chosen this as some kind of classroom
project. I have no surviving best-book evidence or memory. I can now see these pages only as in a direct line from the faces
of Essex clay.
This first description of Alexandria was respectable, certainly no disgrace. Being five thousand miles from the city in the
1960s did not make it impossibly harder than being inside the city now in 2011. Alexandria in the modern age is not like Athens
or Rome: almost none of its ancient buildings survive as monuments or memorials for others. There is little easy tourism.
The sites are mostly invisible. Its palaces, libraries and lighthouse are wrecked beneath sand and water. Its best known relics,
the needles named after Cleopatra, which once stood where the Metropole stands now, have decorated London and New York for
more than a century. To be a dissatisfied tourist is easy. To an optimist the neat lines of the ancient street map are not
so much a show of what has disappeared but of a city still waiting to be found.
Alexandria is never far away wherever we are. Useful ideas were its best exports – the universal library, straight streets
with addresses and post codes, astronomy and gastronomy, Greek columnar architecture in forms that people could live in rather
than merely worship or admire, ‘the pen’ and ‘the wine-press’, new names that still survive for newly identified parts of
the brain, and one of the greatest of all human dramas, the story of Ptolemy XII’s second daughter herself. From Alexandria
came also poetry as experiment, surprise as a virtue,word pictures of painted pictures, style for style’s sake, so much adaptation from classical Greece which, without this city,
would have died. Without the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, there would have been a very different Virgil, Tennyson and Coleridge,
to begin only with the restricted contents of my Dorset Avenue library.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
I am back at my polished modern desk, reluctantly for my ambitions but successfully for my health. It is good to be out of
Le Metropole. The hotel on the site where ‘the great love of Cleopatra and her Antonio was born’ makes no boast of hygiene.
It luxuriates in its old dust and glory. It seemed a nauseous place when I arrived, its staircase lit by a stained-glass French
garden, yellows, reds and greens stirred with grey. Last night’s poisoning has passed – but is not quite forgotten. So on
this sunless day, the third of the year, I am back in the glassy, grey successor to the first great library of the world.
This Bibliotheca Alexandrina is clean enough to be a hospital, one of those Middle Eastern hospitals of the rich where there
are the finest operating theatres and very few patients. It is tasteful, broad and low. Its roof is a tilted sundial. Its
terraces are filled with sculpture. Its rows of desks cascade down towards the sea. It is like an elaborate ornament to a
garden. It does not contain many books. It may not be much of a library at all.
A subversive thought: if the New Year bomb had exploded here instead of in Socratis’s mother’s church, the needles of glass
and granite would have been a splendid sight. There would have been fewer deaths and a beach of shining fragments from here
to the sea. Letterswould litter the pavements. On the walls and windows are imprints from hundreds of different scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphics
and Celtic runes, Minoan Greek and Times New Roman, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese. Once the blast had blown, there would have
been alphas and abjeds, diphthongs and digammas everywhere. Investigators could have spent their days dividing Linear B from
Latvian, Old High German from Apache. Every syllabary would find its semi-vowel.
There would have been louder international outrage. This library cost $250 million to build. More than a thousand architects
competed to design it. Greek ship-owners and Arab sheikhs all paid their part. This wonder
project. I have no surviving best-book evidence or memory. I can now see these pages only as in a direct line from the faces
of Essex clay.
This first description of Alexandria was respectable, certainly no disgrace. Being five thousand miles from the city in the
1960s did not make it impossibly harder than being inside the city now in 2011. Alexandria in the modern age is not like Athens
or Rome: almost none of its ancient buildings survive as monuments or memorials for others. There is little easy tourism.
The sites are mostly invisible. Its palaces, libraries and lighthouse are wrecked beneath sand and water. Its best known relics,
the needles named after Cleopatra, which once stood where the Metropole stands now, have decorated London and New York for
more than a century. To be a dissatisfied tourist is easy. To an optimist the neat lines of the ancient street map are not
so much a show of what has disappeared but of a city still waiting to be found.
Alexandria is never far away wherever we are. Useful ideas were its best exports – the universal library, straight streets
with addresses and post codes, astronomy and gastronomy, Greek columnar architecture in forms that people could live in rather
than merely worship or admire, ‘the pen’ and ‘the wine-press’, new names that still survive for newly identified parts of
the brain, and one of the greatest of all human dramas, the story of Ptolemy XII’s second daughter herself. From Alexandria
came also poetry as experiment, surprise as a virtue,word pictures of painted pictures, style for style’s sake, so much adaptation from classical Greece which, without this city,
would have died. Without the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, there would have been a very different Virgil, Tennyson and Coleridge,
to begin only with the restricted contents of my Dorset Avenue library.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
I am back at my polished modern desk, reluctantly for my ambitions but successfully for my health. It is good to be out of
Le Metropole. The hotel on the site where ‘the great love of Cleopatra and her Antonio was born’ makes no boast of hygiene.
It luxuriates in its old dust and glory. It seemed a nauseous place when I arrived, its staircase lit by a stained-glass French
garden, yellows, reds and greens stirred with grey. Last night’s poisoning has passed – but is not quite forgotten. So on
this sunless day, the third of the year, I am back in the glassy, grey successor to the first great library of the world.
This Bibliotheca Alexandrina is clean enough to be a hospital, one of those Middle Eastern hospitals of the rich where there
are the finest operating theatres and very few patients. It is tasteful, broad and low. Its roof is a tilted sundial. Its
terraces are filled with sculpture. Its rows of desks cascade down towards the sea. It is like an elaborate ornament to a
garden. It does not contain many books. It may not be much of a library at all.
A subversive thought: if the New Year bomb had exploded here instead of in Socratis’s mother’s church, the needles of glass
and granite would have been a splendid sight. There would have been fewer deaths and a beach of shining fragments from here
to the sea. Letterswould litter the pavements. On the walls and windows are imprints from hundreds of different scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphics
and Celtic runes, Minoan Greek and Times New Roman, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese. Once the blast had blown, there would have
been alphas and abjeds, diphthongs and digammas everywhere. Investigators could have spent their days dividing Linear B from
Latvian, Old High German from Apache. Every syllabary would find its semi-vowel.
There would have been louder international outrage. This library cost $250 million to build. More than a thousand architects
competed to design it. Greek ship-owners and Arab sheikhs all paid their part. This wonder
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