It's 3 AM and Staying Up is Worth Every Minute

It's 3AM, and I'm up again. I'm turning into my father. At least I still have my hair.
Today's been really fun, mostly. The German test was easier than I thought it would be, though I still made quite a few stupid errors ("Wenn" and "Als" mixed up, "werde/wurde" that sort of thing). Anyway, it's said and done now. Life goes on.
Afterwards we had a great art tour. We went to the Thurn und Taxis Bibliothek ("T&T Library") and actually held and handled 7 books dating between the 15th and 18th centuries. It was quite an experience! One forgets how far book binding has come, but holding a 12 inch by 8 inch wood-and-leather bound tome serves as a quick reminder! The books were both secular and non-secular, and you could see the annotations in the margins move from scholarly to bored doodlings (practice of letters and rhymes about their teachers!). One book had been munched on by so many book worms it looked like it had recieved a thousand tiny shots. Another had been cut to bits so the paper could be used elsewhere. A psalter had all the liturgical music for the year written in it using the early forms of music notation. I wish so badly that I could show you photos, but this was a private little library and besides not being allowed, it would have been extremely rude to even suggest it.
The man who helped us out was a very nice, very typical Bavarian. When we entered he asked Frau Andres (I've just decided that's how our art teacher's name ought to be spelled, I'm not really sure) if we spoke German. She said yes, that we spoke a little, but not Bavarian. He chuckled and promised to do his best to stick to proper German (hochdeutsch), and did a pretty good job of it. We were still lost from time to time, but not nearly as often as we would have been ages ago.
The books were, of course, mostly in Latin. Being religious works, this is typical. Just as typical were the heavy abbreviations, that reduce words like Christos down to "Xts", which is where our abbreviation for Chrismas comes from ("X" being actually a greek character similarly shaped). For a slight prayer of comprehension, he gave us a latin abbreviation phrasebook, so now we could stretch the small latin words back into their big ones. Once we got to that point, Tiff was able to read them and I was able to fake it a little since a lot of our modern "church words" come from the Latin or Greek.
Looking at these manuscripts, with their scribbles and editorial marks throughout, it's very difficult to take the ideal of a perfect biblical translation seriously. Not to say that God's Word is falliable, but it does shed a certain ironic light on the idea that the KJV is the ideal translation. KJV is nice, especially for the books of poetry, and it is what a lot of us are raised on, but the translation methods of the time are sooo primitive by today's standards! These scribes had arguments in the margins over which letters were even used in their texts, and every one of them translated the Hebrew very differently. If they didn't know a word, they just copied the Hebrew as best they could and someone else came along to translate it, often ignoring the context. Manuscripts were based on copies of copies of copies, and speculation was left to fill in the blanks. These men built the foundations for our modern biblical studies, but I have to put a whole lot of trust in divine guidence to see their works as perfect interpretations.
I may be selling the medieval scribe short, though. Certainly, in their own ways, these fellows did more for the circulation, preservation, and construction of Christian ideas than we can imagine today.
It's pretty exciting to think about really. I just wish I knew Latin, Greek, and or Hebrew. Every little penstroke can make such a difference!
Illuminations were scarce in the Thurn und Taxis texts. I imagine they were of somewhat lesser economic standings, which is probably also why we got to handle them in the first place. The Thurn und Taxis library once housed much greater texts, such as the Lexicon I mentioned seeing in Munich. Those valuable books rested in the gorgeous reading room at the library, an open two-story room renovated in the seventeenth century and painted by the same man who did the Baroque ceilings in St. Emmeram. The Christian images of Paul witnessing Christ on the Cross, King Solomon composing his Proverbs, and... I can't remember the third one... there was an angel and a curtain, maybe it was a scene from the Genesis? Anyway, these major Christian images dominated the domed ceiling, then across the support beams and in the smaller alcoves lurked the muses and the pagan scholars of ancient Rome and Greece. It was very beautiful, especially with the evening sun pouring in through the massive west windows, but very cold. We flipped through a gigantic book-map of Paris from the 1750's, noting the Louvre, the fat-burning lanterns, and the future spot of the Eiffel Tower on two and three square inch blocks. It was a wonderful detail of the city. Then we left with many thanks.

Scott, my friend and RA, was at Stammtisch tonight with Elena. It was nice to catch up with him, and to trade stories. He's graduating in three weeks, so I'll just see him sporatically when he's in Murray. I gave him a link here, feeling a little bad for not having gotten it to him or Elana sooner.
Since I stayed at Stammtisch longer than I thought, then put off my paper to drink coffee and clean up another broken glass (3 so far this year, I'm way too clumsy!), I'm going to have to sleep now. If I reach unconsciousness in the next 10 minutes I'll get 4 hours total, which is the best I can hope for tonight.