London 28.12.2010: Pharaoh's Daughters and Refulgent Light

At the Tate Britain: the omnipresence, even refulgence, of light in J.M.W. Turner’s late paintings, and yet its obliquity.  Why both, simultaneously?  Light becomes more noticeable—more a fact of what we see and observe, and not just the precondition of seeing and observing—when its source is masked?

What his critics saw as paintings of nothing were depictions of light itself, attempts to depict its play across impossibly epic screens; light itself is the subject, and not merely what it illuminates.

London 27.12.2010: Bus-top Views and Droll Children

And what I forgot to say about yesterday: there was a tube strike, so we could get only as far as Hyde Park Corner on the tube, and then had to switch to the bus.  Outside the Earls Court tube station was a transit employee who told us how to get into the city using the buses.

And so we had the unexpected treat of being able to ride the bus, sitting in the top, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, inching along Piccadilly Street, which was very congested with Boxing Day shoppers, both in cars and by foot.

London 24.12.2010: Welcoming Churches and Homeless Wayfarers

Our first stop when we exit the Piccadilly Circus tube station: St. James church, a Christopher Wren church.  We hope its little flea market is open, but it's not, on Christmas eve.

We go into the church.  I'm impressed by a welcome sign in the narthex: "A warm welcome from the church community of St. James, Piccadilly.  St. James is part of the Anglican Communion within the world-wide Christian Church.  We understand ourselves to be called: to gather as a body which welcomes and celebrates human diversity--including spirituality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation . . . ."