The Letter Writer

Now that the official Oxford term is over, I have been demoted from student to visitor status in the eyes of the omnipotent Bodelian bureaucracy. No more library access for the likes of me. This means I spend a lot of time reading books in Blackwell's, the largest bookstore in the galaxy. Luckily, there is a proportionately sized Cafe Nero on the second floor where I like to sit and drink delicious hot cocoa and read my little stack of unpurchased books (quite illegally). This was exactly where I was sitting a few days ago, in a nice patch of sun, reading Theocritus. As I read, a skinny, middle aged gentleman tottered over to an empty table across from me. He reminded me of a high school English teacher I had once, with a gray-streaked ponytail and fang earring and glasses. He had that helplessly dazed look characteristic of so many Oxford citizens who drink ideas instead of water and breath books instead of air. There was something else about him too, but I can't say what. His clothes were all black, and his face appeared to be disembodied, vivid and white above the black mass of indistinct coats and scarves. He sat down with a tiny little cappuccino and a glass of water (room temperature, no ice, like all beverages this side of the pond). He also had a greeting card, just purchased, and still wrapped in cellophane. The next 30 minutes of his life was spent doing something extremely ordinary, but with such intensity, I chose to use Theocritus as a prop to disguise the fact that  I was watching him rather than actually read it.

First, he arranged his drinks: the water went to his far left. After several moments, he seemed to decide that the best place for the cappuccino would be  the far right edge of the little, European-sized table. The still-wrapped card took center stage, while the receipt was hastily whisked away into a pocket, like a carpenter would brush wood shavings away from his finished masterpiece. He sat back, unsmiling, and considered the arrangement. He took a tiny sip of the right-hand beverage, and made a face of disgust. Next, he took three sugar packets and shook them down for an unnecessarily long time. Ten seconds, twelve seconds, fifteen... all the while staring ahead into the crowd of coffee drinkers, seeing something I could not see. After pouring two sugars into the water, and the third into his cappuccino, our man finally opened the cellophane wrapping of his card. This was done with a paper clip, (which had previously been serving as a tie clip), most expertly, in one swift, decisive movement I would not have believed possible from a man who had just spent two minutes arranging his drinks, and a whole quarter of a minute shaking down his sugar packets.

He moved quickly now, as though the card would become stale in the fresh air. He brought a black bic pen out from a nondescript bag under the table, and sent the cellophane wrapping down to join the rejected receipt in the inner recesses of his pocket (he was the sort of man who makes you want to know the contents of his pockets). He flashed the card open so fast, I never saw what was on the outside, although the inside was momentarily blank. I was sitting a mere three feet from him, so crammed are the Cafe Nero tables, and even though I had remembered my glasses that day, I could not make out anything other than tiny, nondescript dots of letters blossoming from his pen. Its better that way, no one should read other peoples' letters, but I would not have had the willpower to refrain. He stopped after the first page and drank off the cappuccino in one go, gagging. He continued to write as steadily and determinedly as he had shaken the sugar packets, and this time I am sure it was words in his ears that I could not hear rather than scenes ahead of him in the cafe that I could not see. He wrote all the way down to the bottom of the second half of the card without pausing to think of what to write next, or even to shake his pen, and I worried that he would burn holes in the card. Finally he put the pen down, and brought his eyes down to the table, rather than bringing the card up to his eyes. I watched his beady, nervous black eyes zoom left to right, left to right, and slowly down the page, and then up to the second half, finally stopping at the bottom right corner, as though they had come to rest on some unpleasant sight, like a corpse.

He blew on the ink, as though a bic pen would leave wet smudges like a quill, and then closed the card, and left if lying face down in front of him. He reached for the water now, and drank it off hastily (I should explain that water in Europe is served in almost shot-glass sized cups - it would not be strange to drink off a glass of water in one, shot-like motion). The next five minutes were spent staring at the empty back of the card. He traced the Hallmark logo with his finger, and then put his hands on the edge of the table, looking like he might push himself up out of his seat at any moment. He stayed like that for a long time, and his stillness was just as impressive to watch as though he had been performing gymnastics all around the room. I would have given my first born child to know the contents of the letter, but I feel confident in making such excessive claims because I know that I will never ever know what it said. After some minutes his hands began to shake, almost imperceptibly, and he smiled. I hadn't notice that he had been unsmiling until he finally did curl his lip. He had dimples, and a cracked tooth that suggested charisma. I would have offered up a second child to know why he smiled. Whatever the thought, it made him pick up the pen again, this time with utter ease and relaxation, contrasting maddeningly with the frenzied character in which he had thrown the pen down some minutes before.

The entire back of the card was soon filled with the same neat, minuscule script, and if he signed the card, his name blended in completely with the words preceding it. He blew on the words again, to dry the ink, and then read the entire thing over again. This time he was like a sea after a storm, his eyes drifting from left to right, top to bottom... still mechanically, but on their own time, not driven by some inner frenzy. His chest rose and fell like someone who sleeps in the morning after a long night of fever, and still he smiled. When he had finished reading (without making any editing marks, I might add), he blew on the words a third and final time, closed the card, and reinforced the crease by dragging a long, strong thumbnail down the spine of the card. And then, without his usual period of consideration, as though he had been planning on doing it all along, he took the three sugar wrappers (which had been resting on the cappuccino saucer) and added them to the envelope ahead of the card. I thought of the recipient opening the letter, and holding those packets in their hand, and knowing exactly what they meant- agh! and I will never know! Its like hearing one end of a whispered phone call. I could die from frustration.  He proceeded to lick the edge of the envelope with the expertise of a man who does nothing but lick envelopes all day. He used his otherwordly thumbnail again on the edges of the flaps, which were unquestionably sealed by the time he finished with them. The sighs began about half way through writing the address, and the shaking of the hands started up again when he opened up his wallet to take out a little book of stamps, and an air mail sticker. This preparedness made me wonder if he underwent this process every day. Surely its impossible. He would die from the emotional toll- one more letter like that would do him in, I am sure of it.

Once the letter was sealed, stamped and addressed, he moved with speed, perhaps knowing that it was too late to alter things now. In a flash he had put his bag back on his back, stood up, pushed the chair into the table, and tottered out with uneven strides, letter in hand. He paused only to push the two cups together on the table, the cappuccino and the water, as though he had separated them unfairly in their early lives, and was now facilitating a reconciliation. He left so quickly, I didn't even get to think about saying anything to him, although I am not sure what I would have said. I felt like I had just watched something intensely personal, like a birth, a bad breakup, or a reunion after a decade of exile.

It would be impossible to say whether the letter man had been traumatized that afternoon at the Blackwell's cafe, or if he had come to some sort of epiphany. He had smiled, but he had also shaken like a leaf, and drunk off his coffee with the desperation of a man who really wanted something stronger, but is too polite to drink hard liquor before a certain hour of the evening. As for the letter, I'll never know what it said, or who it was for, or what they wrote in response, or what the sugar packets meant. He left me with nothing but the vision of an empty water glass and cappuccino and saucer cup, sitting on an empty cafe table, staring at their reflections in the glossy, fake mahogany finish. The two dishes stood as monuments to the letter writer, the sloping sides of the water glass just barely touching the rounded lip of the saucer, the way that man's consciousness seemed just barely to kiss the reality around him as he wrote.

Scotland

The only photographic proof that I was in the Highlands- I forgot my camera at home this trip, don't worry I've already kicked myself.

Here at last is a slightly belated Scotland post- of course, so much has happened since returning from Scotland on Saturday morning (it is now Tuesday night) that I feel impatient to skip over it and rush on to the more immediate things, but I will be good and force myself to stay in one place long enough to remember that beautiful land- I know I will not regret it.

I arrived in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland with five of the coolest CMRS girls on a very wet Wednesday night. The city was all dark, and enclosed in curtains of rain, but shining forth like a beacon of history was the Edinburgh castle, high up on a tall, rocky crag. The stone walls were lit dramatically from underneath, but the highest ramparts stretched up beyond the reach of the floodlights, out of sight. We found the High Street, and then our little hostel, which was clean, warm and cheap, and therefore more than adequate (we did have some unexpected Portuguese bunk mates... of the male variety... but once we established an insurmountable language barrier, both parties were happy to ignore the other with all due politeness, and it worked out well). In the morning, we set out immediately for the castle, walking past dozens of touristy shops selling tartans and shortbread in kilt-shaped tins. The castle itself was amazing and formidable, and completely covered the hilltop. Even though it was pouring rain, I enjoyed spending the whole morning climbing over every inch of it, imagining what it would be like to live there (main conclusion: cold). Of all the medieval anomalies I witnessed that morning, the most memorable item for me was the old wooden door to the dungeon where they kept American POWs from the Revolutionary War (still unclear why they were being kept there... that was one placard I did not read close enough). The door was covered with really high quality graffiti: names, dates, beloveds, prayers, and even a detailed engraving of a ship bound west were all scratched in with care. I tried to imagine the men who lived there as I heard all about the gruel they ate, and felt the cold and the damp of the sunless dungeons.

The castle also houses Scotland's crown jewels: a rather normal looking crown, and a sword as big as me, and The Stone of Destiny. This last is worth googling if you have the time. As I learned in more detail on our three hour walking tour of the city, the Stone of Destiny has been used as a coronation throne for Scottish royalty since the 9th century. The king does not become king when he receives the sword or the crown, but only when his royal bum touches this neolithic stone. In 1296 King Edward the first of England gained control of Scotland and forcibly took the stone to Westminster where it has remained ever since to be used in English coronations. The Scots abided this injustice and act of English domination until the 1950's when a seedy little law student from Glasglow (Ian Hamilton) got a few buddies together, broke into Westiminster with a crowbar, and stole the stone back in a classic act of patriotism. The full story involves breaking the stone, repairing the stone, losing the keys to his getaway car, shredding his coat, burrying the stone hastily in a British field, coming back for it and making friends with gypsies, and finally, after reviving British patriotism and reminding the bloody English that the stone is really Scotland's, returned it to Westimnster. It is now in Edinburgh "on loan" and will need to be returned for the next English coronation. It was SUCH a good story, and our tour guide was downright fanatical about it. He was top notch in my book, actually, because he was able to talk at length about two of my chief interests: Scottish history, and Harry Potter. He took us to the cafe where JKR wrote the first of the Harry Potter books, and also to a creepy old graveyard where she took some of her characters' names off the tombstones (we saw McGonagall, Tom Riddle Jr and Senior, and also Mad Eye Moody).

The second day was less rainy- we took a little tour bus to the highlands. This part of Scotland is less easy to articulate. The slopes were steep and created tiny, narrow ravines which we drove along, craning our necks to look up the rich brown hills to the tops- so white with snow they disapeared completely in the clouds. Our bus driver was also very excited about history, especially about dispelling the Hollywood myth of Braveheart. Much to the chagrin of the French and Belgian tourists sitting in front of us, he spent the entire four hour drive home performing a dramatic monologue over the loudspeaker about the true history of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce- the real braveheart (Bruce was a national hero who actually requested that his heart be removed from his body and taken on crusade after his death. When the crusading party met an army of Moors that outnumbered them 10 to 1, the small casket with Bruce's heart was hurled ahead into the opposing army just before they clashed in battle, with the accompanying cry, "ride forth, brave heart!" This was about a quarter century after the gruesome murder of the real William Wallace... the bus driver described his English-style traitor's execution with shameless relish and detail). The tour ended at Loch Ness, which is beautiful, but also sad and lonely. I regret to say that although I saw some billy goats climbing the steep slopes, Nessie was too shy to come out. The bus ride home was long, and as I said, infused with a true Scotsman's account of Scotish history. We came back in the dark, and I saw the huge, full moon rising over the highlands. It was supernaturally enormous and bright, and I realized later that it was the equinox moon, but at the time, I was actually afraid that something weird and apocolyptic was going on.

I didn't get to spend nearly enough time in Scotland. I loved the city of Edinburgh, and the highlands were eerily beautiful and old, though I would never want to live there. This weekend my adventures continue with a day trip to Wales (800 year old monastery is on the list!) Hopefully before then I will have time to do a post on how I got myself into trouble with a (highly relevant and illuminating) Harry Potter reference during one of Dr. Crowe's lectures on John Milton. The fun just never stops.

End of Term and Friends in Rennes, France.

I haven't been able to post any updates lately due to the crushing end of term workload here at Oxford, but I have finally come out of the other end of the tunnel. I don't want to mock my academic experience here by inflating it or exaggerating, but that last week I spent working on that seminar paper was probably literally the most taxing week of my career at school. The interesting flip side of this is I know that I was the one who made it so, and not because I had a professor breathing down my neck, or I was really worried about a grade (I have yet to receive a single grade here, their absence is initially troubling, but then you get used to it and they start to become less of an incentive). Although my paper only ended up being 15 pages and 200 words over the suggested word count, in reality I wrote about twice that, and edited it down throughout the week. I chose my own topic, found my own books, and made my own thesis. No help was offered me, and the syllabus was more like a style guide with a big deadline at the bottom - very typical of the Oxford system. This independence was pretty terrifying at first, but as the term went on, I realized that this was my chance to study something I really wanted to study, something that I could actually use in my real life. I decided to write about the classical influence on chivlaric ties of friendship, and how the interaction of these two models might indicate why pure, unadulterated friendship is notoriously difficult to obtain between men and women. I was pleased with my findings- it gave me a lot to think about, and many more questions to stew over, but as with all of my Oxford academic endeavors, I was frustrated by the limitations of a 24 hour day, during which the libraries are only open for 12 hours or less.

This is me, welcoming death or at least a full night of dreamless sleep as I plow through my seminar paper. Note pathetic-ness.

One thing I really do appreciate here at Oxford is the way my tutors encourage learning for the sake of learning. At Olaf, I am frequently charged with defending my proposed topic and explaining why it is useful to study this particular aspect of history... at Oxford, my tutor stopped me almost as soon as I went into justification mode, and asked me what I was actually interested in studying, what is relevant to my life right now? This eventually led to a thesis that not only helped me synthesize everything I'd been reading about all term, but also made me feel like my own personal life was relevant in the grander scheme of history. That all made it worth it for me to stay up to ridiculous hours of the morning finding just the right wording, and just the right evidence to support my points. For the first time ever, I felt like my research was for myself and the friends I would share it with, and not for some higher authority with a red pen.

Even though I decided the research was all mine, the timeline was definitely not my idea, and by the time I got to Wednesday night, I could have slept standing up. I turned my paper in at 7:00pm, and then....slept? blacked out?... on my bed for a few hours, missing dinner. I'd had three consecutive nights of 4 hours of sleep or less, and hadn't gone on a run or played viola (therapeutic) in days. My brother Joe did come to visit me for the week, which had the contrasting effects of cheering me up immensly, and also adding to time constraints. I was very sad to see him leave on Wednesday night, but the sadness was eased by my almost immediate departure to France the next morning at 5:00. I'd been waiting for my France reunion for weeks, so I cheerfully shut my alarm at 4:50 am, took a bus, the underground, a train, a subway, and another train to Rennes, where I practically swooned into Erin Beaton's waiting arms on the train platform.

Later that evening I met Bjorn on the same platform when his train came in. It is so strange to wade through a thick crowd of strangers and then recognize just an elbow or a shoe through a chink in the mass. I enjoyed a second epic platform reunion, and then Bjorn and I made our way secretly to meet Carmen and Erin at a predetermined location- our Thursday arrival in Rennes was a surprise for Carmen's birthday; she thought we were coming on Friday. I was delighted to see her shocked face when we emerged out of the metro, but the happiness of being with my friends again didn't hit me until after our crazy night of birthday revelries on the town. Carmen led us back to her host mother's house late, and put me to bed almost immediately. I suddenly felt very fond of her old habit of mother goosing us, and gladly allowed her to tuck me in. I cannot even tell you how thrilling it was to be horizontal, under a nice blanket, moments away from sleep, in a house full of friends. I could hear Erin brushing her teeth an humming in the bathroom, and Bjorn was stumbling rather impressively through some Debussy on the piano downstairs. Eventually Carmen interrupted him to insist he take a bath- he smelled like hay and (more problematically) cows from his WWOOFing experience on French organic farms. 

Carmen and Bjorn at the piano.

The house was as drafty as all old French houses, and pretty cold outside the blankets, but as I lay there, listening to familiar voices, and music, and footsteps, I felt incredible warmth return to my weary, ink stained fingers, and the most distinct, specific sensation that a warm hand was brushing my forehead in a soothing way, although there was no one else in the room.
 

Our long weekend in Rennes was rejuvenating and educational in its own way. There are many things I hope I won't forget in a hurry: going on long walks through the medieval part of Old Rennes, and seeing the slanting 16th century houses and cobblestones; stopping under every flowered tree that overhung the sidewalk, and inhaling deeply; watching apparent members of a high school boy gang exchange the iconic French greeting, a "bise" I think its called, where they kiss each other on the cheeks; cooking a huge lasagna for the four of us;

Lasagna in the making.

pretending we liked wine and drinking a whole bottle just to prove to ourselves that we are grown ups; multiple trips to the boulangerie across the street; an amazing chocolate store which probably kept the dementors at bay in at least a 300 mile circumference; exchanging stories and pictures and playing chess;
walking through the beautiful and springy "jardin des plantes"; finding a dark window with bars on it, full of little yellow song birds, and wondering how they got to be there, and if they would ever be free. It was pretty idyllic to be able to live under the same roof with some of the truest friends I've got, and cook fabulous meals, and laugh a lot and have no immediate obligations.

Bjorn and Carmen, reluctant to move too much. 

Relaxation was a common motif that weekend....

I know I've alluded to this Moby Dick reference elsewhere on my blog, but the temporariness of our retreat in France made me think of when Ishmael is warm and cozy under the covers, smoking a pipe in utter contentedness with his new cannibal friend Queequeg, and he notes that it would not be nearly as comfortable if he did not have one minute zone of discomfort, such as a cold nose, or a toe that sticks out from the warmth of the blankets. My weekend in France was definitely surrounded by a kind of contrasting discomfort on either side. It is true that the upcoming integral section of my semseter is going to be less academically challenging, but there is never a dull moment while on study abroad, and I am sure as I go forward with my adventures, I will be glad to look back on my time with my friends as a fortifying reminder that there is always something or someone warm and good up ahead on the road, even if you still have a long trek in the rain to get there. Life is all about balance, I guess, and its strange that I should have to come all the way to England to figure that out.

No classes this week at Oxford, so I am off to Scotland. Stories and pictures to follow, I hope!