Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral

The annual cost of running Westminster Abbey is about 9 million pounds. (I was really hoping it would be over 9,000. Internet memes, anyone? No? No? OK.) That's why you have to pay 15 pounds to walk around and take pictures. It's the same kind of scenario for St. Paul's. Both places are free if you're just going in for a service or to pray, but that means that you can't walk around and take pictures. All this is fine by me. After all, they're primarily houses of worship and they don't charge people to come inside for a service.

So that's why you don't have a billion pictures of these two places from me, and also why my London album on Facebook is much smaller than any of the others. I get a little picture happy inside churches. It was kinda liberating, just walking into these two places and not feeling like I had to document every statue along the way. Which makes me feel like I've been doing this wrong.

So when I go in for services in a cathedral or a church or wherever, I tend to focus on getting to my seat. I don't know if this is because I'm actually excited for the service or if it's because I've adapted the "if I look like I know where I'm going, they'll think I belong:" strategy subconsiously. I motored into Westminster for the evensong service and slide into a chair beside the choir stalls without waiting for the direction of the ushers. I looked around and noticed that the vent beside me was used for the heating of the choir stall and A COLD DRAFT IS THEREFORE NORMAL. There was a sign. Apparently people had asked. I also talked for a second to the lady beside me who didn't speak or understand English particularly well. I knew where she's been and I wished I could help. But, as I always do when presented with paper and books, I chickened out and stopped looking around and read about the service.

The evenson service is particular to the Anglican communion. (I imagine Richard Attenborough reading this in a voiceover vis-a-vis an animal documentary.) It's a bit like a vespers service done every day. There's a gloria, a magnificant, a nunc dimittis (the prayer of Simeon, one of my favorites) and a time of prayer, plus an anthem by the choir. The one in St. Paul's was on a feast day, the one for Mary's parents, St. Joachim and St. Anne, so there was a sermon. You can have no idea how abusively wonderful it was to understand every word in the two services I attended.

I sat through the organ postlude at Westminster, wondering if the visiting choir brought their own organist, and wandered out much more slowly than I wandered in. I balked for a second on my way out the door in the choir screen, amazed to have stumbled on the grave of Sir Isaac Newton. I looked in the floor and saw a memorial to PJ Dirac, and began to study the place around me, finding Ernest Rutherford and JJ Thomson. I love finding these physical memorials to people that I've read so much about. I would have wandered over to the poet's corner but they walked us out of the Abbey. After all, the service was over.

The same kind of thing happened at St. Paul's, being in a church only as a place of worship. I'd walk around the outside of the building with that Feed the Birds song stuck in my head and when I finally went in for the service, I hardly remarked the decor of the place around me. I walked purposefully up to the man handing out the books for the service and found a seat and began studying the order of service and the hymns we would sing. When I finally allowed myself to relax and look around, staring up again and again into the dome and around to see the statues and symbols around me, I almost shrugged it off. It was nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, and anyway, I was here for the service.

Now, I'm a little astounded at that attitude. St. Paul's Cathedral in London is nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before? And I've heard bells and I've listened to services and I've stared at arches and columns and domes and apses and I've visited and I've thought and I've been through this all before. But shouldn't each time I see a place be something new? There's nothing like St. Paul's. There's nothing like Westminster. But there are so many things so similar that it really takes a royal wedding to set the places apart.

So walk inside. Be amazed. Really, look around and be astounded at the things people have built and made. Realize you're paying for the history that's being preserved here and that history is no small thing to preserve. I want the people of our future to see these places as well. But realize, just as there are many famous people who have achieved wonderful things whose nameswe stumble over or confuse or forget, there are many famous places that we will mix up and each will eventually lose their disctinction in the busy filing cabinets of our minds.

And though this fate of the forgotten seems like a horrible fate, I don't think you have to take the worst of ideas from it. After all, isn't it better to have such an abundance of beauty that we confuse where we first saw it than to have an absolute certainty of a memory of the only place that beauty exists?

London

Do you know what the best thing about getting off the train in London was?

English.

Goodness, I love English.

Not the English, in particular, but I love the language with which they carry out their business. You might not know it, but two months spent in countries where everything primarily happened in a language you didn't quite understand wears on a person. All the signs were in English first in London. The announcements were in English. I could talk to anyone I wanted to. Really, the first couple of hours in London were almost joyous, basking in the beauty of my home language. And English isn't even that pretty. But I had missed its primary presence in my life.

I honestly can't tell you much about the places I visited in London or the things I did there. Life was pretty humdrum. I developed a walk down to the Millenium Bridge and over near the Globe and along the Thames for a good bit. I walked down on my first evening to St. Paul's, just to see how far I could go. The next day, I went farther, looking into getting tickets for a show at the Globe. I wandered around London for a bit then, getting over to Westminster and then Buckingham Palace. I loved the gardens around Buckingham, sitting and watching the people and the birds for hours in an unusually pleasant British afternoon.

My favorite things about London were the things I geeked out about (about which I geeked? Grammatically correct sentences are difficult to come by). The Milennium Bridge was in the background of a scene in Love Actually, I walked by 10 Downing Street, I walked by the Old Bailey and down Fleet Street, I looked up Baker Street and Portabello Road, I figured out that you could watch live video of people crossing Abbey Road, I discovered a TARDIS in the British Library and I saw a play at the Globe. Shakespeare's Globe. The noise my enthusiasm makes is "Eeeeeee!!!"

The play at the Globe might actually take the cake as my favorite thing about London. I was hoping they'd have a Shakespearan play that wasn't sold out that Christine and I could go to, but all of the evening shows and most of the afternoon shows were already sold out for about the next week as far as standing room tickets were concerned. The really pleasant man at the ticket office said that they had spots open for the midnight showing of Doctor Faustus on Saturday night. I'm a Marlowe fan as well as a Shakespeare fan, and Christine wasn't opposed to seeing a play about a man who sells his soul to the devil at midnight, so the tickets were cheerily bought and the plans laid.

We walked my usual walk down across the Millenium Bridge and over to the Globe around eleven thirty, still amazed at the way the light had lingered throughout the long summer days. We showed our tickets at the door and found our way into the theater and around the already gathered crowd to a spot by the stage on the side. Sure, we would miss some of the action of the play, but having stood through a few operas in our time, we understood the wonderful luxury of leaning. I took half a dozen bad pictures of the stage and the room and admired the zodiac on the ceiling as people gasped occassionally at the monster that would peek over the upper balcony. We were joined on our side of the stage by two young men of Ireland and we passed the remaining time before the beginning of the play exchanging stories of visitng London and talking over half-remembered summaries of the action of the story we were about to watch unfold.

The play started with loud drumbeats and music and prologue from a sole actor. Then we dove into Faustus' story and I was as fascinated as ever, listening and watching the listing of studies at which Faustus had excelled, internally waiting for the second when Mestophales would show up, because every play becomes exponentially more itneresting when there's a demon around. Show up he did, though inexpertly conjured, and I spent most of the rest of the first act watching closely the exchanges between Faustus and Mestophales, borderline impatient when other actors took up the stage.

Intermission came and, as the Globe has free wifi, Christine went out to look up some information on the play and I sunk down, leaning against the stage and talking about actuarial things with one of the Irishmen as that was his intended career. Funny the things you remember about people you meet momentarily. The conversation ended rather abruptly when Christine came back towards the end of intermission with a revelation, walking quickly over to our guarded spot by the stage, and announcing, "It's Rory."

Ten seconds of backstory on this: David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who (the longest running sci-fi series if you count all its reincarnations, beating out Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, and Stargate SG-1- end nerd aside), went to stage acting and has been in some plays at the Globe. He's also doing Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate, who played Donna, this summer and I think I might actually have died of happiness if I had seen that, a combination of two of my favorite British actors starring in my favorite Shakespearean play. But, pushing all that away, I had wondered if other actors from Doctor Who got into acting on the London stage in the off-season and Christine and I had both thought that Mestophales looked familiar, though we hadn't guessed from where.

So the second half of the play for me was spent geeking out at the fact that Arthur Davrill who plays Rory Williams on Doctor Who was less than a foot away from me at certain points. The real testament to how awesome an event this was is the fact that I ran over to Starbucks the next day to tell as many of my friends as possible what had occured and to enjoy their reactions of text-based exclamations. Beyond the fan-girl moment though, I was rather enthralled by the rest of the play, watching Faustus bother the Pope and kings alike, staring breathless at his final soliloquoy as the last hour of his life chimes away. It's a wonderful play, if I may recommend some English reading for everyone, and the story itself is fascinating to me.

The ideas we discussed in my freshman English class floated around my head as we walked back in the late London night. I almost think I could have stayed in that moment forever, walking slowly back with my head on ideas of grace and decisions and worthiness and my feet on familiar pavingstones. I caught glimpses of stars as we walked again over the bridge and I love that our minds can consider ideas as big as they are, that we can sit back and think on all of these wonderful concepts.

In a way, it was just another way of basking in the wonder of English, of being able to think and express myself in my language again. It's difficult to be percieved as intelligent when you don't speak language. I think of that, of my own bias against people who I'm sure are every bit as reasonable as I am looking ridiculous as they try to express themselves in a language not their own. I loved London, visiting Westminster and St. Paul's for evensong services, listening to sermons and reflections that, for the first time since Florence, I understood.

Beautiful understanding.