When time is a relative construct

The things you think about a 3am when you wake up coughing. Again.

The first time you felt time stand still. It’s usually that old romantic cliché: meeting the love of your life, or something along those lines. Sometimes it’s not that sentimental, it’s being in an accident, or, watching something you feel powerless to stop. It’s always when you least expect it.

Mine… was on an October morning in 2007. It was my second trip to the British Library. I’d already fought the special collections librarians about a William Blake manuscript that I had flown halfway across the world to see (they were reluctant to get it, even though I’d put the request in 4 months before) – citing the scanned facsimile was “good enough” (Reader, it wasn’t – but that’s a whole different post).

The Prints and Drawings room at the British Museum (now that was sacred space if ever there was one) had already handed me 3 Blake original versions of The Songs and Innocence and Experience (coloured by the very man himself), and a rough copy (with annotations) of a print of Jerusalem… so I really didn’t get why the British Library were being as utterly unhelpful as they were. I did have some warning – there had been a big restructure about a year before, and it was not the institution it had been.

Anyway, I’d fought them once, and on my second day there I decided that I actually wanted to see a bit of this hallowed space (I had 3 days in London before I needed to head up to Cambridge to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Cambridge University School of English and University Library). So after climbing the steps at St Pancras, and going through security, I noticed a door on the left and stepped into their permanent display.

It was dimly lit and full of books open on various pages. Right in front of me was a first edition folio print of William Shakespeare’s plays. Off to the right were illuminated day books and bibles, but it was when I turned left and looked down that time stopped. Yes, dear reader – it was a book. The Cotton MS Vitellius A XV to be precise. And it took a few seconds to realise that I both knew what I was looking at, and that I could read it.

“Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!”

A poem I had studied and translated, and read, and loved was in front of me. The only surviving copy – with its charred corners, annotations, and 1000 year-old ink on incredibly fragile paper – lay quietly on a black velvet cushion, and in that moment the reality that this national treasure had so nearly been lost to nothing but mere references in letters hit me like a proverbial truck. I looked at the opening lines of Bēowulf, and cried.

It’s funny that it was Bēowulf. Not Jane Austen’s manuscript for Northanger Abbey next to it, the Beatle’s napkin with the opening lines to “Help” on it, or even the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Magna Carta. (Or even the Blake prints I had been reverently studying). It was a small, unassuming manuscript that – unless you knew what you were looking at and its history – you would simply walk past. (Unlike the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum that I did walk past several times and paid no heed to before trying to figure out what everybody was gaping at during a fairly busy period. In fairness, it was bigger than I had imagined, but that just got a “huh” from me).

It struck me as I wracked my brains over the reminiscence of that memory that nothing has ever come close to that feeling when I looked at a 1000 year old sheet of paper. Ever. I’ve had my breath taken away by music when something fits so perfectly to the time, place, and emotion that I was listening to, and I’ve been awed to silence by sights and places… but I have never had that feeling before or again.

I wonder if you only experience once in your life. If you do – and that was it – I think I can safely say that I’m happy it was for a piece of poetry so close to my heart.

I think I need to read it again. It’s been too long. Maybe with the Tolkien translation for reference… my Anglo-Saxon is a little rusty, after all.