickens, Darwin, Handel, Pitt, Purcell, Gladstone, Kipling, Tennyson, and Olivier.
From Westminster, we walked through a gentle rain to nearby Green Park and saw the grand structure of Buckingham palace before embarking on a walk through London, stopping at a couple big sites. Passing through intermittent rain, we passed streets with stores ranging from high-end designers to stalls peddling touristy gimmicks. We set aside an hour and a half for the British Museum--I grabbed some Chinese carryout with some other students, then delved into the cavernous museum, chock full of goodies stolen from other countries by the British during the heyday of the empire. Most notable were the famous Elgin Marbles, the vast majority of the pediment sculpture from the Acropolis in Athens. These were "collected" by an Englishman in the early 1800s and shipped to England, and no matter how vehemently the Greeks protest, they haven't managed to get them back yet. I also saw the famous Rosetta Stone, with the parallel Greek, coptic, and hieroglyph text that allowed researchers to decipher Egyptian symbols.
From the British museum, we made our way to Covent Garden, where we poked around the different vendors' stalls for half an hour before walking to Leicester Square and stopping in the National Portrait Gallery, where many famous paitings that end up in textbooks or on dust covers are housed, and then just took a peek at Trafalgar Square from the porch of St. Martin-in-the-Fields before catching the tube back to our hostel. From the hostel, a group of us took a circuitous route to Camden Market--we got some Chinese food from one of several vendors and checked out the square we were in, which appeared to have been converted from a stable complex to merchant's stalls (they were all closed by this point in the day, though). With every other place closed at this point, we stepped into a pub called "The End of the World" and killed some time there before taking an equally circuitous tube route back to the hostel. We later learned that Camden Market is actually within managable walking distance from the pub, but we had just consulted the wrong maps.
I started off Palm Sunday in search of the famous Abbey Road intersection, pictured on the cover of the Beatles' album of the same name. We found it...or at least what we thought was it, and posed for a photograph. Then we caught the tube for a morning service at St. Paul's Cathedral. The service began with a procession from a nearby square, complete with onlookers waving palm branches and a pair of donkeys. A mass of worshipers swarmed up the steps of the cathedral and filled most of the interior of St. Paul's. Myself and my five or so fellow students stayed through about half of the service, leaving just as the clergy were about to administer Eucharist to make it to the train station.
From Victoria Station, the entire Calvin group caught a train to the nearby town of Rochester, where Charles Dickens spent much of his childhood and upon which multiple locations in his fiction are based, notably the village in Great Expectations. We viewed the eclectic collection of the Rochester Guildhall Museum, the highlight of which was a variety of model ships and decorative boxes that had been crafted out of bone, wood, and straw by convicts and prisoners of war confined in the floating prison ships anchored in the nearby river (previously these prisoners would have been transported to the American colonies, but obviously this was no longer feasible after 1781). After the museum, our professor showed us an inn and a house that feature prominently in the novel, as well as the house that was the inspiration for the decrepit mansion inhabited by Miss Havisham. From there, we were officially released on our own for Easter Break--I spent the evening by returning to Camden Market once more to see it in the daytime, then getting a view of London Bridge, the Tower Bridge, and St. Paul's Cathedral in the twilight.
That wraps up the first part of this email, covering the first week that I have to catch up on. I'll bring everyone up to speed on this past week's goings-on in the second half.
Sincerely,
John Morton