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.