Another cool thing I did in Boston
"There's a stained glass globe," Tom Whitmore said. "And you can walk inside it."

The Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science Centre Thingummy is a thing as good as a cathedral, but not like a cathedral. I went with Tom and Marci and a couple of friends of theirs, and Nancy Lebovitz. It's immensely cool. There's a fountain that spills words onto the floor, where they swirl around before climbing up the walls to form unexceptionable secular humanist platitudes. Then there's a stained glass globe of the world in 1934, huge and glowing, big enough for ten or fifteen people to walk inside. It's a perfect aural space, magnifying even a whisper from the centre. There was a presentation, on the general cool nature of the world -- Christian Scientists seem to be for it, and not very interested in presenting their views on the flesh and the devil, which I gather they're against. ("When Mary Baker Eddy said she didn't like her teddy...") I'm actually very impressed with their use of monumental space and the fact that they had the Dictionary of Religions in their giftshop.

After the presentation they let us play in the globe for a little while. I went to the very centre, where all the acoustics were with me, and recited Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer", that paeon to the glory of expanding one's horizons by reading one's book. It sounded absolutely terrific, magnified, echoing back, and I turned around so that I could stare at the Pacific when I came to that line. Then the guide asked me for the author and reference, and actually wrote it down.