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The Green, Green Grass of Oxford

"Even I, ignorant of Shakespeare and baseball, could see this was wonderful." - J. Gonic

As a totem of my youth, the yellowed, clipped article gives a pleasing sense of the passage of time. For years it was locked in the wooden safe made for me by my grandfather when I was a child but I've since re-located it for fear that I'll forget the safe's combination. (Simply writing down the combination never seems to have occurred to me, or rather it would seem to be cheating.)

The article dates from the mid-'80s, back to the Fertile Crescent Era, the land of time & plenty immediately after college when I used to consume the Sunday New York Times for brunch. Wistful I am for a time when a conservative could read the Times without vomiting!

One Sunday I came across a long column that hit the sweet spot of romance and literature that so greatly appealed to me at the time. It was full of the glamour that I imagined the intellectual life held; I read transfixed, intoxicated by the author’s account of summer school at Oxford University and rooming in a five hundred year old building.

All the ingredients were there so it isn't a surprise I’d saved the clipping these twenty+ years, and it's all the more precious for not being found on the NY Times archives (not everything has been cheapened by easy availability). The author, Jean Gonic, wrote of Shakespeare and George Eliot, the differences between men and women, of the green and glamorous Oxford campus and literature as medicine. She spoke with that sophisticated familiarity of the classics that I envied and to which I aspired. (The Internet age has its magical applications; I Googled and found out more about her than I know about most of my relatives, including that she’s been dating a born-again Christian cowboy for the past seven years who won’t marry her despite her frequent requests. The more things change...?)

Under the intoxicatingly romantic conditions she described circa 1985, it’s no surprise she wrote of a crush between her and a fellow Oxford summer student, a Bardophile. It was stereotypical: men are from Mars and Shakespeare; women from Venus & Jane Austen. He was simple and happy and liked baseball, she was complicated and obsessed with relationships and (thus?) despairing.

"'Does Dorothea Brooke rise about her inherent moral stupidity?' our brilliant, patient tutor would ask us. Ah, moral stupidity! What is better than discussing moral stupidity in medieval quarters? The euphoria we felt when she read aloud to us in her warm, well-paced tones was stronger than opium."

Oh how I ached then not just to visit that ancient English campus but to stay there awhile, to dwell in those classrooms, to sit in the seats where students far brighter than me once studied! Travel depends on that, doesn’t it? Sightseeing relies on feelings of awe, which is why it is best done by the young for whom awe is more easily summoned. And where that awe can be more easily applied to self, in the form of self-aggrandizement.

"'Love is fine as long as you don't expect reciprocity,' I announced at my bon voyage lunch with the girls. 'These books are so contemporary it scares me.'"

Travel depends on a reverence for history and relics, for the capacity to be astounded merely by knowledge of your location: I recall amazement at awareness of being so physically close to the remains of Stonewall Jackson on a visit to Virginia. The old Confederate general was impossibly removed from me physically in terms of time and geography and so it was like time travel to be where he’d been and where his bones now lay.

I suppose it’s the idea of pilgrimage. Who or what you honor – as I did the life of the mind, and Stonewall Jackson – is where you want to be. If it’s not so much about relics and the material then travel becomes more about meeting glamorous people. If you’re fit and 20 and shallow, then night clubs acquire that glamour. But what happens when the definition changes for you? When it becomes less about intellect or beauty and more about sanctity? And when you begin to suspect that glamor can’t be transferred? (The killer phrase in John Updike’s memorial of Ted Williams is “But immortality is nontransferable.”)

Immortality is nontransferable except through God and ultimately all travel is a longing for God even if we don’t recognize it as such. But since He isn’t limited by location, time or space where does that leave travel? Would Paul Theroux still do what he does if he discovered God? A part of me that thinks we should tread carefully lest we outgrow the lesser enthusiasms, the sports or ethnic pilgrimages, which are real and good in themselves if not "originally" real but only derivatively so.

"I liked Stuart's regard for the Bard. Most men I knew held more regard for the Porsche. Wouldst that he lived on the West Coast and were unattached, I thought. Ah well - show a little forbearance - make Jane Austen proud of you. Be happy you met a 20th-century gentleman and warm your heart with a cup of hot tea."