continued from part 7
We emerged breathless and vaguely confused from the subway, blinking in the nip and chill of the open air, to see a breathtaking building looming right above us.
I'd emerged right smack in front of Big Ben.
Squinting into the bleak sky, I silently paid homage once again to the power and glory of man--his dreams, and his strength and ability to incarnate them.
I snapped my photo with Big Ben for a friend as requested, holding up a little stuffed duck which I had brought all the way here just for that purpose--her Christmas gift to me--to verify I hadn't just taken the photo from the internet. I'm not sure what the people around me thought, especially when I hurried away awkwardly after that...some strange duck-worshipping cult or something?
All the buildings, to my inexperienced eye, were so grand and had such an aura of history that we were lost looking for Westminster Abbey; thought a bank was the House of Parliament, and a hotel the Abbey. Yep, we could have been in a slapstick comedy movie as the stereotypical ignorant tourists.
At last, the unmistakable beauty of Westminster emerged in front of us, and in excitement only slightly fazed by the unexpected entry fee of eighteen pounds (well, convert that to SGD and you should see why) entered that ground made hallowed by man.
Again, beauty was in full force, backed with history and everything that man's ability and prestige could do. I humbly embraced the smallering effect I'd come to expect, yet again the reverse feeling tolled in me. Staring at the famous Coronation Chair's weathered wood. Realizing, ironically, that significant as this chair was in itself, it could never compare to the multiple people, the kings, who made it important. Who would place a chair above a king, a man-made chair only important because of the kings who it was associated with? And yet, and yet, it had survived, in an indescribable twist of irony, every one of the kings that had sat on it. A chair that could never beat a live king could effortlessly beat centuries of dead kings. To use a quote from Proverbs, a live dog is better than a dead lion.
To think Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I lay here humanized them, just as my experience of St George's Chapel humanized its 'glorious dead.' I stood thoughtfully on Dicken's smooth lead plaque, with the secret only the two of us shared in the gold letters 7th Februrary. (just let me have my moment of glory, will you?) A bust commemorating Shakespeare. Gerald Manley Hopkins, whom my mom immortalized to me by making us all memorize Pied Beauty, overcome by the loveliness of the poem. (of course, being irreverent and unappreciative kids, we mainly giggled hopelessly at the sound of 'rose moles all in stipple.') William Wordsworth. Handel. David Livingstone and William Wilberforce...Darwin...Mary, Queen of Scots (ah, what romance that name evokes)...Byron...T.S. Eliot...Lewis Carroll...Jane Austen...Lawrence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft...Keats.
All the great hearts, the great minds, the grand names. Poet's Corner was like the hall of fame for any book lover or literature student, and it felt unreal standing there among so many names. Odysseus in the Underworld world would not be a very nice comparison but it did feel a bit like entering another world peopled with the shades of the famous dead, trapped in the strange stagnant existence of memory.
I took away, not photos--of course--but these thoughts and some verses I copied from William Wordsworth's epithet: Blessings be with them--and eternal praises who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares. The poets--who on earth have made us heirs of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays!
That, to me, was what ultimately meant more than having your decomposing body deposited within the famous grounds of Westminster Abbey. The significance that the people you left behind valued your contribution so much, were so helped by and inspired by what you had done in this short time you experienced life.
to be continued in part 9