From 'Frozen Britain' to This Warm Farewell: Oxford in Retrospect

Fewer than forty-eight hours separate me from the start of my global journey back to the West Coast. Between packing, printing bus and plane tickets, and finishing this last essay, I thought I'd take a few minutes to sketch you a picture of the last six months or so.

I arrived into a frozen London in the first week of January. There was a week or so of orientation in the city, as the country groaned under exceptionally plentiful snowfall. We awestruck, adventurous Americans meanwhile stumbled through the streets trying to find the tourist sights as the English, bundled up like newborns, shuttered their windows and peered out through small peepholes as if the White Witch herself had caused Britain to freeze over.

Then I came here to Oxford and survived my first term, called Hilary. It lasted eight weeks, and it was miserable. I had some troubles with my tutorials, and some grave problems with one of my tutors. But I was cheered up by some travels and visits. Amherst friends Megan and Jes-c came to see Oxford one weekend (from Scotland and Ireland, respectively), and then I went to see Dublin later in the term for a weekend. Another highlight was getting to hear Tim Keller speak in the Oxford Town Hall. Daniel, yet another Amherstian, came to visit from Alpine France (je suis si jaloux!), too. Yet to my mind Oxford represented terror and nightmares and hard work that went overlooked, and I was anxious to get back to the States (as I've become accustomed to calling home). Before I did make the trip back for my six-week Easter break, however, I traveled a bit in Europe. I first took a train up to Edinburgh to see Megan with two other Amherst friends who were also studying here in Oxford (Jerry and Jen). Then I took a flight to Paris and saw the city for a few days. From there I returned home happily.

But the whole break I dreaded coming back. It got worse as the day neared when I was to get on the plane. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I got a few days more in the States than I'd bargained for on account of the volcanic ash, which kept me stuck Stateside while flights into the UK were all cancelled. The day I flew was the first day flights were allowed into British airspace, and there were fears that before we had the opportunity to land we might be redirected somewhere else in Europe if conditions changed. It was stressful, to say the least.

I got back to Oxford still very tentative and fearful of another two months abroad in what they call Trinity Term. But I had made a pact with Jerry back in Scotland to get more involved in our church here in Oxford (St Ebbe's) and I reluctantly checked out the weekly Bible study for international students the first week. Being supremely welcomed, I committed to the group for the full eight weeks, delighted to learn and grow alongside a great group of guys. This group and the service opportunities in the church that I was able to take advantage of were the means God used to completely, fully, utterly redeem my Oxford experience and draw me closer to Himself. Add to these things the exceptionally great teaching of the rector, Vaughan Roberts, and weekly prayer with Jerry, and this two-month term has been nothing short of explosively wonderful. Even more so if you compare it to the doldrums of Hilary Term. The most awe-inspiring part of that comparison, though, is precisely what the origin of the betterment was. It wasn't some happy-pill gulped down, or blissful hermitage, but rather being a part of a church family. Thanks be to God for His church!

That's not to say that the springtime and summertime weather haven't helped the happiness. Oxford is a stunningly beauteous place when the flowers bloom and the punts are dispatched to the rivers and laughs and giggles fill the air. There is something a bit more real about a place where the seasons play such a momentous role in the life of the people.

Tutorials have gone exceedingly well this term, too. My tutors were supportive and encouraging, and genuinely liked my work. That has been a pleasant surprise. Again, all of it's by grace.

I didn't travel at all this term, which has been a little bizarre, since I've been in this little town for two months straight. But my good friend Joshua Jacobs came over from Wales last weekend to visit, and that was another wonderful gift.

It's strange how I can't quite wrap my mind around the fact of leaving. I've finally settled in here and now, my plane ticket tells me, I'm about to leave. I doubt it will sink in till I'm in the air--and the twelve hours spent up there will certainly afford me that opportunity. But I'd rather write now, rather than when I've returned to the U.S.: I miss Oxford already, and it's easier to write about missing it while I'm still here. Yet that's not to say I don't miss America. Not the familiar landscapes or the food or the buying power I'll regain--though I will be happy to see them all again--so much as the people. And not "the people," as in "of the people, by the people, for the people." I mean, people. Y'know?

I'd say my goodbyes to Oxford, but it's just a place, and a place where I think I'll find myself living again in the future, Lord-willing. I can only bid adieu to the experience, just as the final words are being inscribed in the journal, before those heavy three letters are set down center-justified and extra-bold: FIN.

[NB: This blog will no longer be updated. If you'd like you can continue to keep up with me at my regular blog Through the Narrow Gate.]

Momentous/Momentary

The conventional wisdom is that you really start to ponder time--what time means, how fast it goes--as life draws to a close, as the twilight years (or "golden years" if you're feeling optimistic) set in and you sit in your rocking-chair day in and day out thinking back over a lifetime that passed you by in a flash.

Well, maybe I'm just an old geezer at heart, but this has been on my mind lately. And it won't relent.

I for one think your twenties are just as good a time to be contemplating these things as any. You're at the starting line of what will be a lifelong race. Your last year of college you spend gazing out at the first few hurdles to jump. They're much higher than the ones in the practice course of youth, and made of hard-hitting hickory too. No more of this styrofoam jungle gym with lollipop band-aids. The race to come is all rough and all real.

Amherst's commencement ceremonies were held yesterday. Another year of scared/confident/well-equipped/ill-equipped graduates, many of them friends and acquaintances, were thrust out of the sandbox in one great banishment. Three hundred and sixty-three days from now I'll find myself in the next group to be launched into the rest of my life.

For now I'm still abroad. But not for long: there are four weeks left of term, and they'll go quickly. I am happy about that, I have to say. As much as my experience here in Oxford has taught me much (spiritually, emotionally, about the life of the mind, about history, about the world beyond the American empire--if such a place exists) the academic labor is often slow-going and tedious. I read an average of about about ten or twelve books and write an average of 3,500 words per week. Yes, an "elite liberal-arts education" in the U.S. is demanding--but not nearly this demanding. It wears you down. Well, it wears me down. By the end of the two terms I will have written about 55,000 words; consider that one typed double-spaced page fits about 250 words. Anyway, enough talk about battle wounds. Suffice it to say, my mind would like to lie down for a while.

And what a blessing it is to have two months of summertime for that very purpose! The past two summers I have spent far from California, the first in Alabama, the second in Amherst, in each case working. I'll be working this summer too--doing my much beloved copy-editing work for the Mises Institute--but I'll be with family and friends and not in a dorm room or cooped up in an empty apartment. In many ways this is my last summer, probably. Normal adult people live through summers, of course, but not as high-school or college students do, with considerable freedom.

The greatest tangible reward of the six-month stretch I've been based here in Oxford--and it will almost be seven months by the time I leave--is that I've regained some confidence in myself as a student. The fall semester back at Amherst I managed to do alright on paper in the end but struggled internally the entire time. I missed the first deadline of my academic career, and then my second, in quick succession, and in the same class. I feared for my grade, yes, but mostly I feared for my mind and how it seemed to be failing me. The prospect of coming to Oxford (Oxford!) a few weeks afterward scared me even more: how would I fare in what was probably an infinitely more stressful academic atmosphere?

I shouldn't quite give an answer yet. I'm not altogether finished, after all. But so far I'd say I've managed pretty well. Oxford tutors are fairly honest people; if you're not up to snuff they waste no time in informing you of that fact (unlike some American professors, I might point out). The majority of my tutors have taken my ideas seriously and actually seen novelty and innovation in them--and I can't begin to say just how much that kind of real, true affirmation can do for the spirit, for the soul, for a mind broken down by fatigue and dulled by boredom. Here I find that tutors are willing to search through my often-chaotic thoughts and find real value here and there. To have a world-class expert take a look at your work and discuss your theories and in the end give a nod of approval is quite a thrill. It has done wonders for me (and maybe it shouldn't; maybe I'm too reliant on others' approval).

One main result has been to show me that I have the ability and some of the (still very rough and very untrained) gifts necessary for an academic life. I'm not quite sure if that's what the Lord's calling me to, but it has been officially reinstated as a strong possibility. If there has ever been one profession that has called out to me, affected me, transformed me, it's teaching. To spend life exploring the dark caverns of human knowledge with that tiny torch called truth, while--more exhilarating still--having the honor of guiding someone else through that mystifying, stupefying labyrinth, is appealing to me more and more. Time--yes, fickle old time--will tell. (And who knows, maybe I'll have a lifetime of these free summers after all.)

From Oxford, χαιρετε.

Some Photos of My Habitat

Click here to see some photos of my room in Catz. I know you've been wanting to see them. Alas! finally!

An Update, Long in Coming

I'm starting my third week of term tomorrow. Time is, thankfully, passing a lot faster this time around.

I'm in two tutorials, one on the history of the English Reformation (a lot of work, but really good stuff), and another on short fiction (both the reading and writing of it). I'm keeping busy, and that's a very helpful thing. I'm very much looking forward to finishing up in the next month and a half and returning home to the sun and comforts of the American West. Ah, but we've heard all this before.

Also, just wanted to let you know (whoever you are) that I'm blogging elsewhere, too. I've got a blog I'm calling "Through the Narrow Gate" (formerly called "Terra Incognita") that I'm finally beginning to update after a few months of stagnancy. I suddenly realized a few days ago that in several weeks' time this blog will be utterly useless to me, since my study abroad experience will be over and it would be silly to keep updating it from home. So TTNG is my solution to that problem. There you'll find more faith-related stuff.

A hearty "cheers" from perpetually wet-weathered, perpetually dry-humo(u)red England!

From the Ashes

The subtle breeze carries with it a million tiny white blossoms. They float down from the sky in light showers, then brush along the roads before clumping up at the foot of trees and lampposts. It's a wedding celebration come down from the heavens, a renewal of a wondrously unbreakable vow sealed in a distant epoch with a bright arc of light. And so the long wintry veil has been lifted up to reveal a cool, teary-eyed beauty beaming behind. Her morning dew refreshes a great rejoicing Earth whose hushed hymn sings of a kingly and faithful Sustainer. The prism of evening mist constructs over and over an evolving and infinite stained glass. By day the stony walls that make good neighbors watch as ivy climbs from its brown, obeisant dormancy to join the great song.

Welcome to the English spring.

It's a vision of tranquility which the events of the past week would never have foretold. The clouds of ash spewed from the mouth of an Icelandic volcano spread out across the North Atlantic and left the traveling man and his flying machines utterly paralyzed for nearly a week. But the winds began to change and sent the dark blanket of earthly marrow elsewhere. Deo gratias!

I'm now back in Oxford, just in time for Trinity Term to begin. I would not be entirely honest if I said that returning here and leaving behind the United States once again was an easy thing. Spending time with friends and family for the longest period of time since the summer before college left me craving more. Enjoying the comforts of my American home was highly addictive (think Target, In-N-Out, ceiling fans, free refills). But those things will have to wait, and I've had to pray very, very ardently to be reconciled with that fact. Now is the time to buckle down, to reapply the proverbial nose to the proverbial grindstone (which is a remarkably grotesque idiom, is it not?). It's time to finish what I began more than three months ago.

I have been thinking a great deal about that enterprise, in fact. "Studying abroad" is a term that I thought I fully understood before embarking on this adventure. Yet there is a load of irony in it that I never expected to find. First of all, the learning I'm engaged in is of a much broader character than mere academics. More even than intellectual challenge. It is a full-scale spiritual odyssey. And to progress in that journey--that pilgrimage--I've had to come face-to-face with my doubts. What was nestled deeply is rising to the surface to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be assaulted. I've had to trust in the perfection of the Lord, the perfection of His will and His Word. Reliance, reliance, reliance, dependence, deference, submission, surrender, reliance, reliance, reliance. Not a catchy mantra, admittedly, but these are the things I am really learning about during my "study abroad" experience. History is a fine subject for the mind to play with, to pierce and mull over and explore and sketch. Ah, but even the mind grows weary of its joyful play when the soul is troubled.

And, second of all, the "abroad" half of the term is endowed with its own aspect of irony. Physically, yes, I'm abroad, but being abroad has only convinced me of just how much I love my country and my people. It sounds sappy, and even I, who drips with sap at the mere suggestion of applying pen to paper, am a little uncomfortable with the degree of sappiness, but I just can't deny that my heart is tightly tethered to America. It is not a utopia, to be sure. Evil lurks there just as it does the world over. But it is not a dystopia either. And no matter the state of the garden it is where my roots have taken hold.

Keep a-readin' this here blog for updates. There will be a-plenty. (Forgive me the faults and sap, and thank you, you dedicated few, for reading.)

Scottish Mem'ries + Parisian Wanderings

I'm convinced there really is nothing quite like a fresh Parisian crepe. And nothing makes it sweeter -- not even blessed Nutella -- than eating a fresh Parisian crepe while sitting on the banks of the Seine. As it flows through the gaslit city center, reflecting a golden and shimmering Tour Eiffel and giving the lovers' nightly strolls their calm, lapping soundtrack, that river is like the sweetest, purest sugar. Any smart pastry chef can make an extremely thin pancake and fill it with scrumptious things like walnuts and bits of chocolate, but all crepe-makers who are so unfortunate as to practice the craft outside of Paris face the marked disadvantage of lacking the sights and sounds and spirit of this place. They have to compensate with stripes and berets and fake French accents to achieve authenticity.

I came here from Scotland. This has provided an interesting contrast. On the one hand I had the dull greens and browns of the land the Celts called Alba, and on the other I have the vibrant, proud blue, white, and red of Paris. Scotland is about reserved, endearing subtleties where France is more about highlighting every subtlety till it screams with color and boldness and points itself out to you.

I shouldn't say I prefer one to the other. Each has its charms, its beauty. I do feel a bit more comfortable in Scotland, and England for that matter, but I think it's a matter of Anglophone familiarity more than anything else. There's security in knowing that you have the words to express yourself no matter what the situation. Especially when you're me, and words are currency, breath, blood. It's a strange kind of dull pain when I can't convey my true thoughts or feelings because my (now) very limited French vocabulary won't allow me to speak except in generalities. It's like losing your chisel after the first few blows to the marble. Or trying to paint the intricate night sky with your knee.

In any case, click here for some photos of my trip to Scotland, and watch out for photos of Paris to come.

Oh, and I'll be in the United States of America (what a thrill to write that out) in just two days now...!

Was, Am, Will Be

This moment, this exact point in the great and infinite span of time, is a pivot. One the one side is where I've been recently, what I've been up to, what I've seen and experienced. On the other side is where I'm going, what I'll soon be seeing. And right smack on top is where I am right now. (I think you can reasonably guess what I'm doing.)

(But let's not get too philosophical. I mean, every unit of time is such a pivot-point: each minute is "the present." This is on my mind because, on either side of writing this, in the past and the future, I'm writing a history essay. In history you deal with pivots almost exclusively, which you might say is the great insufficiency of history in understanding the past. After all, if all we ever study is when things change, we miss the times when things aren't changing. Then again, if time never stops and nothing is truly frozen -- not even ice, if you can believe the chemists about "energy" -- then I guess you can say everything is made up of pivots, of changes, of shifts, and so we really can't help but focus on them.)

In any case, where I am is in the lower chamber of the great architectural and intellectual hub of Oxford, the Radcliffe Camera (or, in Oxspeak, the Radcam). I'd show it to you, but photography is strictly verboten in here. (And please keep all hands and feet inside the car at all times. In case of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will float gracefully into your laps as you plummet not-so-gracefully into Earth's.) Suffice it to say, it's got a remarkable grotto-like feel. Built into the corners of the dimly lit set of stone "bays" that surround a central dome are dark wooden shelves filled with books of all sorts of boring blues and maroons. It's the heavy, cavernous coolness of the place that keeps bringing me back. There's no clock in here either, which seems to leave me forgetting that spending an entire day writing about 15th-century books is not the most exhilarating use of the sunshine.


Ah, but where I've been is a great deal more interesting. Friday night I was able to squeeze into a packed Oxford Town Hall, pictured to the left, to hear Tim Keller (senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan). He's without a doubt the ablest, humblest defender of the faith I've ever encountered -- well, see, I never actually met C. S. Lewis. His book The Reason for God (the foundation of his talk in Oxford) isn't just a bestseller and a thrill to read; it's a firmly grounded, deeply stirring challenge to skeptics. What Tim Keller manages to do with so much finesse and wit and spiritual wisdom is to turn the apologetic defense of Christianity as a worldview and faith into a keenly reasoned offensive against disbelief. He concludes that in fact there's far more of the unfounded faith decried by the unbelieving to be found on the skeptic's side of Christ than on the believer's. Wow. Anyway, Keller's talk was a spectacle, and to see so many intelligent people in the audience thinking deeply about his challenge was not just a testament to Keller as a thinker, but to the undeniable presence of the Spirit in his work.

Ah, but what will I be doing, where will I be going? Tonight there's a performance of Olivier Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" in college, and I'm promised it's worth hearing. It was written while Messaien was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, and first performed in that camp by a group of prisoners. It's in parts that are based on the various sections of Revelation. It should be very interesting (and live classical music is, in my experience, always worth the time).

Then, once my work is finished Friday Thursday afternoon -- in just three stress-filled days! -- I am finally free. Off to Edinburgh, then to Paris, then home to America for a full month. Just a little more huffing and puffing till I reach the peak.