Vox Meditantis

What is your mission?

Sunday, 9th January, 1732

You come seeking what, I wonder? To observe me at my labours, bent over these fragments of the departed? Or perhaps to satisfy some curiosity about a woman who concerns herself with such morbid study when she ought to be attending to gentler pursuits?

I confess it freely – I am not at ease with your scrutiny this day. The bones lie scattered upon my work-table, the skull of some long-forgotten creature grinning its eternal grin beside a withered arrangement of flowers. Mr Sutherland, who keeps this studio, permits me to examine his collection when he attends to commissions elsewhere. ‘Tis a peculiar charity, allowing a woman access to his memento mori, yet I suspect he finds amusement in my devotion to ancient things. He comprehends not why I should wish to study the relics of civilizations long turned to dust.

But what purpose drives me, you ask? What calling compels me to these solitary hours amongst the trappings of mortality?

I would answer thus: I seek to read the testimony of stones and sherds, to decipher what the ancients wrought with their hands. Each fragment speaks – if one possesses the patience to attend its whisper. A Roman inscription, half-effaced by centuries. A medallion bearing the profile of some emperor whose very name is lost. These things endure when flesh fails, when beauty fades, when all the vanities we clutch so desperately crumble into nothing. In studying them, I touch something that transcends the brevity of our mortal span.

Yet I confess – and here is my shame laid bare – that my devotion is not pure. There is poison in my admiration.

I have waited years, decades of my life, for admittance to the society of learned gentlemen. I have schooled myself in Latin and Greek whilst they were tutored by Cambridge masters. I have pored over Plutarch and Pliny by candlelight whilst they debated in coffee-houses. And when Mr Douglas – whom I shall not dignify with fuller description – when he presented his paper upon Etruscan pottery to the Society of Antiquaries last Michaelmas, receiving their approbation and fellowship, I felt such a tempest within my breast as I dare not name aloud.

He is not my superior in learning. Indeed, I have corrected his translations more than once, though he accepts my amendments as though they were happy accidents of his own discovery. Yet he moves freely in those circles whilst I must content myself with borrowed access to studios such as this, with the condescension of men who regard my studies as a charming peculiarity, like a spaniel taught to dance.

This envy – for I shall call it by its proper name – eats at me like a canker. I covet his ease, his acceptance, the very masculine privilege that opens doors whilst mine remain barred. When I observe the deference paid to his mediocre observations, I taste bitterness upon my tongue.

The silence here is profound, is it not? Only the creak of timber, the whisper of my skirts against the floor-boards. Mr Sutherland’s preserved specimens regard me with their glass eyes, and I wonder if they judge my covetousness. The vanitas paintings upon these walls proclaim the futility of earthly striving – memento mori, remember you must die – yet knowing this truth and living it are vastly different things.

I have learned patience, at least. ‘Tis perhaps my sole virtue. When clerks turn me away from libraries, I wait. When gentlemen speak over me as though I were but furnishing in the room, I hold my peace. When my observations are attributed to my late father’s teaching rather than my own intellect, I swallow my protest. Patience, they tell us, is woman’s particular grace. How convenient for those who benefit from our silence.

Yet there is beauty in this work, despite my struggles. The curve of a Grecian urn speaks of hands long dead, of some potter who shaped clay with as much care as any artist applies pigment to canvas. The tessellation of a Roman mosaic – I examined fragments only last month – demonstrates such geometric perfection that one cannot but marvel at the human capacity for creating order from chaos. Art endures, you see. Expression carved in stone outlasts the empires that commissioned it.

Is that not a form of immortality? Not the resurrection promised by scripture, but something nonetheless – a voice that speaks across the centuries, saying: I was here. I made this. I mattered.

Perhaps that is what I truly seek. Not merely knowledge for its own sake, nor even the recognition I so shamefully desire, but proof that a life devoted to such study might signify something beyond the narrow sphere permitted to my sex. That when I am gone and my name forgotten – for I shall never see it printed in the Society’s transactions – perhaps some fragment of my understanding might persist, might inform some future scholar who puzzles over the same broken inscription I now examine.

The light fades. Soon I must extinguish these candles and return to my ordinary existence, where I am simply a woman of middling years and modest fortune, eccentric in her interests but harmless withal. Tomorrow I shall resume my patient waiting, my careful translation, my silent accumulation of knowledge that none will credit to my hand.

But for this hour, in this studio of death and beauty intermingled, I am what I was meant to be. And I wonder – is that not sufficient? Must I poison it with envy of what I cannot possess?

The skull grins on, offering no answer. The silence deepens. And I, as ever, wait.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.