A Tour of the Library of Congress and the Capitol

Visiting D.C.

My name has been in the Library of Congress for years, but the first time I visited was last week. The Jefferson building, to be exact. It began with that President’s books; if I remember correctly he sold them to the government to fill the original congressional library, which was was burned in the War of 1812. According to the Library’s About Page, his library contained 6,487 books.

You down with LoC? Yeah, you know me.

Now it has millions. Most are kept offsite in archives; the two that my name shows up in are Dark City Lights and Alive in Shape and Color, both edited by my friend Larry Block (such a mensch). If you register as a reader (the equivalent of applying for a library card) you can request materials to read in the rather stunning Reading Room. Before you get there, you enter this equally fabulous atrium, spangled with working cherubim and arches dedicated to writers of the ages.

The building evokes the palaces of Europe, but rather than edifying the divine right of kings, this is a castle to honor art and knowledge. And while it is ostensibly the library of Congress because they use it for research, it is in every sense the library of the American people, and we can strut right in (after passing through a metal detector) and as mentioned, read anything in its enormous collection in one of its reading rooms. You can’t check anything out, so it is truly more of a research library, but if you peruse its enormous holdings, you can see just how extensive it is.

The Reading Room ain’t too shabby.

I never would have known to visit if not for my good friend Hannah, who gave us a guided tour. I knew of the Library’s existence, but like the Supreme Court across the street, I always considered it less of a physical entity and more of an ethereal entity, like the Periodic Table. (I mean, it’s not an actual table, though that pun has been made flesh at least once. I can’t find the one that’s an actual table, so that links to Bill Gates’s stupendous office wall.)

Us in fronna the Capitol.

As I told Hannah, I imagined that the Supreme Court was in Washington state for some reason, as in separation of powers or so one missile couldn’t take out multiple branches of government. For my day job, I was once a Disaster Recovery and Emergency Management specialist, so putting your eggs literally in one basket, having the executive and legislative and judicial all on the same block, is maddening to me.

The rotunda at the LoC is even nicer than the Capitol’s in my opinion.

I worked in Manhattan on 9/11 and the fact that the people on United 93 likely sacrificed their lives to save people at the Pentagon, Capitol, or the White House still haunts me sometimes, like when I’m on the Capitol Mall. I would have kept Congress in Philadelphia, the President in the White House, and the Supreme Court in NORAD’s mountain, just to be cool. And the Speaker of the House could be kept on the Moon. (Especially that new jackass who doesn’t have the scruples of an Instagram Influencer.)

We went on a tour of the Capitol building, next. And we didn’t even have to riot! All those people can go to the Moon as well, without spacesuits. Ugh. Unlike a few of our Representatives, we went through the metal detectors, and had a lovely time with the statues under the rotunda, between the two houses. The Senate side is a little fancier. I used their bathroom. Marble, baby! Not granite, like at my hovel.

The Capitol building is where the sausage of governing is made, and something about its ostentatious grandiosity is just perfect. Congress has been mocked nearly from its inception, and the rulings of its haphazard majorities seem inevitable, given the building they are made in. It’s like the Sistine Chapel, as commissioned by the Beverly Hillbillies. This may be disrespectful, but after the Library of Congress, it looks like a McMansion owned by the Real Housewives of D.C. There’s a chandelier made of morningstars, for crying out loud!

But I enjoyed visiting Washington D.C. very much, from the bougie farmer’s markets and the panhandlers to the wacky weed dispensaries where you buy pencils and they give you cannabis as a gift, to the Michelin-starred-yet-affordable Balkan all-you-can-eat joints and hotels with twenty-dollar brunch burgers (the two-dollar donut was worth every penny). The Metro was clean, the parking wasn’t impossible, the bookstores like Kramer’s were lovely, everything was expensive, but for a visit, that was okay.

Someday I hope the Bureau of Engraving reopens to tours, as have been a numismatist since an early age, and love banknote engraving and the minting of coins. I recently bought a silver proof 1978 Ike dollar to compare Eisenhower’s bald head to the moon on the reverse. And I’m looking at artists who perform engraving.

Anarchy has boobs.

Thank you, Hannah, for introducing me to this wonderful institution. We all had a lovely time. Hannah is a skilled essayist, nature writer, and self-effacing wildlife photographer (meaning she doesn’t think she is very good, when she is; she doesn’t photograph self-effacing animals, like humblebadgers and emus with impostor syndrome, though she could.) You can read her latest, here.

Everything's wrong in the desert

Shaun Usher’s Lists of Note is always an interesting read as well, and I particularly enjoyed today’s:

Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature