Monday – Library of Congress and Memorials

This morning I caught the bus that is almost right outside my door to its terminus – L’Enfant Plaza where a lot of buses terminate. I knew the bus to the airport went from there but I wanted to make sure I knew where in this biggish place with lots of bus stops I needed to go on Thursday morning. The bus to the airport leaves from exactly the stop that I got off at. A good omen for the day.

I walked to the Library of Congress. It is a lovely building, built in the late 1800’s in the Italian Renaisance style. It was built to echo the capitol with 2 wings either side of a central dome. The domed ceiling of the central bit has stained glass windows in the top. It was attractive without being too fiddly.

One of the exhibition rooms was about ‘exploring the Early America’., in 3 parts - Pre contact, exploration and encounters , and Aftermath of encounters. Apparently writing developed independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley and Mesoamerica. There were some very intricate Mayan pictorial pages from Mexico from before the Spanish got there. There was a copy of the 1492 first printed grammar of Spanish which gave the missionaries a structure to apply to learning the local languages. There was a dictionary of 1586 spanish – Quechuan. Before that the Inca’s had no written language. The missionaries did lots of linguistic good, but they also destroyed many of the local texts believing they were the work of the devil. Then , in the exhibition, there were books of flora and fauna written and drawn by the early explorers. There was an interesting map of the world drawn by Waldseemuller. He was the first to call America America. It was made up of 12 sheets ,4 by 3 landscape, and done in the style , I’ve forgotten the name, that looks like a globe - sort of distorted on the sides.

I went into another exhibition all about the Armenian literary tradition. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, is the Unesco World Book Capital for 2012. In 4th century AD, the king was converted to Christianity ,100 years later, the only Christian literary works were in Syriac or Greek, so a smart monk was ordered to create an alphabet , which he did. 36 letters., so other languages could get translated and their own Armenian language and identity could survive. As an aside, I think in Australia now it is culturally correct to use the terms BCE ( before common/Christian era) and CE rather than BC and AD., used in this library recently. There were some examples of some of the early Armenian literature , all done by monks by hand. In 1375 the Egyptians captured Armenia and the Armenians fled to many countries. The first Armenian printing press was founded by an Armenian in Venice in 1512. In 1717 a young Armenian monk founded a monastery on the island on San Lazzaro in Venice and that became for a long time a centre of Armenian scholarship. There was a book in the exhibition with writing and illustrations on what to do in case of a fire. There was a painting of Lord Byron visiting the island to stay for a while and learn Armenian.

Also in the library was one of the 3 copies of the Gutenburg Bible, printed in 1455. I saw one other in the British Library in London in 2009. There was a Giant Bible of Mainz. A monk started it in April 1452 and finished 15 months later.

For lunch I went back to the American Native Museum and had some fried bread with cheese in the middle , snapping turtle soup and a wild rice and watercress salad.

I continued walking down the mall, past the Washington monument,,a plain tall obelisk like thing surrounded by 50 ( states) US flags, to the Korean war memorial. This is quite moving. Life size statues of soldiers on a patrol all looking around in different directions. One of them always appears to be looking at you. They had rain capes on and it was drizzling when I was there. Then the Lincoln memorial – a big Greek temple like building with a statue of a seated Lincoln inside. It was the thing to have your photo taken in front of it and I got annoyed that I could not take a photo of it without anybody in it. The Vietnam Memorial was a black polished wall with the names of all the Americans who died. It was plain and simple and moving.

I then walked back through different streets. I stopped at part of the American Art Museum which had craft items as part of it. There was a large cylindrical cupboard of wood with lots of inlays , drawers inside drawers, little cupboards inside it, lots more complicated than anything I’ve seen at Bungendore Woodworks, some beautiful glass work, woodwork, baskets, 2 quilts.