The Monumental

A couple of days ago, MathWhiz (who's visiting) and I wandered past the British Museum late at night: the gates still stood open so we wandered in and were invited to wander further since the Great Court apparently stays open all night. I can't even begin to describe what it's like to walk into the Museum courtyard at night when there aren't crowds of people all around.... and then to walk around the cool marble floors on the Great Court and look up at the reading room... again, all in silence, with no chattering masses around you, no din from zillions of school-kids on tours and parents bringing with reluctant children attached to their feet. It is something else to see this place when it is not in its normal state of chaos.

I've always had a special spot for the Reading Room here: given its storied history of Marx and Lenin, Gandhi and Kipling, it's hard not to feel that it is space steeped in the history of the 20th century. But the British Museum itself is one of those institutions that I can only ever be ambivalent about; like the Victoria & Albert -- perhaps even more so -- it can only ever have been a product of an empire and that it was so manifestly the product of an empire that I have a familial connection to makes it so much harder to single-mindedly appreciate. It is without doubt one of the world's great institutions, it has a collection without peer and yet it is somehow -- in my mind, anyway -- horribly flawed by its (metaphorical) foundations. And seeing it in this light -- cold, silent, empty -- where its sheer monumentality can't possibly be missed.