...The world is quiet here
Jul. 7th, 2005 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rymenhildDuke 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.
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.
