...The world is quiet here

[rymenhild]

Duke Humfrey's Library, a huge cavernous ancient room in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is quiet today. It's a normal kind of quiet, full of the soft sounds of parchment pages gently turned and of film clicking in the microfilm readers. Every so often the librarians test the alarm system, as they've been doing once every few hours since yesterday morning.

That's why I had to leave just now. There was too much ordinary silence. I had to get out and hear the noises of the street. I had to read what people were saying today, this hour, this minute, instead of staring at a 1983 microfilm of an early fourteenth-century document.

Really, things are normal in Oxford. Students and tourists wander the streets as usual. The people staring at the computer screens here in the cafe look grim and wan or red-eyed, but that's the only real sign that something's wrong.

The radio in the Internet cafe just played a remix of a Mediaeval Baebes song that always seemed strange and wistful to me. It felt rather appropriate.

I have wist, sin i couthe meen,
That children hath by candle light
The shadewe catchen they ne might,
For no lines that they couthe lay.
This shadewe i may likne aright
To this world and yesterday.

Comments

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

Thanks for catching the moment.

[silveraspen]

Thoughts are with you from this side of the water, Rym. *hugs lots*

[taylweaver.livejournal.com]

I know that I am in a different country, but things are quiet and normal here too. Well, as quiet and normal as things can ever be in this city, I guess.I rode the subway today, and thought about how messed up New York would be if someone blew up part of it. I've thought about that before, though, because thinking about bus bombings in Israel, and about September 11th downtown, I have taken time to wonder how much chaos it would cause. How many people fit in a single subway car - many more than a bus, I am convinced. And how much we rely on the subway to get anywhere, how stuck we would be if it shut down for any significant period of time. But today, the subway was just the subway, and I felt no more or less safe than any other day. The news on TV this morning claimed there would, of course, be increased security, more cops and so forth - but if there was, I didn't notice. I was too busy going about a normal day. I'm not quite sure what to think abou tthat.