The Halls of Hoary Antiquity

It has rained and rained today, but I stayed inside quite happily. For the past three days I've been stirring out-of-doors considerably (a trip to an art gallery, a walk to the Kleistpark, and an evening out with T. and my aunt L.), and have been in correspondingly good spirits. Going out does not necessarily equate cheerfulness, but lately I've been fortunate. Yesterday evening, however, I had a headache and felt quite ill, so today I "took it easy." First of all I played on the ukulele and piano.

Then I read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, a slim tome that my aunt gave me for my birthday. It describes the fictional scenario of the Queen becoming an inveterate bookworm. Modest in its aims, understated, and gently paced, it's very British, I think, and much reminds me of Stephen Frears's film with Helen Mirren. The character of the Queen -- the emotional inhibition, brief and calm and somewhat stilted speech, hints of acerbity, reserve, and strange isolation -- is fairly similar. The book's humour is not really of the laugh-out-loud sort, more of the quiet chuckle variety, but it is consistently entertaining in its mild way and I thought that the ending was an excellent, unexpected but not incongruous touch.

While I don't want to describe the last days much, I do want to tell about L.'s, T.'s and my trip to the Bode Museum yesterday evening. I had never been there before. We took the U-Bahn to Friedrichstraße station, then wandered down along the Georgenstraße. A tram line (I didn't know there were any trams left in Berlin) ran to our right, and to the left there ran the raised S-Bahn tracks. The shops and restaurants underneath made it look like an inverted and more prosaic version of Florence's Ponte Vecchio. The shops were closed; only the glow of their lamps and the elegant china and polished wood, etc., in their windows remained. A garbage can overflowed with the débris of the day. But a large restaurant, Die Zwölf Apostel, was open, filled with dinner guests. We peered in, then passed on through the no-man's-land at the S-Bahn overpasses, then along the waterway that separates the Museum Island from the rest of Berlin. The globe-lamps were shining along the broad, low bridge over it; the water was glittering; and through the tall windows of the Bode Museum we already saw some of the paintings hanging in a white hallway.

We reached the steps of the Museum, and pushed our way through three ranks of great doors until we reached the foyer. Entrance was free, but I gave my coat and bag away at the cloakroom, in the shadow of a great equestrian statue. We went nearly directly to the Gothic rooms, which L. had missed the last time she went to the museum. Then T. and I strayed about separately, looking for whatever struck our fancy. Early on we encountered a sculpture of Christ on a donkey, which greeted visitors into one room; as T. remarked, it presented, in its fairly humble and approachable aspect, a sharp contrast to the usual pompous king-astride-a-horse. In the same room L. pointed out an oaken figurine of St. Christopher with the infant Jesus on its shoulder, a wooden stick in his hand, a ripply chunk of blue-painted water at his feet, and a strong expression of consternation or perhaps irritation on his face. The statues and paintings in that room had the intermingling of beauty, darkness, crudity, intricate richness, and grotesqueness that annoys but also intrigues me about medieval art.

Later there were two extremely ornate ivory carvings of hundreds of little human figures, skeletons, devils, etc., in the Day of Judgment and the Fall of the Angels, set in a golden frame; a maternal woman in bronze looking fondly upon three infants who played around her skirts, as she casually crushed the agonized head of a bearded man underfoot; a head of the mater dolorosa, perhaps in majolica, with a beautiful, pure and finely-molded face, but red-rimmed eyes whence tears coursed down her cheeks. There was a gloomy painting of Christ that was the least sympathetic I'd ever seen. Also, a golden bust of St. Apollonia as a fifteenth-century court lady straight out of a Henry VIII film or portrait: immensely puffy sleeves, tight brocade corset, and a loose blue sash tied around her waist. There was a Venetian fireplace carved out of beige stone, with acanthus leaves and faces; a twisty column standing on the back of a lion; an ivory (hunting-?)horn that might have come out of Narnia; a 6th(?)-century silver spoon; and the coin-sized, staring face of what may have been a king. In another room there stood a splendid larger-than-life-size marble statue of Diana, her dog baring its teeth at her knee; a bronze bust of a Pope; and a graceful marble sculpture of a dancer in a clinging dress, facing a rougher fountain where a burly man ate grapes from the vine with his mouth as a rather repulsive-looking dog stretched out between his legs.

I reflected that there is something sad and absurd in lifelike figures, who are doomed to hold the same position and wear the same expression for eternity, and to be paradoxically lively and active-looking despite being wholly motionless. This isn't a very original sentiment, of course, but valid nonetheless.

Altogether, brief though it was, I enjoyed the visit very much. I think that it is a lovely experience to become completely immersed in a book, or painting, or piece of music, or whatever, so that one forgets one's surroundings and feels the atmosphere of the object much more vividly than one normally would. Yesterday many of the museum pieces did make a deep impression on me. Not only the pieces, but also the building; when T. and I entered the stately stairway under the cupola, I was involuntarily struck dumb for a moment. I didn't like being so much affected by grandioseness; but I'm sure that Friedrich II, whose statue stood in a niche above the first landing, would have been pleased.