Day 2

...I'm afraid my details get a little sketchy here -- the first few days are running together a bit in my mind, but I'll do my best!

This was our first real day in Oxford -- our first day as Visiting Scholars, mind you, not tourists. This is an important distinction, since the town was inexplicably packed with high school students from every country imaginable. We gathered that the colleges were hosting summer events to draw prospective students, but we grumbled at the unexpected Spring-Break feel they gave to the place. Fortunately, they seemed to stick primarily to the main shopping areas of the town; unfortunately, those were exactly the parts of town we walked through every day. Eventually, the other students and I managed to find a detour to our building on Beaumont Street -- one which took us along the ancient walls of the city, past 17th-century row houses and tiny alleyways, until the road suddenly widened and dumped us out in front of the Bodleian Library and the Sheldonian Theater on Broad Street. We liked this route. :)

Now, as a Visiting Scholar, you must appreciate that I had a reputation to maintain -- that of the not-tourist. As such, I didn't take any photos at all until we broke down on Thursday and indulged in as many touristy things as we could cram into one afternoon. But that comes later.

However, for your viewing pleasure, here are pictures from that morning commute, taken later in the week:




Better? Okay.

One of the neatest things about Oxford is just how much people rely on bicycles to get around -- they made up about 40% of the traffic, and shared the road equally with the cars. Several streets in the heart of the town are closed to most motor vehicles, so bicycles are especially in abundance there. Our morning route took us through one of those streets. My favorite sight was a small pack of 7 or 8 people on bikes, all dressed for work or a class, stopped at a red light waiting for a lorry to squeeze through in the opposite direction -- each bike and rider leaning to starboard at exactly the same angle, right foot planted on the ground as they waited. The light changed to green and they were off in a flapping of academic gowns before I managed to get out my camera, curse them.

That first day of classes was the most intense in terms of factual information being passed along. As I said, this was primarily a preparation for getting involved in a discussion which, as yet, has no answers, but we needed some basic groundwork to get us up to speed on exactly what the questions were. Dr. Scruton lectured for an hour and a half on the philosophical approach to the question of what the human person is and what this mysterious property is that makes him different from all other animals -- call it mind, call it soul, whatever. Dr. Giordano then gave us an hour-and-a-half lecture on the development of the neuropsychological approach to the same question.

Listening to Dr. Giordano is like drinking from a fire hose: you open the valve, stand expectantly in front, then find yourself pinned against the opposite wall by the explosion. We took notes madly, realizing with dismay that we had completely forgotten the second half of an important sentence after the words, "Scientists then made the obvious and crucial realization that..." before he was off onto something else equally important and mystifyingly dense. He routinely used long, complex words to say ordinary things, like "interdigitate" and "obfuscating." A tentative question posed by a student for clarification resulted in a ten-minute response, more dense than the original explanation, and involving an anecdote which no one could understand or relate to the original topic. He is definitely brilliant, but certainly aware of the fact. He is also a born performer -- he speaks confidently and rapidly in a rich baritone, throws off jokes with ease, and ever-so-gently patronizes his audience. In another life, he probably would have made a fortune selling hair tonic and snake oil from a suitcase. You would have no idea what the concoctions were supposed to do, but by golly, you'd be convinced they'd do it!

We had most of the afternoon off, so we went off in search of a grocery store to buy lunch stuff for the week to save money. We then strolled through the main part of town, investigated a few interesting-looking shops, before returning for an afternoon discussion period. That evening, a few of the students and I headed to the White Horse pub, literally tucked inside Blackwell's bookshop, which had gradually grown around the old establishment. We knew it would be good at the sight of two elderly men, clothed in tweed caps, sitting contentedly on a wooden bench out front, drinking their pints. I opened the door, walked four steps down into the semi-darkness, and whacked my head on a low-hung beam with the helpful instructions "Mind Your Head" painted on it. Looking around, I was surprised at how small it was: a long bar ran most of the length of the pub on the left, and about six tables on the right made up the rest. The tables were primarily full of locals, a few of whom were chatting in a friendly way with a middle-aged American couple. Several men were lined up at the bar waiting to place their orders, and we had a deal of a time pushing our way through to the last empty table in the back corner. Once established, we enjoyed some fairly decent fish and chips and some flat, warm, nutty beer.

You know -- it's all about getting the full experience!

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Update: here's a photo of Blackwell's and the White Horse Pub I took back in 2006. (The scaffolding is no longer there, of course.) There's another entrance to Blackwell's on the far left of the pub. Weird.