July 10, 2007

7/10/07
Cafe in the
Tower of London
3:00 PM

They shut the cafe as I was writing last time, hence the inglorious finish.  Now I'm eating at a touristy place inside the Tower of London--scone and tea.  That seems sufficiently British for me.

I have some qualms with my recounting the trip to Luxembourg while I'm here in England, still on vacation & all (or holiday, depending on how British I want to be).  I thought, originally, that I would keep up with things as I went along, but I'm not doing that at all; rather I'm only trying to preserve the memory of a blissful few days, now two weeks in my past.  Today I think I'll take a break and talk about right now.

Well, right now I'm eating a very awkwardly crumbly scone, and my hair looks terrible I'm sure, because I ran out of the house in a rush and put my hair in a hat, and now I'm eating and it seemed better to take off my hat at the table.  So I feel awkward and kind of like I must be an eyesore, and... whatever.  I'm really disliking how 8th grade self-conscious I am on this trip.  Grr.

Jim & I have been talking a lot.  Or rather, he's been talking a lot & I've been learning a lot about him, and art, and philosophy.  He's very well-read, probably more so than my father or grandfather--both of whom, paradoxically, he seems to still compete with, in his head.  He overthinks everything, which is something I'm prone to do too.  He's gentle, very much so.  He's creative and intelligent and he has well-formed opinions on everything.

It is interesting how quick we can be to form opinions, sometimes based on very little information.  Then we reinforce our quick opinions with whatever can be found to reinforce them.  We do this often in personal relationships, I think, especially when taking offense at something.  If we perceive offense, we don't examine whether we ought to have been offended; instead, we build up the offense and add implications and intent to it until it balloons out of perspective.  It's very odd.

I think it just means--don't let yourself get worked up on impressions and assumptions and perceived offenses or slights.  Slow to anger and all of that; both in the immediate sense and the prolonged sense.

Yesterday I went to the monument of the Great Fire of London.  It's high--a coupe hundred feet, and 311 steps.  I took a lot of pictures & signed my name with Gina's in the wall.  I guess the tower is as tall as...um, something related to the Fire.  I don't remember what.  But it made me remember how frail our lives are.  Everything can burn up in a week or two and your life will take a long time--the city will take a long time--to recover.

But even more than the frailty, I was struck by how huge everything is today.  If the Great Fire happened today, most of contemporary London wouldn't even see it.  Our new buildings and the enormous amounts of people crowded into our cities--we're just bigger, now, than anything before.  Even the monument, which was built to stand out in the city as a gigantic testament to history, is now dwarfed by the apartment buildings and offices around.

Effort is value, or value is effort.  This is why I sometimes think our civilization is worthless and will never be remembered by our eventual descendants.  We build buildings without thinking.  We erect structures like toy forts & tear them down when they're out of fashion.  There will be no pyramids or sphinxes left for future generations, from ours.

At the British Museum with Chris, we were observing how the style of Egyptian tomb art didn't change for nearly 2,000 years.  How is that even possible?  My uncle noted that the engravings may have had a religious form, which kept them all the same over the eons.  I wonder.  We also noticed the Egyptians paid close attention to the characteristics of the face, while the Assyrians let their faces be blank and unstylized in favor of accenting the muscle structures of their figures.  The Greeks, of course, did both--and they liberated their figures from the walls of tombs & let them stand apart to struggle both from in front and behind.  The Greeks were also the first to do anything significant with clothes and drapery.  Overall, it was a really enjoyable overview.  I still wonder what's up with the Egyptians--and whether we have the dates right, in reality...

The whole deal brings back the effort-value equation.  If we made enormous statues today, nobody would care.  We can cast them in concrete after planning them with computers and cutting them with lasers.  No effort--and no value now.  We marvel at arches that were hard to build--not at the arches themselves.

Stonehenge is perhaps the best example.  Nobody even knows what the structure is--but we're baffled by the effort required.  Hence, value.

I should get going & see more of the Tower.

But wait...  I wonder if the Effort thing is why I don't think Modern Art is natural.  It doesn't require effort so much as--well, effort, but not effort in the same way, not effort to paint a certain line or to perfect an expression on a face, but effort to say something new.  Hmm.  Things to ponder.