Fencing

Hello all, greetings from Oxford.

Before I begin I’d like to apologize for not writing in the “Shimer in Oxford Blog” sooner. I hope that some of you will still have faith in us and log on to read my story, because it’s kind of interesting. I’m also going out on a limb to write this! We all know how hard it can be to drop our readings, and our Naruto downloads, and our wine/cigarettes, to write.
Anyways, many of you back home already know of my athletic past, and would find it hard to forget that I was at one time an avid fencer. I fenced sabre competitively for about 9 years before quitting, and since being at Shimer have only picked it up once but failed to continue (for a number of reasons). Fencing is a GREAT sport, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the kind of sport that you can play pick-up at the park. Finding means to fence typically costs a lot of money, and takes a lot of interest to really get going as a fun, competitive sport. You might also imagine the difficulty in finding a place where people will let you play with swords, etc, etc.
Well, since quitting fencing, and since not having a gigantic ocean to play in, my young and restless body can get pretty antsy during the semester (especially during winter!#@%*!). I knew this going into my fourth year here, so I decided to take advantage of my surroundings and sign up with the Oxford University Fencing Club at the U's first year orientation, “Fresher’s Fair.” I found their table, littered with weapons and masks. I picked up a sabre whispering to me in a Tolkienesque tone, “yes, I remember you quite well”. I got to know the captains, signed up, and the next week I was suited up and fencing. I was rusty, horribly rusty- but not too rusty apparently because after my first session I was approached by Mathew Shearman, their team captain, who invited to fence for the official Oxford University Varsity Fencing Squad. Needless to say I was extremely honored and accepted his invitation.
But here’s the funny part: I’m a Shimer student, that is, not so much (if at all) a student at Oxford. How I ended up fencing in Oxford - for one of the most well known, prestigious universities in the world - will keep many of my former teachers and classmates puzzled for a long time. For you to understand what I mean better, you should know how bumpy my life in school(s) has been. With horrible attention issues and habits directing me well away from the road of academia, I was once a candidate for boarding school, special ed, and that special place, death, i.e. “High” School – which for me meant ditching class to hike up a mountain with spliffs and books. I was in no way Harvard bound, or had the mental capacity to ace my way to Oxford! And yet here I am, through some blessed wormhole in life called Shimer.
It’s a slight a farce, but will nonetheless be impressive evidence that I was once “a student at Oxford”… and one who was even good enough to fence on the varsity squad. “But that’s what Oxford’s all about”, Stuart says to me, “sticking your foot in the door.” [For Americans, that is, especially from tiny Great Books schools, I’d add. And not too far or you might lose it to a scornful mien, or, in Lance’s case, a fencing saber. SP] I’m beginning to see why, but that can’t keep me from laughing about the irony of it with my friends here. And thank god for them, too, because when I tried to humiliate myself in front of the Oxford Fencing Squad at the pub, all I received was blank stares and judgmental telepathic thoughts (yes, Oxford students know telepathy).
It’s been alright so far otherwise. We’re 3-1, with our only loss to a very good Cambridge team (“those wankers”). We’re fighting our way to the top of the league where we’ll hopefully meet Cambridge again in the finals. If we do, and win, that would be just as uncanny as me actually being on the team. It would make me twice as happy, too. Keep you posted.

Lance

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Allegory of Truth, Ode to Joy

Pictured at left is Truth, Descending upon the Arts and Sciences to expel Ignorance from the University, by Robert Streator, court portraitist to Charles II. Truth is the caramel-colored infant in the clouds at center, Ignorance the greyish, gorgonesque character at the far right, about to disappear into the upper reaches of the pipe organ (see the photo below for another view). This is the newly-visible ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre, it having been under restoration for four years until earlier this month. (The chief curator of the project predicted that the unveiling would occasion "much drawing in of breath.") The Sheldonian itself was completed in 1668, the second major outing by Christopher Wren, though his first in Oxford (where he attended Wadham College; his first building was the Chapel at Pembroke College - in Cambridge!). Wren took the Theater of Marcellus in Rome as his model, which made the Sheldonian one of the first major structures in Oxford in the classical idiom. And which accounts for what appears to be a grid of ropes across the painting and the ruddy draping bunched at the edges and around the back (arcing) end. This illusion alludes to the retractable cloth roof that actually hung over Marcellus' theater to let the sun in and keep the rain out, whereas the elements in Oxford are more the stuff of seraphs and demons, of course.


But as Wren found, inviting Truth into the University's meetings, much less simply upholding - her? him? (it's hard to tell a baby's sex from three floors below) - was not quite as airy a proposition as Streator's painting depicts. That is, the Sheldonian's roof presented some novel architectural difficulties. First, a Gothic peak (the usual manner for finishing such a large structure at the time) on top of a classical facade was right out of the question for Wren. His exterior solution was an unassuming roof with a (now much-pictured, as at left) cupola, though this left the problem of finishing the upper reaches of the theatre's interior expanse. The solution there, a plane suspended from above, spanning the 70-foot width of the space inside, was something of a coup engineering-wise at the time. And it served additionally as the floor of an attic space in which the Oxford University Press could store its growing inventory (largely of best-selling Bibles and Prayer Books). Sturdy as the structure seemed, however, there were worries throughout its first century that Truth - particularly, that is, in the form of the Press' books - might descend disastrously onto the unprotected heads of the University's budding Artists and Scientists. But Streator's painting and the boards that held it held up, much to the engineers' delight and Ignorance's presumed chagrin (though he appears to have found permanent lodging in the pipe organ, which was silenced years ago for lack of funds for repair).

The Sheldonian is where the University holds some of its major academic ceremonies - matriculation, graduation, and the like - as well as some lectures. It is also used for conventions, conferences, and recitals and concerts. Handel premiered his Athalia here in 1733. And we've had the luck of being around for the 10th anniversary of the Oxford Philharmonia, which has been celebrating its first decade with performances of Beethoven's five piano concertos and nine symphonies over the past month. The final concert, which paired the 2nd and 9th Symphonies, took place this last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. (Which, I hope it's needless to point out, the English don't celebrate, though they are nice about wishing to us Yanks, when they remember it. You might return the favor for us to any Brits you meet abroad on Boxing Day). In the late evening before the concert, we strolled toward the Sheldonian on Broad Street, we met up with the Festival of Lights, which opens Oxford's Christmas season (which is celebrated here). During the concert itself, a few of the windows were opened and we could hear merry makers carousing by after the light show outside, making their own diminutive, off-key ode to joy just as the Philharmonia launched into the booming, dissonant opening measures of the choral movement of the 9th.

Now, having learned that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was recently voted the world's top symphony orchestra, I think it no slur on the Philharmonia to say we have been spoiled (at least those of us who make a trip or two each season to the CSO). The Philharmonia's leader, Marios Papadopoulos, is a stalwart, leading all nine symphonies and playing - heroically, as apt - all the concertos himself in the space of three weeks. But by Friday night's concert, I think the Philharmonia was just a bit tired, and perhaps a bit intimidated. They struggled at moments during the first three movements, missing beats, slurring and muddying lines and just trying to keep up with Beethoven's massive and complicated work. But I am not so interested in sounding like a pissant as in relating what a thrill it was - in the end - to have the evening, and the whole series of concerts, come to a glorious close with Beethoven's Chorale. It could have gone horribly wrong, but the chorus, and the Philharmonia, rose to the occasion. Outside it was a foggy chill, but we had passed, briefly anyway, through Elysium.

Language

While I'm learning many things in Oxford, there seems to be a theme of language. I'm constantly learning new languages and ways to communicate, not all of them the conventional grammatically organized symbols, words, and sounds that we use to convey meaning to each other. The obvious one is my French tutorial. Yes, I'm learning new words, but that's different from learning the language. For example, I know that the word "bercer" means "to rock", as in a baby. But for the French, this word has sweet, calming connotations which us English speakers miss when we just see the word "rock". It's the subtleties that truly communicate; it's the nuances that make it language.
In addition to this, there is the language of the British. Obviously we are both speaking English, so we can get the basic point across, but every day I seem to hear a new word, phrase, or idiom that I don't understand. Even when I learn what it means, I can't bring myself to say a phrase in the glib manner which I can speak any American idiom. I lack the same level of comfort and understanding which I have for our own colloquialisms. For example, the Brits are always going around asking you if you're all right. This does not necessarily mean that you look like you just came back from your recent vacation to hell, however. That's just their way of saying "how are you?".
But I'm learning more than just spoken language. I'm also learning the language of music. As I'm finally learning to play the violin effectively, I've come to understand more deeply a language that has evolved beyond words. It has surpassed the need for clumsy syllables and ambiguous meanings which mere words convey. It passes directly from instrument into soul, without the logical filter of the mind, which is constantly trying to abstract something concrete from the jumble of prose.
Who knows what language I'll realize I'm learning next?

Lila Midgett

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The Oxford Union

It's been especially interesting reading Augustine of Hippo's Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans over the last weekend. Partly this has had to do with the trip some of us took yesterday with our hosts in Oxford (the aptly-named Oxford Study Abroad Program) to the Roman baths in: Bath. The baths were excavated some 110 years ago and are now restored mainly as a museum to the city's Roman developers. Unfortunately, you can't bathe there anymore; in fact, they tell you not even to touch the water. The array of ancient structures that made up a whole complex of pools and rooms (the photo here looks into the pool at the source, first built up in the first century of our era) is now mostly under the open air (though it was covered with a high, arcing canopies during its heyday). The waters are thus liable to the insults of passing birds (and tourists?), all of which renders them apparently rather toxic (though this could be a ruse to dissuade the overeager from doffing their parkas and shorts). I wasn't much tempted to do more than contemplate the stuff. Once it was, apparently, rain water that has, since it fell, filtered down and then back up from depths of thousands of meters over transits lasting tens of thousands of years. Now it's a languidly steaming, algaeic-green murk. At the base of the main pool lie huge, worn blocks of rust-colored stone littered with pennies and a silver spackling of five and ten-pence coins. What's curious is that our fondness for consigning spare change hopefully to shallow waters seems to be an inverted echo of the Romans' practice at Aquae Sulis (as they called the place) of committing not wishes but curses to these depths. The archaeologists here have uncovered a treasure of petty malevolence, prayers addressed to the goddesss of the waters, Sulis Minerva, all in the form of scratches, in coded (and sometimes just bad) Latin, on slips of pewter rolled up and thrown into the pools. And how vivid a sense one gets from these remnants of ancient spite as to how radical a Christian, or even Stoic, ethic must have been to those taking the waters here close to the edge of the known world. Often, the cursers sought requital for a theft - of a cloak, a comb, or a purse - from the changing rooms at the baths, one imagines. But rather than asking simply for its return (which no devout Christian or principled Stoic would even have bothered to do), the aggrieved usually sought rather more persuasive and final judgments, asking, often, for the blood, even the life, of the thief, "be it a man, a woman, a slave or free" as one seething devotee of the (otherwise presumably soothing) waters had it. Other curses leave some mystery as to their causes and objects, but that the malice they express was deep and lasting they leave no doubt. And all this "bloody-mindedness" (in the suitable British English phrase) is only amplified by contrast with the baths themselves. World-class masterpieces of engineering, they bespeak the Romans' ability to conceive and execute on a truly grand scale. One recalls further that magnificent as they are, the baths were actually nestled distantly at the remote northern end of an Empire which, during Aquae Sulis' heyday, ruled everything between here and Gibraltar, the Danube and the Euphrates. Augustine and the other early founders of the church had their work cut out for them.

Of course, by the time Augustine wrote The City of God Against the Pagans the empire had shrunk considerably and been split down the middle. Some Emperors had even found the Christian God (after their own fashions). And the final insult - the sack of Rome (by Christian Goths!) - had come just a few years before Augustine began recording his devastating case against the "pernicious mob of false gods" under whom the Empire had risen, then long faltered, and finally decayed. Meanwhile, the bathers' angry prayers to Minerva, and presumably millions others like them across the Roman world, scratched out or merely muttered, festered and gathered silt under the churches and mosques that eventually rose over the ruins - as here at Bath, where the chapel looks, itself rather imperiously, down into the main pool.


You may have asked yourself by now why I am going on about the baths at Bath under the heading of the Oxford Union. It's that I started reading Augustine's City of God on Friday afternoon (at Blackwell, the local bookstore), the day after the last debate at the Oxford Union. A few words on the Union itself first (from the Library of which I obtained my copy of the Augustine). The photo here is of the first debate at the Union this term, where the proposition was that "This House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government," the pictured speaker, the Rt Hon Paul Murphy, a member of the Labor Party (that of Her Majesty's current Government) since he was fifteen, an MP (Member of Parliament) and former Sec of State for Wales, and the last speaker in opposition (to the proposition). Each week on Thursday evening, the House (i.e. the Union) hosts a debate, and usually starts the term with a critical look at whomever is in power. Power matters to many at and from the Union, founded as Oxford's premier debating society in 1823, and one of whose first Presidents was William Gladstone, a major political force in Victorian England. The Union has had a host of PMs (Prime Ministers) and other political leaders pass through, and it's still seen as a main conduit toward a successful career as a politician in Britain. In addition to weekly debates during the school terms, the Union hosts speakers of world-historical import, has a cozy library and bar, and serves generally as a social spot for up and comers in Oxford. Most of Shimer's students become members (though I am not sure if the networking is what they're in it for).

At any rate, last Thursday's debate concerned the proposition "This House believes that the world would be better off without Religion." That may tell you why it seemed so apropos to be reading Augustine this weekend. Sadly, I imagine that Augustine (having been himself a Master of Rhetoric to the Imperial Court at Milan) might have had a better case to make than the others speaking in opposition to this proposition last Thursday, who offered rather questionable points in favor of religion at times (including, from the last speaker, the contention that it had won increasing support for gay rights!). That said, the arguments in support of the proposition seemed rather tired, too - all the usual fulminating against the enormities of religiously-motivated conflict (is there such a thing?) and japing at the variously amusing and infuriating inanities of faith. I wondered where Richard Dawkins was, and whether he might have at least livened things up in a last hurrah as a full don (word has it that he's leaving his chair at the University to go crusading full time against Harry Potter, whom he sees as damaging children's interest in science). But the arguments for the proposition seemed finally to be on the same side as Augustine a millennium and a half ago, i.e. in the ascendence (however much Augustine would have been - is! - in the opposition sub species aeternitatis). I haven't checked yet, but the Union's website probably has the outcome of the vote on who won now posted. One votes with one's feet after a Union debate, leaving the hall either by the door marked Nays or the one marked Ayes. To my eyes as I was leaving (myself from the balcony, and hence unable to vote), the line under the Ayes was longer. But who knows, like much of what people think, it may have been merely a matter of convenience (the Ayes door is on the side of most of the seating).

Oxbridge

We took a trip to Cambridge last weekend, and survived to tell the tale (here is my version, anyway). In some circles, generally those concentric around Oxford, Cambridge is referred to simply as "the other place." Meanwhile, the more judicious term "Oxbridge" (coined by W. Thackeray, in Pendennis) has put the stamp on their status together as the - at least historical - duopoly of elite (and yes, elitist) British higher education. It's well to note, however, that one never hears mention of Camford. Oxford is the elder as a place of learning, after all, some of its scholars having founded the university in the other place after fleeing townies up in arms over a murder in 1209. But further into the treacherous waters of this rivalry I'll tread no further.

Our trip between this place and the other was itself a bit treacherous. I'll admit that I was a bit distracted for most of our thrill ride, piloting our seventeen-seat van along the erratic line of highways, bi-ways and single-track country lanes that led us from the eastern edges of the hilly Cotswolds down into the flat Fens. It might have been idyllic, but our route cut at frequent intervals and odd angles across all the larger, humming roads which all lead south into London. Now, a round-about is demonstrably more efficient and less dangerous than a stop light, but knowing that hardly stopped me from cursing them as I went hurtling wearily from one to the next at an all-too-hectic pace in the looking-glass world that is driving in Britain.

At last, however, we arrived at Ely, a bit northeast of Cambridge, where we headed first to take in the Stained Glass Museum, within the Ely Cathedral. The Cathedral itself is known as the "ship of the Fens," as it looms majestically over the farmlands surrounding Ely and can be seen riding along the wide horizon for miles in any direction. Once inside, one discovers that it serves the fenlanders not only as a glorious place of worship, but as a living public space. Last weekend's harvest festival, including sheep stalls and crosses made of potatoes seemed to feel perfectly at home there in the aisles of the Cathedral nave. The image at left pictures the Cathedral interior, from the choir through the screen to the nave, between and above which is the Ely Octagon, i.e. the lantern over the transept in the upper half of the picture. Here I should direct everyone to links to other records of our trip, including some beautiful shots of Ely on Heath Iverson's blog about his experiences in Oxford, and a set of photos (of Ely and Oxford) by Kate Wilhelmi. It was mainly Kate we were taking to the Stained Glass museum, as she is taking a tutorial this term with a member of the British Society of Master Glass Painters on the history and practice of the art.

Here are a few more shots of interior details,










one of the painting in the lantern







two more of the richly imaginative carving in the choir, including, on the left, the underside of a misericord (a mercy seat for legs tired of standing for hours in service)

















and one of the group outside the Cathedral with the lantern exterior perched in the far distance.






Next stop Magdalene College, Cambridge, where everyone piled out of the newly dubbed "magic bus" to make it into the free public hour at the Library of Samuel Pepys, a Secretary of the Admiralty under James II and diarist who left his books, arranged to ring a single room at Magdalene by order of size, from his massive atlases of the then-discovered world to chapbooks full of "merriment" he bought for a penny quay-side. (Magdalene, by the way, is pronounced "mawdlehn"; it's a relief that even the British roll their eyes at all the syllables they drop from their place names.)

Here's part of the crowd milling around in front of the Library (by Lance Dyke, another student, studying Lute and Voice this term). I found a parking spot for our magic bus (outside the former digs of a friend who I used to visit here often, back in the day) while the others made their way across the bridge over the River Cam just outside Magdalene, into city center. I rejoined everyone as they refreshed themselves at the Bath House on Benet Street near city center. Down Benet Street where it joins the pedestrian King's Parade perches the Corpus Clock, the newest addition to the mingled majesties at the heart of old Cambridge. I was unveiled a month ago (September 19) by Stephen Hawking, himself the latest in a line of cosmos-defining minds that have made their homes in Cambridge over the centuries. Isaac Newton was another you may have heard of. In general, Cambridge is renowned for its scientific studies, and Oxford for its humanities (which term I use to include theology, by the way, which was almost the only subject one studied for in either place for the first few centuries of their existence).

At any rate, it is a little hard to imagine the Corpus Clock (left) in Oxford. The device, pictured here, is run entirely mechanically (though it is wound by an electric motor). It has no hands, but displays lights round the circumference to indicate the time. The grasshopper/cricket/locust at the top is the escapement device, which regulates the transmission of the pendulum's motion into the regular movement of the clock's hands. The beast's name is Chronophage, or "time eater." The ensemble commemorates one John Harrison, the long-suffering inventor of the grasshopper escapement and maker of a clock reliable enough to help solve the "longitude" problem (of knowing how far one had sailed from Britain in an east-west direction in the days when one had only the heavenly bodies to reckon by). Harrison's story is a fascinating one for anyone interested in the history of science and its politics.

Toward evening, we crossed the busy pedestrian King's Parade and in under the King's College Gate to take in the Evensong service at Chapel (whence the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is broadcast worldwide every Christmas Eve). It's an aetherial place, somehow too grand for snapshooting. So, while the choir filled the long, soaring nave with Palestrina's setting for Psalm 81 and the sun set through the east window in a blaze of golds, reds and blues, I just took it in. Even Rubens' Adoration of the Magi on the altar just to our left was hard put to hold its Baroque-own within the majestic early-Reformation sensorium that is King's Chapel in its living glory. Anyway, if you want to experience this masterpiece of sight, sound and space, you'll just have to go yourselves. Short of that, here's a shot Kate took just after the service ended from just outside the chapel door of the waxing moon peeking into the front quad of King's College.














Finally, we intended to go punting after services, but got to the Granta (a boathouse and pub on the Cam River that runs right through the city's center) just as the boats were being tied up for the night. So, instead, we took a refreshing break while we sat along the river, and I made a picture of the swans below the Granta's patio with Kate's camera:

I won't go into detail on the ride back. Suffice to say it wasn't as peaceful as my photo, but we did see a bit more of nighttime rural England than we'd intended to. But I dare say we fared better on our own than we would have on the nightly bus that ferries students each way across Oxbridge. There's a rivalry, allright, but it doesn't stop them from being quite merry on the bus together (we hear) across the sixty or so miles that separates them (as the crow flies, which is altogether really the best way to go, I think.)

Thucydides and Sir Christopher Cox

Today our class (in the Western Tradition, Part I) discussed Thucydides' accounts of speeches made during the height of the Athenians' war with much of the rest of Greece in the 4th century BCE. Thucydides' work has always seemed almost frighteningly relevant across two and a half millennia, especially given his aim to reveal a basic human nature. Its fruits? Genocide, unprovoked military aggression, imperial callousness and pride, sham democracy, and desperate religious travesties.

Perhaps aptly, we were hosted today by New College, founded in the 14th century as Oxford emerged from its bout with the Black Death; Thucydides also gives us an excruciatingly detailed account of the plague that (along with the Spartans) nearly wiped out both him and Athens. Also, our rooms this morning commemorated Sir Chris Cox, who taught at New College after serving as Director of Education in the British Sudan in the 1930s. I know almost nothing else about Sir Chris (as the Porter who handed me the key to the room called him), except that his biographer calls him "an imperial patrician of a different kind." An intriguing phrase, one that together with a reading of Thucydides fairly fires the imagination. Just now, though, I wonder if he has a ghost, and what it might have made of our conversation this morning.

But we had a laugh before we got down to business, and it was a warm, sunny day after long bouts of drizzle and wind. Life goes on.

Welcome!