The real Pod 5 is the new “Wet Pod,” a 125,000-square-foot space that serves as the home of vertebrate, invertebrate, and botanical collections stored in alcohol, ethanol, and other preservation fluids. There is indeed a forty-foot squid there, just as is depicted in the scene in TLS when Trish shows Mal’akh, posing as Dr. Abaddon, around what is said to be Pod 3 (which Brown refers to as the Wet Pod). In addition, there are 25 million other specimens that comprise the National Museum of Natural History’s biological collections, including some gathered by Charles Darwin himself. At the moment, Pod 5 is the most technologically current of the five pods, though Pod 3, the former Wet Pod, is getting a face-lift scheduled for completion in early 2010.
In a blog post, Megan Gambino, an editorial assistant at Smithsonian magazine, said of Dan Brown, “The bestselling writer is notorious for blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, and his latest book is no exception. The Smithsonian plays a dominant role in the plot. A major character works at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center. . . . The true-life address of that facility is even revealed.” Of the pods, she noted that Brown correctly captured the numbering system and some of the description, but “took some liberties with their uses. . . .”
While the SMSC is a central setting in The Lost Symbol, the Smithsonian as a whole plays an important role both directly and metaphorically in the novel. Peter Solomon is said to be the secretary of the Smithsonian, a position that tops the institution’s organizational chart. In real life, G. Wayne Clough holds that position. Where Peter Solomon is a 33° Mason with nearly unimaginable wealth, Clough grew up modestly in Georgia and there is no indication that he has any affiliation with the Masons. However, Masons did build many of the Smithsonian’s structures, including the building known as the Castle that houses the institution’s administrative offices as well as the crypt of James Smithson. Smithson, the great endower of the Smithsonian, is said by a number of sources to have been a Freemason.
The Smithsonian plays one other considerable role in The Lost Symbol, though it is quite indirect. Toward the end of the novel, Mal’akh attempts to release a video of a “gathering of the most decorated and accomplished Masons in the most powerful city on earth.” People captured on the video included, among others, two Supreme Court justices, the Speaker of the House, and three prominent senators. Brown’s implication is that the release of this video, pinning major lawmakers to a ceremony that involved drinking from a human skull, would shake the government to the core, perhaps toppling American democracy and the Masonic tradition in an instant. Whether such video revelations would have had such cataclysmic consequences is open to debate. However, Dan Brown may have found inspiration for his selection of high-ranking Masons from the board of regents of the Smithsonian Institution. That board includes, on an ex-officio basis, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the vice president of the United States, as well as three senators, three congressional representatives, and a group of prominent private citizens, which today includes at least three real-life billionaires.
James Smithson himself is a man veiled in mystery. When the British scientist drew up his will, he stipulated that his considerable fortune be bequeathed to his nephew. However, if his nephew died without heirs (which happened in 1835, six years after Smithson’s death), the remaining money would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Nearly nothing is known about why Smithson decided to make such a generous contribution to establish this kind of institution in a land he never visited. Much of what we might have learned about James Smithson turned to ash on a frozen January day in 1865 when the Castle caught fire and destroyed all of Smithson’s personal effects that had been shipped to America.
It’s unfortunate that the SMSC didn’t exist in that earlier era. If it had, Smithson’s effects would likely be in pristine condition today, and we might all have a better picture of the man who made possible the institution that bears his name.
Hiding Out in Jefferson’s Palace of the Book
Why Robert Langdon’s Adventure Takes Him Inside the Library of Congress
by the Editors
The Lost Symbol is many things: a thriller, an intricate puzzle, an elaborate tour of the “secret” Washington, D.C., and more. But perhaps beyond all of this, it is a love song to books, the written word, and the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. A book lies at the heart of its mystery, the “Lost Word” is its deepest secret, and its prevalent message is an exhortation to open the mind. Dozens of specific books and authors are mentioned by name in TLS, and numerous proverbs and aphorisms related to books are cited, such as, “Time is a river . . . and books are boats. . . .” In fact, one could read the entire work as an argument for the extraordinary power of words and books.
If one were going to pay tribute to books and words in a novel set in America—and certainly in a novel set in D.C.—one would naturally find one’s characters gravitating toward the Library of Congress, the most elaborate and inclusive home for books in the country. “It’s my favorite room in all of D.C.,” Dan Brown has said of its main reading room. Brown sends his characters there in a particularly clever way that underscores the central place books have in his novel: he literally makes those characters part of the library’s distribution system.
Library of Congress Main Reading Room. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
In chapter 59, Robert Langdon, Katherine Solomon, and Warren Bellamy travel deep into the library’s stacks to elude pursuit. Upon the realization that he’s within the labyrinthine stacks, Langdon notes that “he was looking at something few people ever saw,” and he steps away from the tension of the moment to express the proper level of awe and reverence at being in the presence of such an overwhelming collection of books. Bellamy convinces Langdon that the only escape route is via one of the conveyor belts used to get a volume from its place in the stacks to one of the three buildings that comprise the library. Langdon observes that the belt “extended a short distance then disappeared into a large hole in the wall,” immediately seizing his mind with claustrophobic visions and causing him to seek other options. He soon discovers, though, that if he’s going to get away from the CIA agents trying to chase him down, he is going to have to go hardbound. By chapter 62, Langdon has gotten over his phobias (or rather Bellamy convinces him that he has no other choice but to do so) and he rides the conveyor toward his delivery in the library’s Adams Building and temporary freedom. Brown makes the Library of Congress seem at once awe-inspiring and mildly sinister, and he uses its unique properties to grand effect.
The Library of Congress serves many functions, though helping symbologists stay free from misguided government functionaries is not supposed to be one of them. It is the primary research facility for the U.S. Congress. It is the location of the U.S. Copyright Office. It is the home of America’s poet laureate. But it is first and foremost a library, much like the one you would find in your community . . . assuming your local library housed 130 million items . . . and that it included 650 million miles of bookshelves . . . and that it had a staff of nearly 4,000.
Established by act of Congress in 1800, it was originally housed in the Capitol building and was intended then for use exclusively by members of the legislative branch. The British, perhaps sensing that someday their own British Library would be in competition with the Library of Congress for the largest in the world, burned its contents—then about three thousand volumes—to the ground in an 1814 invasion during the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson, in need of an infusion of cash (and, according to some reports, unwilling to part with his extensive wine holdings), agreed to sell his entire collection of 6,487 books—the largest collection in America at the time—to the Library of Congress for $23,950.
The famously well-read and intellectually curious Jefferson’s libr
ary included a wide variety of volumes, many of which were on subjects the original library had not included. Some within the legislature expressed concern at the breadth of the material, believing that a few of the topics fell outside the scope of the library’s original charter. Jefferson called his fellow politicians to task over such a suggestion, saying, “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” In other words, he was pushing the lawmakers of our nation to expand their minds, much as Peter Solomon suggests we all need to do at the end of The Lost Symbol.
Although Thomas Jefferson himself was not a Freemason, many of his contemporaries were Masons and their reverence for books was cut of the same intellectual and moral cloth as their emphasis on science, progress, tolerance, open-mindedness, and self-improvement. James Billington, today’s Librarian of Congress, and a well-known historian, has pointed out that it is no surprise that the Freemasons were integral to the American Revolution. Freemasonry, he once said, was “a moral meritocracy—implicitly subversive within any static society based on a traditionalist hierarchy.” Much of the impetus to find and believe in the moral compass of eighteenth-century Masons, deists, and Founding Fathers came from the deep rationality, richness, and importance of books in the early American experience.
Jefferson’s influence on the Library of Congress was profound and extended far beyond the volumes he sold to revive it. He claimed that he could not live without books and the Library of Congress became the ultimate manifestation of a book lover’s dream. While it does not contain every book ever printed in the United States (a commonly held myth), its collection is the most comprehensive compilation of American writing ever amassed. Jefferson believed there was a direct connection between the values of democracy and the quest for knowledge, and in that spirit the library seeks to be as inclusive as possible and as accessible as possible, its librarians having long ago cast aside the notion that it should exist solely for our nation’s lawmakers.
The library collection grew dramatically and quickly from Jefferson’s collection. Its home remained the Capitol building until the end of the nineteenth century when a shortage of shelf space clarified the need to give the Library of Congress a place of its own. And quite a place it was. Designed by architects John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz, it was created in the style of Florentine Renaissance buildings. This itself makes it distinctive in a city where major buildings tended to source their inspiration from the Romans and the Greeks. From the start, the goal was to create a library that surpassed all others in the world for splendor. The intention was to create nothing less than a palace for books. The original building (known now as the Jefferson Building) is a vast study in marble, its columned entrance giving way to sweeping staircases, ornately carved pillars, huge vaults of space, and, most dramatically, a massive 23-carat gold-plated dome that rises 195 feet above the main reading room. Tablets featuring the names of ten great creators of the written word encircle the dome—Dante, Homer, Milton, Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Shakespeare, Moliere, Moses, and Herodotus. Cervantes, Hugo, Scott, Cooper, Longfellow, Tennyson, Gibbon, and Bancroft get tablets elsewhere. Standing under the dome, one gets the impression that one has entered a cathedral. And indeed, in many ways, one has.
Two additional buildings now complete the huge sprawl of the Library of Congress. The Adams Building opened in 1938, its architecture and lines less elaborate. The Madison Building, also a much simpler structure, was completed in 1981 and serves as home to the librarian’s office, the copyright office, the Congressional Research Service, and the law library as well as the country’s official memorial to James Madison.
While the Library of Congress itself is a work of art, it is also home to many great works of sculpture and painting. More than forty artists have been commissioned to create major pieces for the library. The exterior includes the massive Neptune fountain created by sculptor Roland Hinton Perry and boasting sea nymphs, sea monsters, the sea god Triton (pictured before he bulked up for his powerful supporting role in Disney’s The Little Mermaid), and a majestic twelve-foot rendition of Triton’s father, Neptune. Circling the building as ornaments to the first-floor windows are the ethnological heads, studies in granite by William Boyd and Henry Jackson Ellicott of thirty-three ethnicities from around the globe. Three massive bronze doors greet visitors at the entrance. Commemorating writing, printing, and tradition as interpreted by three different sculptors, they are fourteen feet high and a combined three and a half tons in weight.
Among the artistic highlights inside the library are the eight statues in the main reading room representing philosophy, art, history, commerce, religion, science, law, and poetry. There are bronze statues at the staircases, mosaics depicting thirteen disciplines of knowledge, and Edwin Howland Blashfield’s mural Human Understanding, set inside the lantern of the dome. There’s Henry Oliver Walker’s mural Lyric Poetry celebrating the work of American and European poets in the South Corridor, Walter McEwen’s paintings of Greek heroes down the Southwest Corridor, and a marble mosaic of Minerva by Elihu Vedder along the staircase that leads to the Visitor’s Gallery. In the Adams Building, one can find the history of the written word as sculpted in bronze by Lee Lawrie, and Frank Eliscu’s four-story bronze relief Falling Books presides over the main entrance of the Madison Building. As Langdon waits for Bellamy to explain what’s going on with Peter and the Masonic Pyramid, they stride by the Gutenberg Bible. Overhead is John White Alexander’s six-panel painting entitled The Evolution of the Book, which traces the history of the word from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to illuminated manuscripts to the printing press.
Nearly all of the 29 million volumes the library holds are housed in sixteen-story stacks inaccessible to the general public, hence Langdon’s observation that he’d been where few others had. One doesn’t browse stacks of the Library of Congress to do research, to read the works of one of the writers immortalized on the library’s tablets, or to take something home to read to the kids. To get a book from the library, you must place a request and wait perhaps an hour or more to receive the book you desire. This delay comes from the fact that your book might indeed have a very long way to travel from the bowels of the stacks, perhaps riding the very same conveyor belt that took Robert Langdon on his claustrophobic ride to freedom. (While a conveyor system actually does exist and is currently being upgraded, Langdon’s ride itself would be much more of a challenge than Dan Brown suggests. According to a spokesperson for the library, “Since it is designed for boxes carrying books and has a significant number of horizontal and vertical switching points [e.g., going from the Jefferson basement level to the Jefferson cellar level], it would not be possible for a person to fit on it and ride from the stacks in the Jefferson Building to the Adams Building.”)
It is interesting to note that this ornate “temple of books” might seem out of proportion to the general perception of the place of books in the life of the average contemporary American. Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, said about the Library of Congress in a 2009 Times article, “It’s gratifying that someone once thought books deserved such an impressive home.” His suggestion, of course, is that most of us no longer read books regularly or value books and libraries, that no one has time to read entire books anymore, and that the Internet is supplanting the book as an information resource. Film and television draw much larger audiences. Far more people will download the latest Jay-Z album on their iPods (especially if one includes illegal downloads) than will buy the typical number one New York Times bestseller. Even the book’s newest incarnation, the electronic book, is a kind of repudiation of the book as a physical work worthy of a grand physical home.
In TLS, there are numerous references to lost words, lost books, and the lost wisdom of the ancients. We all know the cautionary tale of the fire at the Libr
ary of Alexandria where the world lost much of its physical storehouse of knowledge, not to be recovered until the Renaissance. (Much of Thomas Jefferson’s original collection in the Library of Congress was lost in a fire; ditto for James Smithson’s papers in the early years of the Smithsonian.) TLS is filled with the sense of loss and regret for a more golden, wiser epoch—and also filled with the encouragement to revive those long-gone traditions.
But now consider this: three of the biggest and most enduring cultural phenomena of the past decade have come from the book world via Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer. Has anything from the film world come close to matching the impact of these three authors in the last ten years? In fact, five of the top-grossing films of all time as well as five of the annual top-grossing films in the last ten years were based on books. Nothing in the music world has come close. Amazingly, in the aftermath of the death of singer Michael Jackson, the King of Pop’s Thriller CD was often cited for its phenomenal sixty million copies sold worldwide. But Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code actually outsold Thriller by more than twenty million copies.
Sure, television shows regularly draw bigger audiences than those that buy books by these authors. Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight has had somewhere around the same number of readers (though that number is still growing dramatically) as a show like America’s Got Talent has viewers. For that matter, more people saw G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra than bought the latest Harry Potter book. But how many were still talking about those other entertainments a week later (or an hour later, for that matter)? We know that readers can’t stop talking about Edward and Bella or Harry and Voldemort—or Robert Langdon and whichever brainy female partner is along for the adventure. One could therefore argue that books have had a more dramatic influence on pop culture in the last decade than any other creative art form.
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