In Praise of Oxford

(dedicated to those who like the blasé pose)

For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasing for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.

Here in Oxford, the one really decisive factor is not just that I'm a foreigner about whom no one knows or cares, about whom the only fact of any biographical significance is that I won't be staying for ever, it's that there's no one here who knew me as a young man or child. That's what really troubles me, leaving the world behind and having no previous existence in this world, there being no witness here to my continuity, to the fact that I haven't always swum in this water.

In Oxford the light remains the same from half past five, when the shops close and teaches and students return home and when the cessation of all visible activity first obliges you to notice it, until gone nine o'clock when the sun sets - as suddenly, apart from a lingering distant, ghostly glow, as if turned off by a switch - the signal for those who have determined on going out that night to rush impatiently into the streets. The same unchanging light, that accentuation of static quality or stability of the place, makes you feel as if you yourself were at standstill and even less a part of the world and the passing of time than one normally feels here.

There's as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can't accept that certain things won't repeat themselves. That's why I sometimes I envy Will, the old porter at the Taylorian, who must be twenty years older than me and yet, now that he's let go of his will for good, he lives in a constant state of joy and anxiety travelling back and forth in time throughout his life, both enjoying great new surprises and repeating things he knew before.

(That's enough Oxford nostalgia, Ed.)