Day 39: Tick Tock, Tick Tock…

2/23 Oh how a day can be long. Plenary dragged this morning. On and on. I actually began to panic when I realized how little time I had this week. As Dr. Wardwell lectured he mentioned this thing to view, and that thing to view, and this place to visit, and that museum to frequent. Ah! I realized that I had 40/50 pages of reading for the evening, and hours of museums and galleries to complete. The lecture actually went on past 1pm, when thankfully we were politely kicked out of the LICC so they could have a lunch function. Oh my oh my.

This week was not looking so enjoyable, because I also was supposed to have a service project on Wednesday for 4 hours and I had heavy reading every night. I ended up talking with Dr. Stewart during the break, which resulted in my not having a service project any longer. I felt bad, but they placed me in a service area where I am more intimidated than effective. My calling in life, as I have thus heard, is not to work with young children in a leadership position. I am neither good with young children, nor effective as a teacher in medium-large groups. Those just aren’t the gifts God has blessed me with, therefore I was anxious and jittery about spending 3.5 hours every week teaching young children. Dr. Stewart was slightly irritated that I hadn’t mentioned this before, but I pointed out that my service form that I’d filled out last July had indeed indicated that I was not gifted in those areas, but rather other areas. So that was that, I now have no service project, but I feel more at ease about life and the week.

Our goal after we finally let out and got our 4 page Museum assignment was to get as much done today as absolutely possible! We raced through those places. We raced so fast, that it’s hard to remember where we even went or what we saw. Thankfully it only involved 3 stops: the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the British Library.

We hit up the galleries first, and saw some interesting variations of styles. We looked at some Venus pieces, and a famous portrait of the Ambassadors, which was really big and very interesting. We also looked at some religious pieces that had a very different style than the pagan art. Those pieces were much less clear, and generally darker in tone and color, with the only light falling on Jesus. We saw two pieces called “Adoration of the Kings”, which I didn’t particularly enjoy, but they were definitely thought provoking.

This was our first stop to the National Portrait Gallery and we walked through the exhibit to the Tudor Dynasty, examining many portraits of kings and queens that made up political propaganda during the Reformation period in England.

Our last stop, always our last stop because it’s closest to home, was the British Library. By that point in time, we were so motivated to finish the gallery assignment that day that we were going slightly loopy. We got to the library and examined amazing works such as the first complete collection of Shakespeare, a Gutenberg Bible, da Vinci’s notebook pages, and other works. The Shakespeare and Marlowe pieces were really interesting and cool to look at. However, by this time we were also very tired and hungry. This resulted in a lot of muffled giggles and laughter as well as struggles to stay upright, both because we were laughing and because by that point in our day our feet ached from exertion. I believe by the time we got to Gutenberg’s Bible, Daniel and Katie were fighting over a pen.

David and I left them to that and went to Leonardo’s sketches, which were mounted on the wall of a case. I was staring at them, awed by the fact that I’ve heard about these sketches so often, and was now seeing them. I was interrupted by David’s comment on how intricate the drawing was, and how much perfect detail went into the picture. I was a little baffled, because the sketches weren’t very meticulous, and I would have described them more as chaotic and scrawled. I looked down to see what part specifically he was examining, only to see him pointing to a book below the sketches with a full page illustration. The book was typed, and the illustration looked like a print rather than a sketch of a woodland scene. I tried really hard, unsuccessfully, to contain my laughter as I pointed out the real notebook pages and explained that a typed manuscript was not the same thing as Leonardo’s personal notebook. His response was to convince me that indeed Leonardo was just a very meticulous writer, whose handwriting looked like a font. We laughed for a long time about that one.

We made it back just in time for dinner, and then it was off to my doom with reading. I had unfortunately underestimated the amount of reading assigned, and wished that I had taken Daniel’s advice by starting the day before. However, I plodded through Luther’s short writings, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and through the massive chunk of Erasmus-Luther’s Discourse on Free Will—for the record it doesn’t talk much at all about Free Will. Basically, I learned nothing about the actual theology of the day from my readings, but I did learn that Luther was a hothead and that Calvin was super meticulous and detailed and careful about his arguments. Luther’s actual arguments could have been the same way, who knows. I did learn though that he was a passionate person, and had a different demeanor than Erasmus in his debating style. I didn’t go to bed until at least after 1am, but it felt good to have everything done.