Russell's Blog

Mimi and I had an incredibly packed day today. We started off by going to the Pergamon Museum, in which one could easily spend a week. We spent a good twenty minutes just staring at the Pergamon Altar before it occurred to us to listen to what the audio guide had to say. And, of course, the Ishtar Gate was... jaw-dropping. It reminds me of Ozymandias :

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

Then we took the New Berlin Tours Third Reich Berlin: The Rise and Fall of Hitler's Capital. Utterly fascinating. It occurred to me that history is littered with governments that have gone berserk in one sense or another, and yet people who go into law and politics seldom study these situations. Someday, when I've got lots of money (har har), I'm going to establish a college at some nice university that gives degrees in constitutional law and political history. I want the graduates to understand constitutional law from the perspective of someone who is intimately familiar with how constitutions fail. Maybe they will finally understand why, and learn how to build republics so robust that tyrants will never be seen again.

And, since we weren't quite done yet, we grabbed some dinner and saw a Bach organ performance at the Berliner Dom. The music and the acoustics actually made me dizzy, it was so good.