pallas_athena (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pallas_athena) wrote2008-10-14 01:08 pm
pallas_athena) wrote2008-10-14 01:08 pm
Entry tags:
Overawed
Those who hang out with me know that I chronically overuse the word "awesome."
I've heard it argued that "awesome" should be held in reserve for things that genuinely inspire awe-- that people who use "awesome" to describe, say, colourful socks would find themselves vocabulary-impoverished when beholding, say, a sunset in the mountains.
Yesterday, something happened that made me feel a mixture of ohmygodohmygodohmygod shock and OHMYFUCKINGGODTHISISSOFUCKINGCOOL fascination and !!!!!!!!! sheer saucer-pupilled joy.
Through an odd set of coincidences, I have a friend who's a curator of maps at the British Library. I'd normally never have dared do this, but I emailed him at the behest of my visiting antique-map-obsessed mother and asked if he might have time to show her a map or two.
Tom met us, smiled a mischievous smile and said he had some rather special things to show us. He led us up to the map library, which is full of large tables on which large maps may be unrolled. He got out some early printed maps-- a Frisius, a book of Ptolemaic maps compared with "modern" ones from the 1500s -- and then he got a vellum scroll out of a very long rectangular box and unrolled it. (On the library tables, they have little weights that you put on the edges of old vellum scrolls to stop them rolling up again.)
On the scroll was a very plain hand-drawn map in black ink, mostly of the countries surrounding the North Atlantic: Europe, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Zembla, the east coast of North America. It also had an island called Estotiland out in the middle of nowhere, as well as a Northwest Passage past the Pole. The coastlines were drawn in much greater detail than one would find in a printed woodcut map. The whole expanse was cris-crossed with a fine warp and weft of precisely-spaced latitude and longitude lines about half a centimeter apart. At the North Pole, one could feel a slight indentation in the vellum where the fixed foot of a compass had pierced it.
"This is the map drawn in 1580 by Doctor John Dee," said Tom.
After letting us marvel over it for a moment, Tom led my mother on to a huge, ornate map-- again, hand-drawn and painted, with plenty of ships and savages and mermaids and gold leaf-- that had been done for François I after Jacques Cartier's expeditions; it was supposed to have been the first map that claimed Canada for France. It was a beauty, of course, but I couldn't help drifting back to the Dee map. When it came time to roll it up, Tom said "I think there are annotations on the back."
And there were! On the back of his chart, in an unusually legible hand for an Elizabethan, Dee had laid out the legal case for Queen Elizabeth to claim possession of pretty much all the lands on the map. It included such reasons as the well-known conquest of Iceland and Greenland and diverse ylands, even unto the Pole, by King Arthur. (Did you know about that? I didn't.) The presence of Latin books in the library of the King of the "famous yle Estotiland" could only mean that Arthur had been there, too. (Books, library and island had all been invented by the Zeno brothers earlier that century.) Dee also cited the discovery of Florida by Welshmen as grounds for a prior British claim to those Spanish lands.
So, yeah, I was awed. Dee's dry and wrinkled hand reached across the centuries to touch mine. If anyone can think of anything more awesome than that, then I want to hear about it!
I've heard it argued that "awesome" should be held in reserve for things that genuinely inspire awe-- that people who use "awesome" to describe, say, colourful socks would find themselves vocabulary-impoverished when beholding, say, a sunset in the mountains.
Yesterday, something happened that made me feel a mixture of ohmygodohmygodohmygod shock and OHMYFUCKINGGODTHISISSOFUCKINGCOOL fascination and !!!!!!!!! sheer saucer-pupilled joy.
Through an odd set of coincidences, I have a friend who's a curator of maps at the British Library. I'd normally never have dared do this, but I emailed him at the behest of my visiting antique-map-obsessed mother and asked if he might have time to show her a map or two.
Tom met us, smiled a mischievous smile and said he had some rather special things to show us. He led us up to the map library, which is full of large tables on which large maps may be unrolled. He got out some early printed maps-- a Frisius, a book of Ptolemaic maps compared with "modern" ones from the 1500s -- and then he got a vellum scroll out of a very long rectangular box and unrolled it. (On the library tables, they have little weights that you put on the edges of old vellum scrolls to stop them rolling up again.)
On the scroll was a very plain hand-drawn map in black ink, mostly of the countries surrounding the North Atlantic: Europe, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Zembla, the east coast of North America. It also had an island called Estotiland out in the middle of nowhere, as well as a Northwest Passage past the Pole. The coastlines were drawn in much greater detail than one would find in a printed woodcut map. The whole expanse was cris-crossed with a fine warp and weft of precisely-spaced latitude and longitude lines about half a centimeter apart. At the North Pole, one could feel a slight indentation in the vellum where the fixed foot of a compass had pierced it.
"This is the map drawn in 1580 by Doctor John Dee," said Tom.
After letting us marvel over it for a moment, Tom led my mother on to a huge, ornate map-- again, hand-drawn and painted, with plenty of ships and savages and mermaids and gold leaf-- that had been done for François I after Jacques Cartier's expeditions; it was supposed to have been the first map that claimed Canada for France. It was a beauty, of course, but I couldn't help drifting back to the Dee map. When it came time to roll it up, Tom said "I think there are annotations on the back."
And there were! On the back of his chart, in an unusually legible hand for an Elizabethan, Dee had laid out the legal case for Queen Elizabeth to claim possession of pretty much all the lands on the map. It included such reasons as the well-known conquest of Iceland and Greenland and diverse ylands, even unto the Pole, by King Arthur. (Did you know about that? I didn't.) The presence of Latin books in the library of the King of the "famous yle Estotiland" could only mean that Arthur had been there, too. (Books, library and island had all been invented by the Zeno brothers earlier that century.) Dee also cited the discovery of Florida by Welshmen as grounds for a prior British claim to those Spanish lands.
So, yeah, I was awed. Dee's dry and wrinkled hand reached across the centuries to touch mine. If anyone can think of anything more awesome than that, then I want to hear about it!
That is so cool!
As J.L. Chamberlain once said, "In great deeds something abides..."
http://www.brotherswar.com/Civil_War_Quotes_4e.htm
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To the "but what about when you see something really awesome" crowd, I say, have you ever when seeing something awesome, said in dictionary reverence, "I say, that X is awesome." No. When I went on holiday to Switzerland last month, I got out of the train and gazed up at north face of the Eiger in awed astonishment. Did I turn to my friend and say "As I stand beneath this mighty rock, I am overwhelmed with awe at its height and majesty"? I did not. I turned to my friend and said "That is a f*cking big mountain." Because it was a f*cking big mountain. It was so f*cking big that I could say nothing else. It would have been a great pity to have saved awesome for it.
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(That trip to Switzerland does sound, awesome, though.)
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...the saddening thing was that no-one else in the shop could understand my enthusiasm at holding this incredible thing in my hands, this piece of history...and as it was a fiddly job they were only to glad to let the temp do it.
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I also use the word all the time - I blame it on having a Canadian as a best friend. I've caught lots of unfortunate words off him including 'dude'!
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http://www.onb.ac.at/globenmuseum.htm (German only)
and more pretty pictures in the last few pages here
http://www.onb.ac.at/files/GeschichteGloben.pdf
Isn't everyone delighted by globes crafted by Mercator himself, or 1930s ones showing "principal zeppelin routes" (way steampunk)
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Sorry. Something similar happened to me in my first term at Oxford, on a tour of the Bodleian records rooms - the curator, knowing that we were classicists, produced the oldest surviving text of Catullus, which in librarian terms is something like the bit where Sean Connery pulls out the shotgun in The Untouchables. Shuddery.
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So how old is the oldest surviving text of that filthy old bastard Catullus, anyway?
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Note: they didn't actually wave it.
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Actually, my friend Dr Haggis and I have an ongoing study of the quantifiability of awesome, and what makes a unit of awesome, how to appropriately penalize awesomeness and so forth :-)
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http://slashboing.blogspot.com/2006/10/quantification-of-awesome.html
http://slashboing.blogspot.com/2006/10/quantification-of-awesome-part-2.html