Black tie at the Library of Congress. We were played in by a fife and drum corps in Continental blue and tricorn hats, standing on the steps as a delegation under the English constitution walked past them into the building. Somebody had thought about that.
The Great Hall is the most beautiful room I have been in this week, and the week has not been short of rooms. Marble to the roof, and above that a painted vault that does not stop anywhere the eye can follow.
The floors are mosaic, and after a hundred and thirty years of feet the tiles have settled and parted very slightly, each one now sitting where it means to sit. The cracks are the finishing touch the artist’s own hand could not have given it.
Dinner for something like four hundred, which at that number is a feat of organisation before anybody has cooked anything, and the food was good as well.
Chetin Durak, Grand Master of Washington DC, opened and closed the evening. Ambassador James Gilmore spoke on the 250th. Then a fireside chat between General David Petraeus and Akram Elias, Past Grand Master, the latter having been our unofficial tour guide thus far in DC.
What the General said was, in substance, what I had heard on Monday in Philadelphia, on Thursday at Alexandria, and again that morning at the Capitol. That the founders who were Freemasons carried the principles of the Craft into the country they made, and that those principles and American ones are the same principles.
I do not think any of the four men were arguing the point. Nobody in the room needed persuading, and none of them spoke as though they expected to be contradicted. Heard once it is a claim. Heard four times in five days, in four different buildings, it is something else: the settled self-understanding of American Freemasonry, said aloud in its own house in its anniversary year. That is worth more to me than the argument itself. A fraternity that has agreed with itself for centuries about what it is for is a rarer thing than a fraternity that is right.
We ate in the dining hall beneath Prudence and Temperance, named in gilt on the wall either side of the arch, which the architects put there in the 1890s meaning nothing by it at all. At the far end, framed dead centre, the Washington Monument.
Nobody arranged that either.
