Cheers

Today is my last full day at Magdalen; my group of Academics packs out tomorrow morning. Some are heading home; a surprising number have barely time to unpack, re-pack and head back to school; a lucky few are going to travel around a bit more before heading back to the States.

The last week has been a blur, with final papers and projects due and more trips than usual. Running through everything like a minor motif in a symphony is an undercurrent of I can’t believe it’s almost over. We say it to each other constantly, as if it’s a new discovery, as if it’s almost over isn’t the undercurrent in every sentient mind, everywhere, all the time.

As it should be. For every Hero’s Home I’ve seen on this trip, I’ve seen twice as many Hero’s Headstones. When you realize that everyone you admire professionally is dead, it makes you wonder if maybe your time would be better spent admiring the living. For me, the Old Answer was: No.

But the Oxford Answer is the same one I learned in Improv Class, where you never, ever say no: you say, “Yes, and . . .”  Shakespeare? Yes, and Monica Drake. Tolkien? Yes, and J. K. Rowling. Lesson Learned: Don’t be such a damned snob. Boy, do I not know everything. I will visit the world of the classics, but live in the world I live in.

Speaking of being a damned snob, I am going to quit assuming that I know what’s going on with other people. Beautiful people aren’t always jerks. Intellectuals aren’t always interesting. Athletes aren’t always stupid. Reverse-prejudice doesn’t make you superior, it just makes you prejudiced.

The Oxford Answer is to talk to people about what we’ve got in common, even if as far as I can tell the only thing we have in common is standing in the same check-out line. I vow to quit worrying about being looked at and start seeing other people. Lesson Learned: Get over myself.

Adjacent to that Lesson, and seemingly in opposition to it, is another one: Take myself seriously. When I stop worrying about trying to look cool, I’m free to attempt the most basic (and most difficult) thing of all: doing what I want to do. The Oxford Answer is that no matter what your friends or your parents or Reddit or the Kardashians think, it’s permissible to love writing and math, skateboards and theatre, Gregorian chants and Pokémon Go. You don’t have to explain it or justify it.

(Sure, people may Make Remarks. Pity those people. They have yet to Get Over Themselves.)

I’m glad I paid attention every second I was here. I’m indebted to my tutors, academic Amazons who showed us Secrets of the Universe, bent our brains into new formations and then continued the discussions over cider and Guinness (extremely responsibly, of course). I’m grateful for every one of the other students here – those dear people who pretended I wasn’t slowing them down on the excursions, who invited me along to the pubs, who finally straight-up insisted that I sit at “our table” in the Buttery. I’m very thankful to my family and friends who kept me from losing my mind to homesickness in the middle of the night (either mine or theirs) via text, Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The Man will be here tomorrow morning (!!!!!!!) and we’re going to wander through the UK and Italy as our fancy takes us for a couple of weeks. I wonder if he’ll find me changed. I feel changed. I hope I am. It has been quite a trip.

I’m glad you came along. I can’t believe it’s almost over.

tl;dr: If you ever get the chance to attend Oxford University, do it. It’s worth the hype.

(Thank you, Sweetheart. Thank you for Oxford. Thank you for The Bodleian. I owe you one.)

Taken in the woods planted by C. S. Lewis and his brother Warnie at their home, The Kilns;

the woods supposed by many people to have been the inspiration for Narnia.

Yes.

I've been to Narnia.

Okay, Universe, I Get the Message

She strolled down Catte Street, feet steady on the cobblestones, and smiled at the harpist outside the Bodleian. She stopped to chat briefly with a friend (who was weaving a small skein of visiting family through the tapestry of Oxford’s main attractions) and recommended the Pitt Rivers Museum; she herself had just come from an early-morning visit to the dinosaurs there. Turning down the High Street she glimpsed the lacy Magdalen spires in the distance and sighed happily – almost home. That morning she had walked past the “new” Manchester College Clock Tower – briskly, in order to create a little breeze past her temples – and had noticed for the first time the carvings on adjacent sides: “It’s later than you think . . .” and “. . . but it’s never too late.”  How very true that is, she thought. How apt.

If I read that paragraph in a book, this would be the point where I’d throw the book across the room, because Life isn’t like that, right?  Life is real, life is earnest (please don’t tell the other Oxonians that I’m quoting Longfellow) and this is all very fine but we’ve got shit to do.

It turns out that’s not how it works.

That was me this morning, walking from museum to museum, ducking into a shop for tea, greeting a friend met by chance in the street in front of the Bodleian Library. It was me, it is me, and that was just one of the thirty-one mornings I’ve spent on this glorious adventure. And believe me, I am nothing special – I’m a little awkward, a little impractical, spend too much time thinking about chores and not enough thinking about miracles, and did I mention kind of middle-aged and round?

My life, though – that is really special, and I don’t mean in a Vintage-SNL-Church-Lady way. Last night I walked along to the New Building (c. 1733) to do some printing, and when I got back to my room (which is one of two on the ground floor) I met my temporary “neighbor” in the Guest Room (reserved for visiting former students) next door. He was a delightful British gentleman in his late seventies, and we fell to chatting about his years at Magdalen. It seems he, too, had read English Lit here, along with History; what was the course I was taking this summer? (I’m studying The Inklings, a clutch of famous Magdalen writers whose members included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.) By Jove, what do you know about that . . . when he was here, Lewis was one of his tutors!

I wish my biographers to note that I did not revert to full-on Yankee Native and screech, MotherFUCKER, are you KIDDING me right now???  I didn’t, but it was a near thing. Fortunately I have been here long enough to absorb some of that British Stoicism you hear so much about, so I merely thought the above, smiled, and said, Oh, how interesting! Turns out that phrase is the “On” button for interesting British septuagenarians, and as a reward I got several minutes’ personal reminiscence about The Master from one of his students.

WHO HAS THINGS LIKE THAT HAPPEN? THINGS LIKE THAT DON’T HAPPEN!

But they do. They happen. All the time. The thing is, you have to be ready.

I’m a middle-aged woman finishing up a 37-year Bachelor’s degree. A lot of my colleagues (the same ones by whom I was a little intimidated in an earlier post!) are “college-aged” and go to Ivy-League schools, but they have cramps and bounce checks and fight with their Significant Others just like anyone else does. We all have this in common: We do things.

We do things. We climb the tower. We hop on the train and go take a look at Paris. We sketch and we write and we travel and we take a job with the Scottish Parliament and we look behind every door that isn’t locked, and it doesn’t matter if our joints hurt or our friends don’t go or our hearts hurt or our pockets are empty, because these are things that people can do, and so we do them.

The world is here for everyone. It may be that the only difference between Oxford and your local college (or whatever is your version of What Only Privileged People Do) is that you don’t realize you can go to Oxford. Maybe Oxford is more complicated, but it turns out that the reason you’ve heard about Those Things You’ve Always Dreamed About is that they were set up in order for people to be able to DO them. Learning to sail, owning a horse, being a doctor, hiking the Appalachian trail, writing a book – these are things that people do.

You’re a person.

Do the things.

In Cloister

In real life, my days are gloriously chaotic, tangled and usually loud. My husband and I are at the hub of a large family which is rapidly expanding both geographically and numerically. We ourselves are often (as my mother puts it) running off madly in all directions; besides Family Business we travel and explore, he has work that he loves and I’m in school trying to get ready for whatever Phase 3 looks like. We are extremely pleased with one another, with The Fam and with the general shape of things. In one way or another, it's always been like this. I have never been able to see the appeal of monastic life.

That has changed.

Since being here, I’ve learned the joy of silence – not the silence where you know there’s a toddler breaking something or a teenager getting pregnant in the next room, but the silence of simplicity. While I am here, I am responsible only for keeping myself alive (I don’t even have to cook or empty my trash) and for thinking. There are places in the world - monasteries and nunneries and ashrams and ivy towers of all sorts – made specifically for thinking.  A few of these places – like this one – have sheltered millenniums’-worth of thinkers, and that deliberation has seeped into the very stones. 

Here, there is time. One marks it, not by the procession of clock hands, but by the procession of one’s thoughts.  Following a single thought, uninterrupted, from beginning to end has been a completely new experience for me, but it is possible here; the place is made for it. The gardens are restful, the architecture is inspiring. The paths are laid out for the express purpose of helping a walker mull over a problem – a bit of verse or a logical argument – so that his mind can march in tandem with his feet, or it can run off into the brush after the rabbits. 

It’s not always quiet here, as it is (I understand) in some cloistered communities. Everyone who lives here is working on and for some purpose, and the vitality is contagious. Here you realize that nearly everyone you meet in the Real World has stopped growing, and that what you missed when you left school was that sense of nearly everyone you met being fully engaged, exploring, and learning something new. Thinking is surprisingly difficult work, and here it spills onto the grass and the walkways and the streets, with laughter and shrieking, jangling ukuleles and practiced soliloquies. Somehow, it’s not obnoxious. Somehow, you understand it; you know what it’s like, after all. You think, too.

We are sheltered here, but we are not isolated. We hear what’s happening in the world; we discuss it, we go out into it, and (presumably) there are those here who will someday affect it. But sometimes, as now, when you can hear nothing but the wind in the trees and the Sunday-evening carillon of the bells in the Tower, it’s easy to imagine how someone could give up the outside world altogether. It’s easy to see the appeal of spending years trying to work out the answer to the question, “Well . . . so what?” 

I wouldn’t trade my crowded, complex, hilarious life for any other; but perhaps one does not need the noise for its own sake. Perhaps I can take a bit of the Cloister back with me. Maybe I can plant more roses and hydrangeas, fill more bookshelves, and spend more time walking. What I’d most like, though, is to return from this temporarily contemplative life with the habit of thinking. I’d like to hold on to the notion that finishing the book is as important as finishing the laundry, and that tending to myself is as valuable as tending to everyone else. Most of all, I’d like to remember that I don’t need to be Doing Something to be doing something. 

Loving and thinking: that would make Phase 3 the best of all possible worlds.

You Are Likely to be Eaten by a Grue

This week’s essay was one of those where there’s nothing for it but to plunge the pen into an artery and write with your heart’s-blood. The thing just would. Not. Go.  I finally whomped it into shape on Friday, so I decided to take this weekend off (save the ever-present reading) and have a little Adventure!

First I went to the Oxford Botanical Garden, since it’s A) a garden and B) right across the High Street. Pro Tip: If you ever get the chance to see the Oxford Botanic Garden, go first thing in the morning. I had the whole place pretty much to myself.

And what a place!  I will not bore you with the seven zillion flower-pictures I took; I will only bore you with two or three of them.  It’s the oldest Botanic Garden in Britain (it’s hard not to say Botanical, but when in Rome), and it had everything – the old Physic Garden was still there, as well as greenhouses, rock gardens and broadcast-meadows.

Afterwards I determined to go on a Pilgrimage. 

This is the River Thames, upon which Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll, who taught math at Oxford) would go rowing with Alice Liddell and her sisters.

This is the garden in which Alice Liddell played.

This is Christ Church College, where Carroll taught and Alice lived. I was a little bit lost by the time I got back to this point (full disclosure: I'd wandered about five miles out of my way), but from Christ Church you can see Magdalen Tower so I was finally back on the right track. So you see a White Rabbit near the school helped me to find my way:

This is in Merton College, where Tolkien was a Professor of English. It's the oldest continuously-running university library in the world:

Tolkien lived at 21 Merton Street for the last few years of his life.

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson and a revolving cast of extras had an informal literary-slash-drinking club they called “The Inklings,” and they were wont to meet at a pub they called “The Bird and The Baby”:

Cheers!

It was actually in the pub that I had the first real conversation I’ve had since I’ve been at Oxford. The lady at the next table was about my age and we got to talking (as you do in a pub); we began by exchanging polite banalities, and she said that she and her (grown) daughter (who was also delightful) were from Sully, Wales, but they were in town on a tour; how did I come to be here? I told her that I was a student at Oxford and, realizing it as I said it, that she was the first person here I have actually said that to.  Apparently the Welsh are disarmed by giant goofy grins, because by the time my Guinness was gone we were chatting away like we’d known each other for years. I can’t guarantee we’ll go home and write great fantasy novels, but the place certainly does loosen the tongue!