Of Rain, Bad Handwriting, and a Good Book

I just realized I can see a rainbow through the window of Hatter’s Hostel computer room where I am sitting. It is just a little bit of an arc, very faint, sandwiched between the top of a brick wall and the spire of a radio tower and fading fast, but it is by far the nicest thing that the weather has done all day. One of my fellow-hostellers said that the good thing about the rain in England is that it usually stays light and misty, like the rain in Seattle. That may be true, but today must have been the exception to the rule—it has been intermittently pouring, with claps of thunder at 5 o’clock just as I was about to leave the library, accompanied by an especially wet and plonking rain burst that lasted while I waited for the train back into town, which was delayed fifteen minutes. Shiny.
I have been in Brimingham two days now, but I have not had a chance to see much of the city. I was in the library from ten am to seven pm yesterday, and from ten to five today. Most of that time was spent trying to comprehend the loops and squiggles of the nearly-two-hundred-year-old handwriting of the British missionaries of Calcutta. It’s pretty intense to spend such a solid chunk of time working on this stuff, and I partly wish that the archive was not going to close for the summer so that I could justify spending less time each day on it, but at the same time I am glad to have a time limit that is forcing me to get through it. I am not sure how useful what I have found will be, but I have taken copious notes, and something should come out of them.
Outside of the library, you would think that I would be done with reading for the day, but I have become totally engrossed in On Beauty, a book I had been meaning to read for a while and picked up on a whim for the plane. It is really great, and it is so nice to have a book you don’t want to put down—a state I that used to be much more common for me than it has become in recent years. It is loosely based on Forester’s Howard’s End, and although it doesn’t follow the plot slavishly, I can see the suggestion of the other novel under its surface, like the similar bone structure of a pair of sisters. It is a story about the divisions between class and culture and age, the extent to which we can reach across them and the extent to which we are sundered from each other by our own humanity. It makes me feel both amused and discomfited, and sometimes both at once. Its also a lot about American and British culture clash (as well as the clashes within those cultures) so it seems a very appropriate read for where I am right now.