Day 5

Okay, this is the day you've been waiting for -- the one with all the touristy photos! During the Thursday morning sessions back on St. Giles' Street, we were eager to discuss what we'd picked up from the conference the day before, get difficult points clarified, and generally put in our two cents to an audience that would actually listen to us. Namely, ...us. Still, we were surprisingly restless. At our 10:30 coffee break, we cornered Dr. Giordano and asked him how he envisioned the layout for the rest of the day.

"Oh, well, I was thinking we should talk some more about the conference and see what other questions you all have, but it occurred to me that it would be good to give the students some time to actually enjoy the town---"

"Oh yes!! ...er, I mean -- sure, that sounds good." (This is a direct quote. I was not very subtle.)

That day, we went crazy. Possibly the sustained brilliance of an eight-hour Oxfordian symposium had temporarily cured us of our need for brainiac stuff. At any rate, I was certainly ready to lower my brow considerably. Dr. Giordano had scarcely closed the last morning session when I announced to everyone that I was organizing a small group to go on a walking tour of the colleges and everyone was welcome. "After that," I said, "we're going to split up for a bit of souvenir shopping, then we'll head back to St. Hilda's around 5pm and go punting!"

"Do what?" asked Dr. Scruton, a little taken aback.

"Punting!" I announced confidently. (We'd planned this out amongst ourselves over breakfast. At any rate, I knew I would be sitting comfortably in the boat with someone else doing the work.)

"And who do you have lined up to punt for you?" We all looked at Jim Donahue, one of the IPS students, and smiled proudly. Jim looked concerned. "Ever punted before, son?"

"Uh, no..."

"Right. Let me give you a few tips." And Dr. Scruton launched into a long, detailed description of proper Oxford punting form, all of which sounded a bit obscure to me and difficult to translate from theory into action. Dr. Scruton's quiet, ironic smile throughout his explanation was a pretty fair sign he expected to hear all about Jim's dunking come Friday morning.

To my surprise, Jim began looking more confident. "Oh, that's all right. That sounds a lot like trolling a boat for crayfish. My brothers and I do that down in Louisiana every summer." Heh. Two points to Jim. We were going to be fine.

After wolfing down our lunches, we sprinted down Broad Street, still munching grapes and cheese, in time to catch the 1pm 'Official Oxford Walking Tour' ("See beautiful, ancient buildings, places inaccessible to the public! Less than a half-mile of walking!"), umbrellas stashed in our packs just in case. The tour took us through the chapels, refectories, quads, and cloisters of several different colleges; we saw the schools of Chesterton, William Morris, and Lawrence of Arabia (whose portrait in the refectory hall looked amazingly like Peter O'Toole. Go figure.) We saw where they filmed various scenes from the Harry Potter films; (they shot the infirmary scenes in the Bodleian library, the cads.) Sadly, my camera battery gave out half-way through, but you get the idea:

(The girls I went on the tour with. That's Melanie Baker and SuLi Lee in the front in blue, both from IPS, and Neha in the white sweater -- one of the senior scholar/med students.)

(The "Oxford Bridge of Sighs." We asked the tour guide about its significance: "Just a nifty way to join two buildings.")

This is a very old, very narrow alleyway, called "St. Helen's Passage." (I'm not sure if you get the idea of just how narrow this is from the photo; two people walking side-by-side would scrape the walls with their shoulders.) At the end is one of the oldest pubs in Oxford, which, sadly, we didn't have a chance to visit...

Entering through the front gate of the first college. They had smaller people back then. (Melanie and SuLi are both about 5'2".) As the guide pointed out, the oldest colleges were built like castles and with the same kind of fortress-like protection -- the reason for the original "quad" -- because when the colleges were first established in the town of Oxford, the townsfolk rioted and killed 63 students. It's not clear to me why; they just didn't like living in a college town, I guess...

Through the low front gate, out into the courtyard --er, quad-- and voila! This, I think, is University College, one of the three oldest colleges in Oxford, built in the mid 1200's. Like all the others, it belonged to a particular religious order, since it was only priests and male religious who were this educated back then. It really does feel like a cross between a castle and a monastery.

Looking out from the hall into the second, smaller quad-like area, called the cloister. This was an area to meditate, pray, and study in.

See that huge, ancient oak there, in the center of the cloister? Here's a closer look:

Should look familiar to Harry Potter fans. Apparently, something happens to Voldemort under that tree... I'm kinda vague. Any ideas, Karen?

Back outside the college walls and on our way to another. I'll upload the remaining photos to a web album and post it here soon; it's sort of more of the same. :)

Well, this post is already huge, and there's still stories of punting and an outdoor Shakespeare play in the evening that went horribly awry. Stay tuned for Part II!

Postlude?

My interlude has luded long enough. But it's late tonight and I procrastinated, so I'll finish my Oxford saga tomorrow, when I can use that to procrastinate from my dissertation reading. (When do I do my diss reading? When I have a report to write, of course! As some wiseacre said, you know you're a grad student when you procrastinate on one project by working on another.)

Meanwhile, something good I found over at dotCommonweal today, thanks to the IC link. (*waves* Hi, Margaret!)

"This Sunday’s Gospel, continuing the consecutive reading of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, contains the statement of Christ in response to the grumbling crowd: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” (I note in passing that the politically correct “I Am the Bread of Life” has transmogrified this into “unless the Father beckon”, apparently in order to avoid the masculine personal pronoun.)

In their commentaries on this statement, Augustine and Aquinas explored at some length how to reconcile the fact that faith must be free and the statement that no one can come to Christ (which means believe in him) unless drawn dragged, pulled by the Father. Both of the saints point out that the verb implies some degree of violence. If one has to be dragged to Christ, how can faith be free?

By pure coincidence, while thinking about my homily for this Gospel, I read an article in the London Tablet by Fr. Daniel O’Leary which ends with his quoting some lines from Denise Levertov’s poem “The Thread.” I was delighted to see how Christ’s metaphor informs the whole of what I take to be her description of her poetical and religious journey:

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone."