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
-
Friday, 21 November 2008
Sunday, 16 November 2008
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).
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).
Friday, 17 October 2008
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.)
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.)
Thursday, 9 October 2008
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.
Sunday, 5 October 2008
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