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The Sea Inside

The Sea Inside

Titel: The Sea Inside Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Philip Hoare
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theatre in which one could swim was remarkable even for the greatest city in the world, to be rivalled only by the dolphinarium which opened in Oxford Street in 1971, a murky green cellar-pool twelve feet deep, complete with swimsuit-clad ‘aquamaids’, a sea lion, a penguin and a trio of dolphins named Sparky, Bonny and Brandy who were prevailed upon to wear plastic hats and perform the usual tricks.
    The modern capital barely acknowledges the river which was the reason for its being. The Thames was not embanked until the mid-nineteenth century; you could not walk or ride along its banks, yet you could descend to the water via a series of steps, marked on old maps – Temple Stairs, Essex Stairs, Arundel Stairs, Surrey Stairs, Salisbury Stairs, Whitehall Stairs – while street names such as The Strand commemorated what was once a beach. The river was much more present then; it seeped into the city, washed the feet of its buildings. Now the embankment oversees it with a wonderful disconnection – all those cars racing by, the trains rolling over its bridges, the commuters pacing to work; all turning their backs on the strong brown god as it surges through the city. It may be the colour of mud, swirling with silt and underlain with every kind of refuse, but I’m tempted to take to it like Benjamin Franklin, who, while working as a printer’s apprentice near Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1725, would frequently plunge in.
    Franklin was obsessed with swimming. ‘I had from a Child been ever delighted with this Exercise,’ he wrote in his
Autobiography
, ‘had studied and practis’d all Thevenet’s Motions & Positions, added some of my own, aiming at the graceful & easy as well as the Useful.’ Even on his way to England, watching porpoises, grampus and dolphins as his ship passed the Isle of Wight, Franklin jumped in and swam around the boat as if to join them. In London, he taught a fellow apprentice – ‘an ingenious young man, one Wygate’– to swim too. On a boat trip to Chelsea, Franklin decided to demonstrate his skills to the company on board. He stripped off and leapt into the river, then swam back to Blackfriars, ‘performing on the Way many Feats of Activity, both upon & under Water, that surpriz’d & pleas’d those to whom they were Novelties’. He even considered starting a swimming school in the city, before fate took him to other things.
    Sometimes, in the great stretches of my unemployed life, I’d get off the bus and walk the narrow alleys of the City, through the old inns of court and their silent celebration of privilege, being, on all accounts, an outsider. The lanes led to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its shrubbery home then to the down-and-outs and dispossessed of the 1980s who had turned it into an encampment, stretching their plastic sheets underneath the massive plane trees. On one side of the square sits Sir John Soane’s house, its antique plaster casts and bizarre lighting effects set in a sepulchral interior; on the other rises the unremarkably grand façade of the Royal College of Surgeons, with its own cabinet of curiosities.
    After climbing a wide staircase lined with portraits of past presidents, the visitor is greeted by a quartet of worn wooden boards on the wall. They appear innocuous enough, until you learn that they are overlaid with the nerves and blood vessels of human beings. This macabre furniture suite was the property of the diarist John Evelyn, who acquired it in Padua in 1643. Its planks are the essence of bodies; everything else – flesh and fat, bone and offal – has been stripped away to leave these upended tabletops, their grain coursed by tributaries like congealed river systems. They act as a ghoulish advertisement for what lies beyond: an array of glass cases on whose shelves sit innumerable jars and bottles and boxes, containing every imaginable body part, both human and animal. It’s as though the world had been turned inside out and into its constituent parts by their collector, in whose honour the museum is named.
    John Hunter, born in Scotland in 1728, was a surgeon and anatomist who trained at Barts. After serving in the army, he set up his practice in London; his brother William was obstetrician to Queen Charlotte, and delivered the future George IV. As a fashionable doctor, John Hunter was in demand. His patients included an older and wiser Benjamin Franklin, now suffering with a bladder stone, and the future Lord Byron, whose birth he attended

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