Layers of Tragedy

Suffering from jet lag, I wandered around Tahrir this morning photographing the ubiquitous graffiti and murals about which I wrote yesterday. When I came upon the scene above, the joy of the trek was considerably dampened: Not only was I confronted with the walls erected by the military in an effort to prevent the movement of people about the square, but here were the remains of l'Institut d'Egypte, the library I had so often used as a graduate student to write about Egypt's nineteenth-century intellectual circles. The magnitude of the tragedy had not quite hit yesterday, in part because this area is now used by day as an impromptu parking lot, and there were buses obscuring the view. But the devastated space that this has become was quite clear at dawn this morning.