So, probably wouldn't stand up in a job interview, but still. There we were in Oxford and there sure was a lot of English to read ...
We went to Oxford a couple weekends ago via Bus, with hoards of Swansea University Students (pretty much International, like us). Its a 4 hour bus-ride. But like I've probably already said, buses here in the UK are not quite the horror they often are in the states. A long ride, but pretty comfy.
Oxford, at its Centre (and there is a lot to it at the edges, where the re-ga-lar people live--and it looks like anywhere else, strip malls and industrial parks) is all about its Colleges. There seem to be dozens (ah, yes, 36 ...) and their buildings and chapels and residence halls dominate the town. Oxford University is the second oldest surviving university in the world (#1 is Bologna in Italy), and the oldest English-language University in the world. It was founded sometime in the 11th Century.
Yes ... so that's, like, a thousand years. A thousand years of students and teachers in the same place. Try to imagine that, oh Californian of the ever-revolving landscape ... There is architecture there stretching back all the way to the time of the Saxons. U.S.A., you were not yet even a dream in the eye of the dream of a zygote ... Poet Matthew Arnold called it, 'the city of dreaming spires' for all its church spires which, I must admit, in the misty gloaming looked fairly dreamy.
We wandered through the streets ... unable, however, to enter the colleges (all closed the day we went). I was impressed by rarefied and sequestered feel of Oxford ... Rather like cloisters. Students are protected inside the walls of the college from prying eyes or outside influences, placed into a context where they exist wholly as students (fed and cared for by the colleges--in fact there are cleaners who clean the students' rooms for them from what I've heard). I imagine there must be a bit of a connection with the way Monasteries, those first educational institutions, were run long ago. I was torn between envy and feeling quite Marxist and revolutionary about the whole thing. (Especially since we couldn't enter the lovely Radcliffe Camera ... since it was open to 'Readers' only ... its is a reading room that is part of Bodleian Library).
Now the Bodleian goes back to at least the 1400's. It has MILES of shelf space and quite a number of treasures. Copy of Shakespeare's First Folio anyone? Shelley's handwritten notes on Ozymandias? Most of the library (which is several buildings joined by an underground tunnel ... no, really) is, like the colleges, off limits (though as a UK university student I could apply for entrance actually ... will have to look into that!) but there are sections which are open. Christien and I stumbled into an amazing exhibit on Shelley, an Oxonian who once was a bit too rowdy for Oxford ... they kicked him out in his day but now seem to have gathered him into their arms as one of their own. In a little room we walked from case to case, looking a locks of Shelley's hair, a guitar he gave to a muse of his, but best of all at his notebooks with their sketches of trees, eyes, profiles, boats. And close-knit, beautiful, but illegible, handwriting ... though in one journal there were three words, written in larger, bolder print. On one page the word 'Illumines' on the facing page 'Own Shadows'. A message floating up from the text ...
We had a chance to climb up up the tower of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin which was well worth 3 quid a piece for the gargoyled views over the fantastic rooftops and skyline of Oxford. And later we even made it to the Ashmolean Museum where we wandered a bit among the ancient art, particularly the Buddhist images from Central Asia.
Ah, to be a cultured posh person, now that Spring is here ....
