On Oxford (part xiii: Conclusion)

It took a while, but I have finally recovered from the writing load of my term at Oxford. I loved it, and it was incredibly rewarding, but it got to the point where I had done so much writing that the thought of doing any more, even replying to e-mails, seemed like a strain. Fortunately, such states of fatigue rarely last too long for me. I have returned to a state where I want to do nothing but write and now have difficulty finding time for it. Such is life I suppose.

The last few weeks at Oxford seemed fairly uneventful. That is not to say that there was nothing happening--everyone was doing a lot, but it was all bookwork: researching and writing the last papers. Much of my time was spent in libraries during the day, then I would spend the evening working. There was a rhythm to it, and each day had its own interests, but they all seemed to run together after a while. The last week was probably the toughest I have ever had academically. I have never researched and thought about a topic as in depth as I did for my long essay on Samuel Beckett's Endgame. I was one of the last people in our house to finish, but fortunately, it was not because I had been lazy, but because I had filled my time with as much work as possible. I loved the topic, I believed in my argument, and I wanted to do them justice. I think I did.

Once that final paper was turned in, there was such an amazing flood of renewed life in our house. We could finally all unwind and spend time together without feeling like we were neglecting homework. It was great. I finally made it back to the Ashmolean Museum and checked out their fine art--some very impressive pieces. I started playing outside more: frisbee, soccer, badminton, and even some wrestling. It was terrific. I wish that state could have gone on longer.

For some people it did, of course. At our debriefing on the last Friday, the head of the program told us about the eruption of the Eyjafjallojokul volcano which had closed British airspace. Most of the people in the program were to be stranded in Oxford for the next week. By sheer providence, my friend Eric and I had made plans to travel to the continent by bus and in continent by train, so we did not have to cancel our plans.

Saying goodbye was strange. Strange and difficult. I still don't know that I have processed it.

After a final meal of fish and chips in London, Eric and I boarded our overnight bus and set out for Paris. What we did not realize was that our bus was not going through the tunnel to France, but was stopping in Dover to board a ferry and cross the channel. Exciting as this was, it meant we had to get off the bus where we had been sleeping (or trying to). This made for a rough night, but waking up in Paris was worth it.

What one must understand about Eric and I is that we are both pretty laid back fellows. What one must understand about our trip is that we had done next to no planning. We knew where we were staying every night and how we were getting from city to city, but that was it. Thus, most of our sightseeing ended up being whims of the moment. This was how, on our first day, we stumbled upon the Bastille monument, Notre Dame, the Louvre (including the Mona Lisa), and the Eiffel Tower. I had been sceptical of the Eiffel Tower for a long time, but we saw it at sunset, and it certainly lived up to the hype.

The next morning, we walked into the lobby of the hostel and saw several of our friends from Oxford. We had originally been planning to share most of our travels with them, but they had bought plane tickets and could not arrange all the changes in transportation, and so this was our only day with them. We tried to make the most of it, visiting the Moulin Rouge and Sacre Cours before buying baguettes and cheese and having a picnic in Luxembourg Park, where we learned that you are not allowed to sit on the grass. After lunch, we saw the Pompadour, a very odd building, and visited lots of famous dead people in Perre Lachaise. After this, Eric and I found our way to the train station to say goodbye to France and begin our overnight journey to Rome.

Waking up in Rome was about as mystical as waking up in Paris. We checked into our hostel and then began to explore the ancient part of the city. It was surreal to come over the crest of a hill and see the Coliseum waiting for us. The structure was just incredible. From there we went to the palatine hill and the Roman forum. The ruins were just incredible. There is something about ruins that just captivates me. That is a big part of why I like capricci paintings so much.

Our next day was spent at the Vatican, where we got to stand in St. Peter's square and here the Pope himself address the people assembled there. We didn't understand the Italian, but it was cool to see His Holiness. We left early to stay ahead of the crowd and visited the Musei Vaticani, one of the largest museums in the world, and also home to The School of Athens and The Sistine Chapel. It was incredible. We spent hours there and we only saw one wing of the museum. On our way back to see St. Peter's we stopped at a gelateria a friend had recommended called The Old Bridge and

Oh

my

goodness

There is no way to put into words how good gelato is. It is everything ice cream ought to be. After that we visited the basilica. If Notre Dame was the most imposing church I had ever seen and Sacre Coeur the most elegant, then St. Peter's is by far the most magnificent. There was more gold and marble than I could begin to comprehend. It was overwhelming. I must have taken more than 200 pictures just of that building. The Vatican had exhausted most of our day, but we had time to find a nice cafe and buy paninis...panini's conveniently named after American movie stars. Eric got a Sylvester Stallone, and I got a George Clooney.

Our next day started with a quest to visit a gallery which happened to be closed: huge bummer. However, this gave us time to visit the zoo: a very fun little experience. And while we were there, we saw signs for the National Museum of Modern Art. That museum was easily the best surprise of our trip for me. We spent several hours there, and I now have a list of dozens of artists and works of art to research. They also had an incredibly fascinating exhibit on 1970's avant garde feminist art--mostly photography, but also featuring some videos, drawings, paintings and sculptures. After this, we visited the Piazza del Poppolo, in the vicinity of which we found a charming Italian restaurant where we decided to splurge on a hearty meal. The bruschetta was absolutely incredible, my pesto was remarkably creamy, and the espresso surpassed even the French coffee. Such a meal.

Our next and final day in Rome was dedicated mostly to plazas and fountains. They are all over the city, and most of them were designed by Bernini. The man practically built Rome. In the midst of all of these, we found the Pantheon. It is unfathomable to think that the Pantheon has been standing for almost two millennia, and while it is smaller in scale than St. Peter's, it's furnishings have just as much splendour. While enjoying a fine lunch in The Miscellenea, we made plans to work our way back toward the Vatican (and by way of the Vatican, to The Old Bridge). On our way, we got to walk along the Tiber until we reached the Castel de Sant Angelo, a building which has served as a mausoleum, as a papal palace, and as a medieval fortification. After this, we got our last gelato and realized that we still had an hour before we needed to head toward the airport, so we filled this time by tracking down the Church of St. Peter in Chains featuring, as its namesake, the supposed chains which held Peter in the story from Acts 12. However, the church is more famous for housing Michelangelo's Moses. Seeing both this sculpture and La Pieta while in Rome were fantastic honours.

It was all downhill from there. We caught our flight to London Heathrow, spent the night in the airport, then caught our eight hour flight to Chicago.

Home.

I still feel somewhat like a visitor and not like someone who lives here, but I am home.

On Oxford (part xii: Complete)

14 essay

89 pages

29,813 words

And that's without the works cited.

On Flash Fiction

So, I've been thinking for a while that I really ought to develop my prose writing a bit more, as well as my control of language. In the midst of these thoughts, I discovered that I really enjoy the challenge of writing flash fiction: a short story usually of somewhere from 100 to 300 words, maybe 500 at the most. I really like the 200 word mark. Creating a story and characters with so brief a space can be a lot of fun, and it leaves a lot to be created by the reader as well. The genre is also really appealing to our instant-info culture that might not want to take the time to read a fifteen page short story, but can stomach a page's worth of story. I started writing some, and I'm thinking that if I can write a bunch of them over the summer and maybe start another blog posting them in instalments. Here's one of the first that I wrote, inspired by a scene in an Oxford street.

Hold

The alley was wide, but few people used it. It may have been because the tall stone buildings on either side kept out the sun most of the day except for around 12 o'clock. That’s where they stood, surrounded by murky shadows while strangers passed by on either end of the manmade ravine.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He bowed his head to look at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Are you sure?”

She nodded slowly.

A breath of wind wound its way down the alley and swept up a few of her golden hairs, coaxing them to flutter before her face and land on her moist lips. His dark, gentle hand brushed those strands aside, tucking them behind her ear and letting his palm rest for just a moment on her warm cheek. She might have been blushing, but the half-light around them made her almost expressionless face appear more serene than he had ever seen it.

He felt her jaw tighten.

“Come on. We should be going.”

Her heels clicked on the cement footpath as she walked. But he lingered ever so briefly, saying goodbye to the air where her perfume and his hand still hung.

On the World

"The crisis started with the end of the seventeenth century, after Galileo. The eighteenth century has been called the century of reason, le siècle de la raison. I've never understood that: they're all mad, ils sont tous fous, il déraisonnent! They give reason a responsibility which it simply can't bear, it's too weak. The Encyclopedists wanted to know everything . . . But that direct relation between the self and - as the Italians say - lo scibile, the knowable, was already broken. Leonardo da Vinci still had everything in his head, still knew everything. But now! Now it's no longer possible to know everything, the tie between the self and things no longer exists . . . One must make a world of one's own in order to satisfy one's need to know, to understand, one's need for order. There, for me, lies the value of the theatre. One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard . . . Yes, even the game of chess is still too complex"

--Samuel Beckett

On Oxford (part xi: A Diversion)

I am well overdue in reporting my recent trip to Ireland. A week overdue in fact. I'm not sure how it happened, but I just haven't been able to work myself up to writing it all down. I think a part of it is still living in me and writing it down would be imprisoning it, hindering its growth somehow. But perhaps not. I will do my best to give a good description without smothering the experience.

We started in Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, the region that is still a part of the United Kingdom. We got there early in the evening, checked into our hostel, and then just wandered around until we found a good pub, and when we did, we found a good one. There were five of us, and we all agreed that it was the finest pub food any of us had ever eaten.

We got up early the next morning so we could have a full day. Our first stop was a walk along the river, and what should greet us on our first morning in Ireland, but an Irish rainbow. No sign of leprechauns or pots of gold, but we did find our way to the oldest covered market in Ireland where we bought bread and cheese and fruit to get us through the day. From there, we set off to see the Ulster Museum. It was interesting because it was not a huge museum, so it didn't focus on any one area in particular, but instead it was filled with art, sculpture, history, anthrology, science...basically anything you could imagine. There was even a fashion art section. It was an incredible museum. After that we lunched and then wandered around in the botanic gardens next to the museum.

When they started closing the hot-houses, we left and started heading into some of the more historic areas of town. Belfast has been a pretty volatile region both politically and religiously, and we walked through some of the neighbourhoods that have been the centres of the conflict in the region. It was eerie being there and feeling the tension. They had these murals painted all over the place, and a lot of them were signs of remembrance for people who had died in the Troubles. There was a lot of anger in them, and some of them even seemed to glorify paramilitary activities. It was surreal, especially for my friend Kate who had been studying Irish political history for the whole term.

When it started getting late we headed to the bus station and bought tickets to Dublin. While waiting for our bus, we finished off our supplies from the morning shopping spree. It was a two-and-a-half hour trip from Belfast to Dublin, and we spent it in quiet conversation, and possibly a bit of dozing off (we had done a lot of walking). By the time we got to Dublin, we were pretty beat, so we just tracked down our hostel and crashed. That night was when the British isles moved the clock forward for their daylight saving time, which one of our rooms forgot, but still got ready a half-hour early, while the other remembered, but slept in a half-hour, meaning we started the day late, but together. This hostel had breakfast provided, which was nice, and set us off for a good day of exploring. There are memorials and monuments all over Dublin. It seemed like every corner had its own famous person to visit. One of the first we saw was a statue of James Joyce, which was cool.

We made our way through these icons of history to Glasnevin cemetery in the north of Dublin, where almost every famous Irish political figure is buried, including the likes of Charles Stuart Parnell, Daniel O'Connell, and Michael Collins. We wandered through the packed cemetery (over a million graves) for quite a while and eventually met a charming old Irish fellow named Freddy Daly who took us around and showed us some of the less well known figures and told us their stories. He actually knew some of the people buried there. It was a startling juxtaposition of living and dead history, but in a completely different way than we met with in Belfast.

After the cemetery, the five of us sat down for a splendid Chinese feast in a local buffet. By that point, we had been on our feet for about four and a half hours, most of which had been spent walking, so we took full advantage of the "all you can eat" invitation. Perhaps not the best choice with all of the walking left, but these are the choices that fill our lives.

The rest of the day was just seeing the sites: political centres, cathedrals, a park (which just so happened to have plaques commemorating some of the great Irish writers including the likes of Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Wilde, and my personal favourites: Yeats and Beckett). My favourite thing we saw in the afternoon was definitely the Famine Memorial on the banks of the River Liffey. It is one of the most moving sculptures I have ever seen in my life. I could have studied it for hours. As evening approached, our group split, and the three of us going back to Oxford in the morning drifted back toward the bus station to catch a return bus to Belfast. It was another two and a half hours of good conversation, and good rest for our feet. Once we got to Belfast, we had a short while to gather provisions for dinner and the inevitable fourth meal we had planned to eat while staying awake in the airport (to save money, we hadn't booked any accommodation for that evening) and for breakfast. Then we caught the shuttle to the airport and camped out. We got on our flight at 6:00 am. When we landed in London, we came straight back to Oxford. It was so weird to be sitting in a lecture with everyone else when we hadn't slept that night, and we still had the smell of Belfast streets on our clothes. Another very surreal experience.

Since then, I have mostly been catching up on work. We have been going on field trips with our program seeing different cities and old churches. However, we are coming to the final stretch and there are just a couple of massive papers looming between me and a week visiting three of Europe's greatest capitals: London, Paris, and Rome. After that, it will all be done. Strange.