The Last Word

I've been home now for almost four days, and now I think its finally time to wrap up this blog. I'll be thinking about my time abroad for a long time, but all chronicles have to come to an end at some point, even if the adventures don't. There is one final episode I have not had the guts or the heart to write about yet, though I think it is the most meaningful and earth-shaking aspect of my experience at Oxford. So here goes. The big finale of my experience at Oxford.

About two weeks before the end of term, I got myself into an extra-curricular tiff with one of my favorite tutors. Its all a bit foggy how it began, but it somehow came about that this professor implicitly challenged my assertion that Harry Potter could play a useful role in the academic world. He maintained that it did not, which of course made me bristle, if you know anything about me and Harry Potter, you know that it informs my whole philosophy... or at least, I thought it did. Our casual disagreement finally came to a head when, after a lecture one day, I asked him if he would promise to read whatever scholarly Harry Potter literature I could come up with. I wanted him to see how wrong he was to slander a genre so dear to me, a series which I had informed the way I think since I started reading it in the fourth grade. I thought if I could just compile a bibliography impressive enough, I could wow him into admitting that he was being a pretentious, stubborn ivory tower scholar, and his refusal to acknowledge Potter's value in an academic setting was based on the trite assumption that anything popular is not worthy. He was very amused by my proposition, and promised to read anything I could come up with by the end of term. Full of righteousness and strengthened by the knowledge that I alone could redeem the underdog series in the eyes of the Oxford authorities, I set to work researching Harry Potter in academia in addition to the other work I had to do for classes. 

Despite a full blown inquiry at Blackwell's and several emails to a known Potter aficionado back at St. Olaf, I had an incredibly pathetic scholarly reading list to present to my tutor.  I compared my three sources with the three page lists he had given me to read up on Utopian literature earlier in the semester. It was laughable, and I was wrong. Ok, so HP hadn't made its grand entrance onto the academic scene yet. That's ok, I thought, it is still a new series, it just needs an opportunity- it needs an introduction, or else it will be scorned forever by the academic community as a worthless, popular series- the stuff of Warner Brothers, but not to be dragged into Oxfordian matters. That was when I decided to write the damn thing myself. If I couldn't find the right scholarly material I needed to impress my tutor, I would write it myself. It was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done, including the time I told Miss Morrie she was a bigoted condescending pig in front of the whole class and got sent to in-school detention for the rest of the day. So, with one week left in the semester, an exam, and a big paper looming on the near horizon, I decided to write an extra essay, an apologia pro Harry Potter.


I have never worked so hard on an essay. I thought about it when I wasn't writing it, and I edited it multiple times a day, deleting whole pages, and rewriting the same paragraph over and over. I included footnotes. I tried to frame the whole validation in the pastoral tradition, which I knew to be the tutor's pet subject. In some drafts, I even pulled lines from his very own lectures and inserted them in the footnotes to support my own points, but in the end I decided this was too insulting, and removed them (my favorite was from a lecture on Milton's Areopagitica in which he said, "scholars only mock the things they truly fear.") Anyway, at 4:00AM on my day of departure, I finally printed off a copy of my Apologia and put it in his mailbox with a shaking hand. I wanted it to be good. I wanted him not to laugh at it, and more than anything I wanted to prove that he was wrong, and Harry Potter had unmeasurable potential as an untapped source for moral ideologies, literary comparisons, and historical commentaries. By writing a 2600 word essay describing Potter's continuation of his own favorite literary tradition, I hoped to prove my point. 


Within 24 hours, he had written me an email response. It was three pages long. It will be impossible to describe exactly what was said, and with what tones, and how it affected me, even if I reproduced the whole Apologia and his comments for you to read, but when I was finally brave enough to read his response, I was shocked. He seemed to not only have read the Potter books (a fact which he had previously denied) but he thanked me honestly for starting this conversation with him. That was the good news. The bad news was that what he had to say threw me for the worst loop of my life. Again, I am unable to recreate the response for you, but the main gist was that Potter is ultimately escapist literature. Rowling's world might serve as a sort of Arcadia for my generation  (Gothic architecture and wizards serving the same purpose as pastures and shepherds in classical pastoralism) but it remains escapist. It does not address the problems of today, or if it does, it buries them too far beneath the scenery and smoke and mirrors of wizarding life. He seemed to appreciate my enthusiasm, but wished I had applied it elsewhere. He kindly forwarded a final reading list for me, which I feel I will have to complete before I ever show my face in Oxford again. I was utterly humbled, and am not quite sure what to think of myself or my favorite series. I guess, this is what academia is all about, and I just need to learn not to get so emotionally attached to my subjects.


So that's that. Oxford has left me with a lot to think about, Arcadias and the value of nostalgia/escapist literature not in the least. I've traveled to a lot of places in the past months that could almost be the Arcadian paradise man seeks. It all depends what interests you: Oxford could be an Arcadia for librarians, Rome is almost perfect for the historian in many ways, and Paris for lovers, among other things. There are spits of gardens and countryside in between everything, but none of these are large enough to serve as a true classical Arcadia these days. And Vermont, of course, my home, is a type of Arcadia itself, one of the last truly green places on earth, but now that I've come home and started reading up on global warming, I feel like even the Northeast Kingdom is sullied as an ideal landscape for men to play out an ideal life. The more I think about it (and I hope I'm about to think about it quite a lot more), the more I start to feel that the true Arcadia is not a place, but a connection between people. This has become apparent to me as I've stayed in touch with my family and friends through video chats, emails and letters these past months. What makes a place close to perfect is when I am with any one of them. As Theocritus and Spenser have Romanticized and longed for the pasture of a bygone  Golden Age, and as some 11-year olds have sought for their Hogwarts owl in the mail, I have found myself longing for my old company more than anything else this semester. I am not sure what that means yet, but if I ever figure it out, I will get back to you. For now, I am going to close the book on this blog, and start working on my next story: "Henry and Francois: how a jaded American scholar and a middle class Parisian cockroach were perfect for one another."


Thanks for reading everyone.

The City of Lights

Guilaine and I left our teeny tiny apartment in Rome just after dinner on Friday April 22, and hopped (as gracefully as any two ladies could ever hop with so much luggage) on a very crowded bus to the train station. From there, we caught a night train to Paris, City of Lights. I love night trains- the way they whisk you off to someplace new while you're sleeping, and how the jolt of the wheels on the rail eventually subsides into a rocking motion, and the sound of the whistle seems to be heard from farther and farther off as sleep overcomes you. Gui and I shared a compartment with a little French family. The mother and little daughter (about eight) were equally cool towards us - Mademoiselle laughed with as much derision as an eight year old can muster when I exhausted my French vocabulary asking her name, and if she'd had a good time in Rome. The first thing she said to me was "adieu" the next morning as she got off at Lyon. Her father was completely good-natured and used his scant and heavily accented English to make jokes about the Italians in the compartments on either side of us. He also nodded appreciatively and tried to encourage our pathetic attempts at French, even when Guilaine slipped into Italian (that was the last straw for Madame and Mademoiselle, who, from that point on, ruined their attempts to pretend we did not exist by shooting us dirty looks throughout the evening). We passed most of the evening in the dining car, sharing a little travel size bottle of wine and a ham sandwich made with bread so white, it probably shortened my life three or four days. When it got too dark outside to see the countryside whizzing by, we shifted our attention to making eyes at the bartender. He became more and more attractive as he proved conversant in English, Italian, French, and German throughout the night. I got another opportunity to feel ashamed for only speaking English.

The next morning I woke up because the train had come to a sudden, lurching halt. When I wandered back to the dining car, there was only one man there, who asked me in French why I was up so early. I liked him, he had a pair of twinkling, old world eyes that I found reassuring- he also was kind enough to ignore my heinous French. He was able to tell me that we were stopped  because something had been caught under the train - a piece of trash, no doubt, but I never found out. When I asked him where we were, he said, "a beautiful field just south of Lyon, and what better place to stop?" and then he left the car, presumably to twinkle at other world-weary people. The scene out the window moved me deeply, though I have no idea why: an endless field of fresh spring green waved from our track to the far distant horizon, which sloped up, and was crowned with a ridge of dark pines. A small herd of brown cows munched near the tracks, and looked at us as though train breakdowns on this track were the main component of the ennui they suffered. They were unlike Vermont cows, they had a sort of devil-may-care look about them. Without speaking, they seemed to say, "go ahead, tip me, see what happens" ... with a French accent of course. One dirt road ran perpendicular to the tracks, with a single farmhouse situated about halfway between us and the horizon. The whole scene was enveloped in early morning dew, and the fog was so thick it would have given British fog a run for its money. It made me think of WWII and phantoms of de Gaulle's Resistance fighters continued to flit across the landscape even after I shook my head and blinked. Some of them fell as they ran, cut down by Nazi bullets, and others ran on, vanishing into the mists, and still no one else came into the dining car. I was glad when we started up again. A  little later, the bar opened, and I could get a hot cocoa to help keep the phantoms away.

We arrived in Paris mid-morning, and met up with Dad at the train station. He had a huge throbbing wound on his hand, and explained with expert nonchalance, that he had been attacked by gypsies in a deserted subway station the previous night. Apparently they had trapped him on an escalator, hitting the emergency stop, and cutting him off at the top and bottom. When they went for his wallet he apparently karate-chopped at their neck, and was bitten. I can picture him him bellowing like a wounded rhinoceros at this, and I believed him when he said that he then put up such a fight that they quickly ran off, without his wallet. It really is a spectacular bite wound- all purple and infected-looking, complete with teeth marks. Luckily nothing else of that magnitude happened while we were in Paris. Gui and I allowed Dad to steer us around the city since he knows it so well already, and we benefited from his superior knowledge of good restaurants and fluent French. He was only mocked once for his Canadian accent. As in Rome, much of our time was spent wandering around and taking frequent rests at cafes, enjoying the human fauna. Highlights of Paris include the Louvre (huge line to see the Mona Lisa, but no one standing in front of the nearby Raphels- WHY?), the Garnier Opera House (box 5 has a little plaque on it that says "Reserved for the Phantom of the Opera"- awesome), some big famous Paris department stores (Gui and I got yelled at for trying on hats we were obviously not going to buy), a three hour meal at Dad's favorite restaurant, le Lyonnais (direct quote from Dad, "there is sex, there is paradise, and then, there is le Lyonnias"), and an afternoon at les Bagatelles gardens. We also joined what seemed like half of Paris at Easter mass at Notre Dame. This was a great moment for me, because I had studied the cathedral at Oxford for one of my tutorials, and I knew exactly what I was looking at- they just don't do early Gothic cathedrals like they used to. Of course, the best part of the trip was Dad's constant commentary- a mix of pure academic professorial lecturing and mildly inappropriate commentary on tourists and "grotesque" modern architecture. This is one thing I cannot recreate on a blog, not even if I had written down all that he said.

Paris was very beautiful, maybe my favorite big city of all time. The height limit on the buildings and the amount of open space make it seem more open, the air more free (despite the thick second hand cigarette smoke in the air). I loved the history and the cafe culture, and it was fun to partake of the many pretentions of that culture for the week... still, by the time I got on the plane back to Vermont, I was more than ready to breath the fresh air, and see the lake, and hug my mom and my dog- not to mention do a load of laundry. I found the City of Lights to be dazzling and refreshing at first, but stare at any light too long and its bound to become blinding.