Diary 3.0

The Temple of Dendur
I was listening to The Memory Palace podcast talking about the Temple of Dendur. I’ve never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nor heard of the temple, before but a line stuck out about the prominence that a fairly minor Egyptian building now has in one of the world’s major museums – making me think about the countless numbers of school children and tourists and all sorts of other visitors for whom the temple is now the archetype of a piece of classical architecture, irrespective of how significant it may or may not have been in its own time.
I’ve long been amused when my students start their essays with a phrase along the lines of “Historians have long debated the issue of…”, introducing a question which to the best I my knowledge only came into existence when I dreamed it up the previous September. The podcast got me thinking about the power we have to decide what is important about the past – Dendur is important because of the position it now has in people’s experiences of the ancient world; the question of whether Yokohama was a site of containment or a contact zone, or what it means to call the US presence in post-1945 Japan a ‘gendered occupation’, or whatever else, may not have been struggled over by historians for generations, but if we find it a meaningful question to ask in class, one that expands our understanding, then that’s good enough for now.
Shadows on the Moon
I got a telescope from my father for my birthday last year – it was a birthday present of his, I think, but as he’s not been able to find time to use it, he passed it on. It’s an 8 inch dobsonian reflector; whatever that means scientifically, it means it resolves the bigger planets as small but clearly discs but is especially good for looking at the moon.
As a total neophyte in this area, something that is striking is the way that areas of the moon are best seen when they are right at the edge of the visible portion of the moon. The centre of the full moon looks flat and featureless when the sun is shining directly down at it, but the half moon exposes the same area as just as cratered and uneven as any other part.
It’s a cliché that the summer’s evening light makes a view look all the more beautiful, casting long shadows and making the land seem more richly textured, but it’s funny to think that effect of the setting sun has a similar effect whether looking across the valley to the hills on the other side, or across space to the moon.