Ten minutes until closing at the BL

I went to a Taize prayer service last night, where the seven of us spent a good part of the hour sitting in silence. Was anybody listening? Were we? I have been typing all day today, taking notes from the manuscripts and so have very few words left. A meditation on color and the number of drops of Christ's blood, instead.* Perhaps, if I get far enough into Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, I'll write a poem about it. For now, silence and the opportunity to listen to the rain.**


*BL Egerton MS 1821, fol. 6v-7. Can you count the drops? They should, if John Lowden's calculations are correct, come to somewhere around 5,475 all told--in other words, 15 x 365: the number of wounds Christ received in the course of the Passion, 15 for every day of the year.
**1 Kings 19:11-13. There was, in fact, a great thunderstorm in the middle of the hour, with hail and a great crashing of rain on the roof of the chapel. And then came silence.

Comments

  1. WilliamAugust 14, 2008 at 4:47 AM

    fol. = folio? I wonder if from folio-as in portfolio(sp) that we get foil? as in rolled or scroll?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fencing BearAugust 14, 2008 at 6:43 AM

    Folio comes from folium meaning "leaf". According to the OED, "foil" can also mean "leaf" (n1), but, as referring to fencing foils (n5), "that the word is, by some far-fetched association, a transferred use of FOIL n.1 a leaf (cf. F. fleuret fencing foil, lit. ‘floweret’, the button being compared to a bud) is a possibility for which at present there is no evidence." Which is too bad, really.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WilliamAugust 14, 2008 at 12:02 PM

    I thought I was on too something.......

    :-P

    ReplyDelete

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