Watching TV while still recuperating from a cold, we find a Time Team program about Westminster Abbey.
These two lines of thought come together beautifully here:
"...many years ago, on my first visit to London, I was wandering through that charming old junkshop they call Westminster Abbey and abruptly, without warning, came upon the grave of Isaac Newton. The memory of that can still send a tingle up my spine."
-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT pp. 182-183.
The concluding paragraph of "The Discovery of the Past" lists the ways in which we can mentally visit the past:
history;
contemporary writings;
modern scholarship;
archaeological and historical fiction;
fantasy;
sf time travel.
Then, at the bottom of p. 206:
"We can return pleased, refreshed, better able to understand our own age and even, it may be, the future."
-op. cit., p. 206.
The following page begins with the Title, "Flight to Forever."
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Like Anderson, I too have visited the former Westminster Abbey. Alas, I did not have a similarly positive reaction. It was crowded with far too many strictly secular monuments to prominent British statesmen, politicians, generals, admirals, etc. They looked so out of place in a CHURCH. (Of course a nation should commemorate distinguished persons, but I thought the location jarring.)
Also, as a Catholic, I noticed signs here and there in the Abbey of how it had once been a Catholic church (such as niches where images of the saints were once placed).
I have wondered if Anderson had ever visited the nearby, and relatively new, Catholic Westminster Cathedral (near Victoria Underground). I thought it far more a house of prayer and reflection. And, of course, we both know of how much Anderson admired York Minster!
Btw, you might have liked the two bookstores just outside Westminster Cathedral (if they are still there, at the present time.
Sean
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