London: Day One

Our first full day in London proved to be very eventful. We started things off at the Westminster Abbey, site of the coronations and burials of English monarchs for hundreds of years, as well as being a bit of a national graveyard. There I was able to rub shoulders with Chaucer, Darwin, Handel, and Queen Elizabeth, among others. Or at least, I got to see their graves/tombs. In the south wing of the nave, “poet’s corner” as they call it, we walked above Tennyson (we saw his school yesterday, today his final resting place), Coleridge, Dickens, Eliot, and dozens of others, as well as a variety of memorials to the likes of Shakespeare, Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. On a whole, the church seems a pastiche of British culture: science, the arts, politics, aristocracy, and the cultural mind in general are all assembled beneath the stained glass and gothic detailing. I guess the question is whether this presence is a sort of corrupting infiltration of the church or a wrapping up of a whole society’s life into the sacramental tradition of a physical Church. That is, do the national monuments within the church indicate a less-than-sacred foundation for the building, or do these plaques and engravings catch the stained-glass light and somehow become washed in a rich, illuminating presence?

After the Abbey, we walked past Big Ben and the gorgeous buildings of Parlaiment to see the Cabinet War Rooms and Winston Churchill Museum, which provided an intimate, and therefore more interesting, look at the usually uninteresting (to me, at least) subject of humans killing one another. We headed down Whitehall, grabbing a relatively cheap but tasty sandwich for lunch, to the super-sizedTrafalgar Square--the British seem to have a thing for statues of dignified-looking males atop large pillars. After a whirlwind tour of the last 800 years of painting in the labryinthine wings of the British National Museum, John and I headed for the Blackwell publishing book outlet, being overwhelmed by the possible ways of blowing our food stipend. On the way back through Trafalgar Square, we tried to talk to a local, but somehow he talked at us instead of to us, asking if we had seen a play and mentioning something about getting a few “appropriatements” with which to engage some oppressive water, at which point we left this strange character alone and questioned our own sanity.

On our way to Buckingham Palace, we passed through a crowd of people centered around a rather out of place car parked before a movie theater. A spectator informed us that Prince Charles was about to make an appearance, so we waited around for a bit to catch our first physical glimpse of the British royal family. I snapped a few pictures (along with several hundred other camera flashes) in the silent 20 seconds it took for him to exit the building, wave to the crowd, and be off. Lucky us, stumbling into the path of royalty. Having the taste of monarchy fresh in our mouths, we decided to finish our walk down the mall to Buckingham Palace. St. James Park along the mall was quite inviting, with its fine-trimmed gardens and weeping willows, but the palace itself was a rather bland disappointment, literally grey and gated off from passers-by, except of course through small entryways guarded by heavily-armed police and the postcard-worthy royal guard.

I was pleased to learn last night that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr Rowan Williams, is delivering lectures at the Westminster Abbey for the first three days we are in town, it now being Holy week. Tonight’s lecture was on faith and politics. I don’t feel like summarizing or analyzing what he had to say, but suffice it to say that I was somewhat surprised, pleased, and ultimately encouraged to see someone of such religious and political prominence say the things that tonight he said. His lecture was nothing new or groundbreaking, but a solid overview of things that are near and dear to my own growing understanding of these issues. To hear such views represented in a semi-public, official church setting was, as Jamie later noted, a nice model of public intellectual engagement. Afterwards, we managed to shake the Archbishop’s hand, offer some obviously unnoteworthy expression of gratitude, and be on our way back to Pickwick Place.

Now I’m back in our room, sore again and more tired than yesterday. I guess we’ll see if I’m even still alive after three more weeks of this. Not so bad for our first 24 hours in London, though: Prince Charles, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chaucer. Tomorrow morning is the Bloomsbury literary walk and another full day of playing at tourism. Who knows what could happen?