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.

La Ville-Lumière

After finishing up with the trying academic labors of the last two weeks of term here in Oxford, I will be off to visit Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and then Paris, la Ville-Lumière, the City of Lights.

I've been to Paris before. The summer before college I went on a trip led by my French teacher that wound its ways through Europe and allowed us to spend a few days, including le 14 juillet (the French independence day), in Paris, the most brilliant city I've ever known.

But I'm returning because, ever since I left it behind in Europe and went to live in cold, blustery, dark New England to learn about stuffy, uninteresting things, I've longed to go back. I imagine--I know--that I am not alone in feeling that way. It's a sort of neverending village, filled with street vendors, singers, painters, booksellers, and, well, annoying tourists too. But this time I'm going to try to resist joining the ranks of the fannypack-wearing, sunscreen-nosed American visitors. I'm going to take in the sights not as the main event of the trip but rather as a consequence of wandering and tasting Paris for what it is--which is far more than a dizzying hike up the Eiffel or a stroll through the Louvre in search of the (utterly disappointing) Mona Lisa.

Here's where I'll be staying for my four nights: St Christopher's Paris. It's been voted the best hostel in all of France, which hopefully means it will be better than the average stay in a hostel...

A Picture Worth a Thousand Years

All Souls, Oxford

What's Missed, What Will Be Missed

What's missed:

• Free refills
• In-N-Out
• Netflix
• Non-military time
• Eating and drinking in the library (at Amherst, anyway)
• $5 movie theater tickets
• Talking in dollars, bucks, and cents, not in pounds, quid, and pence
• Wal-Mart
• Good pizza
• Ceiling fans
• Crossing streets safely
• Hearing "you're welcome," not "cheers" 
• Fanta

What will be missed:

• The cheapest flights I'll ever know
• Trains
• Old men with pipes and old women with dainty hats
• Pubs instead of seedy bars
• Gourmet Burger Kitchen
• Coke with real sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup
• The Alternative Tuck Shop
• Living in a medieval city
• Clean linens each week
• Being an hour from London
• Never fearing that the library won't have the book I'm looking for

'Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty'

This weekend I left Oxford and flew to Dublin, where I rendezvoused with two Amherstians-in-exile. It was quite the adventure.

I have to say, contrary to Whitman (who must have been in America when he wrote the line in the title), Ireland is not far at all: the flight takes about an hour from London, in fact. But maybe he meant it in another sense, that Ireland is a place far from everywhere else, an island not just as a geographical fact but as an idea, as a feeling. That it is, though I'm not sure my three days in Dublin suffice to certify me as an expert, or a poet for that matter.

So this is how the trip went:

The first day we enjoyed a good breakfast before setting out for the nearby coastal village of Howth. There we walked around the harbor shops (which smelled something like Fisherman's Wharf) and then to the outermost reaches of land where we had good views of the village cliffs and of Ireland's Eye, an island where the famed Book of Kells, now on display at Trinity College (Dublin, not Oxford) was stored by monks more than a thousand years ago. We also wandered up the hill into the heart of the village and sat a spell in Howth's parish church and listened to the children's choir practice.

After the sun went down, we dined at a restaurant called Deep, where the seafood-lover in our group was appeased and the remaining two of us managed to find huge gourmet burgers. When we returned to the city later that night, walking through some drizzle, we found a downtown pub, and, sipping a nice, sugary Coke, listened to the entire pub sing and clap to various loudly-played '90s pop songs. Pop and pop. When we left the rain had turned to humongous globs of snow.

The second day, after the snow had come and then completely gone, we explored Dublin more thoroughly. We saw the River Liffey that juts through the city and is crossed by a series of beautiful bridges. For lunch we went to the Brazen Head, the oldest pub in Dublin (it's about a thousand years old), and enjoyed some delectable pub food (which tends to be an oxymoron here in England but definitely is not in Ireland) and then some live Irish music by a traditional acoustic band, which included a woman playing the bodhrán (an Irish frame drum) and a man who played a mean set of spoons.

Before going to the small but passionate Immanuel Church Dublin, where we enjoyed some wonderful worship and one of the best Old Testament sermons I've ever heard, we heard evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, the Church of Ireland cathedral in the city. If you've never been to an evensong in a cathedral, it is well worth the hour. The incredibly beautiful music is surely just a small taste of what we'll be able to enjoy and take part in for eternity in Heaven. Anyway, for dinner we ate at an American restaurant, where I had some really good chili, and then called it a night.

The third day I ventured into the city by myself before catching my flight back into London. I decided to spend my few hours seeing Dublin on foot and leisurely. I strolled through a few open markets and saw the first maternity hospital ever built. It was a relaxing time.

To see my few photos of the trip, click here.

Les Voyages

It's strange to think that the first of my two terms here in Oxford is already more than halfway over. But it means that there are some fun travels coming up, and I thought I'd share them.

This weekend I'm off to Dublin (flights are incredibly inexpensive!). I've only got a few days there, so I'll have to return some other time to see the north, where the Hendren side of the family finds its ancestral county (in Armagh).

Then, after 8th Week, the last week of term, I'm taking a train up through England and into the wily country of Scotland. I'll see Edinburgh and maybe some of the Highlands. And next it's off to Paris for four days--Paris!--before taking an 18-hour flight back to the U.S. for a month of vacation.

Who knows what next term holds (besides a brilliant explosion of spring color in Oxford, I'm promised). But I do know what the next few weeks and months will be, and the prognosis looks very, very good.

Weekend Hijinks

Here's a few photos of the weekend. Two good friends came in to Oxford, one from Dublin and the other from Edinburgh, and we met up with three others already in Oxford. It was an absolute blast.

Being touristy in St John's College. 

From left to right: Alice '08 (studying English in Harris Manchester, Oxford) , Megan '11 (studying politics this semester up in the U. of Edinburgh), Jen '11 (studying politics and history this semester in Mansfield College, Oxford), Jes-c '11 (studying all sorts of things this semester in University College Dublin), and moi.

Eating our sandwiches from the Alternative Tuck Shop outside the Bodleian Library (which is my daily lunchtime routine.) Jerry '11 (studying economics and philosophy for the entire year in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) was our sixth member.

Taking afternoon tea in the posh Randolph Hotel, across from the Ashmolean Museum.

I was especially fond of the scones, clotted cream (a strange dairy product), and strawberry preserves. What you can't see was the slobbering.

An Oxford Lesson on the Two Hedonisms

. . . for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
(Romans 14:17, NKJV)

I'm no pioneer, and Oxford is no frontier. If anything, I'm comfortably situated in what is one of the great anti-frontiers of the Old World. At its foundations this place is a medieval city, with its cobbled roads taking the same winding paths between walled colleges as they did 800 years ago.

But it's easy to feel sometimes as though Broad Street, neatly trimmed as it is with its old bookshops and pubs and the edifices of the great Bodleian Library, is a kind of Oregon Trail. You wander down its length and find a crossroads at Magdalen and Cornmarket and George. You're forced to make a decision, and all the while you're thinking, "Will I really be able to 'caulk the wagon and float' over that massive puddle I'm about to step into?"

OK, OK, I exaggerate. But it is true, though, that even in a place so grounded in history and so steeped in culture and learning as Oxford you can find yourself trying to reinvent the wheel or fashion a canteen out of cow intestines (which, conveniently, can probably be found in the Covered Market).

(I've gone too far, haven't I?)

Well, my point is, being away from home, and especially in another country entirely, necessitates growth. It inevitably means facing a certain kind of adversity and adapting to it (those are two very Latinate words, and I apologize; though in my defense, I'm not attempting to write poetry here).

As humans, we take varying stances on change. Sometimes we open our arms and embrace it, either by unfolding our once-stubborn arms or just keeping them wide open all the time. Or sometimes we keep our arms folded and forcefully shake our head at change, or maybe even shake a fist at it. Most of the time we do a combination of those things. But it's also human to face challenges by not facing them, by either denying that the challenges exist or self-medicating so that the feeling of change is felt only minimally.

Really, our world is full of promises of self-medication. Coffee, caffeine, alcohol, sedatives, junk food, bad music. We plug ourselves into an iPod, turn up music that is itself likely telling us to self-medicate by other methods, chug our Coke or coffee, eat our comfort food while plopped down in front of a TV that's piping profane and moronic things into our ears and flashing images of sex, consumption, and divisiveness into our eyes. When we're feeling blue, we reach for chocolate, or we turn on a movie. I don't mean to sound like some cultural critic, but I'm just saying that if you look around, and if you look at your own patterns, you see that we're all choosing over and over to sate our hunger and thirst with the products of the world.

This impulse is even stronger, I think, when you're away from home. We do things on vacation we would never do among friends and family. It's the old "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" line. Except that it's not just in Sin City (as if there isn't sin outside of Nevada!). Now, this isn't to say I'm having some wild time in Oxford, doing all sorts of things that I'm ashamed of. But something can be wrong even if it is mild and seemingly innocent.

It's wrong because our sustenance should come from the Spirit. As the verse way up there says, "the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." That means setting down the Cadbury milk chocolate bar (not that I've ever had any...) and picking up the Bible. It means logging out of Facebook and logging in to prayer. It means, ultimately, realizing that nothing man-made will ever sustain the soul.

See, I've gone from sounding like some lefty critic to sounding preachy. I say it only because I've learned it, and at Oxford you haven't truly learned something until you've written it down.


(I'm about to start working through the writings of John Owen, a 17th-century Christian pastor who wrote extensively on temptation -- as soon as I get a chance to bring over the twenty-three volumes of The Works of John Owen from the library. In the meantime, I'm familiarizing myself with John Piper's so-called Christian hedonism, which you can read about here.)

The Lecture War, A Habit of Mind, & Friends

I've had a wonderful morning. Granted, I woke up at 6 a.m. or so (for the second morning in a row) to read several hundred pages on the 16th-century trade in Lutheran books. But then I arrived at my first tutorial and all my fatigue faded. My tutor, who is a very kind Italian scholar, began the session by asking me more about Amherst and its history department and how I'd come to be in Oxford.

Then she asked if I had been attending lectures. Uncomfortable, I stammered a very ashamed "no." She shook her head slightly and then looked up and said, "Well, let's go off to the History Faculty and pick up a lecture list, shall we?"

So off we went, out of the Taylorian, past Gloucester Green, and onto George Street. When we entered the Faculty, there were no lecture lists* to be found. So she walked into the only office with a human inside and asked if there were any lists left. When the guy, a porter, replied that they were all gone, she said, "Well, my student needs one. What about that copy there?" The porter took hold of the 14-page list and, shaking his head, told her it was his only copy and that we could easily access the list online. Ah, but Dr. Dondi was undeterred: "Is there a photocopier?" "No, it's only for postgraduates, I'm afraid." Twitching slightly (she's a faculty member, for heaven's sakes), she peered at him. "Well, I'd like a printed copy, please." "It's a full fourteen pages, Miss." "Well, if you'd show me to a computer with a printer, I'll print it out myself." "There's no printer available; sorry." "Well," she sighed, with a bit of a grin, "I need the list." He got up suddenly and, rushing out of the room, he yelled from the hallway: "Fine! I'll make it double-sided!" She's my hero.

Anyway, after getting the list and watching two adult people nearly break out into a playground fight, we walked back to our tutorial room and she went one by one through the fourteen pages of lectures and pointed out the ones I should attend, skipping over the one about "the linguistic turn" and the few about "gender in such-and-such-a-period" with a smile. When we finished, she told me to compile the list and send it to her so she could keep track of what I was learning. Now I have an advisor.

It was a very nice gesture, and she gave up her hour of teaching time (for which she'd brought early modern pamphlets to show me) to do it, which is incredibly considerate.

So now my task is to really form my Oxford "habit of mind." A weekly schedule of lectures and essays and reading for tutorials -- plus my other routines -- will be a lot to juggle, but I'm ready to try.

But the day's not over. In an hour's time I head to Hertford College for my other tutorial (on Victorian politics) to hear how good or bad my week's essay is. Then I've got a lecture on William the Conqueror at 5, and at 11 I'll head back to Gloucester Green to meet two good friends from Amherst who are arriving from Ireland and Scotland, respectively, for a weekend of Oxonian exploration.



*A note on lecture lists. The University of Oxford, like Cambridge, is organized in a few different ways. Besides splitting students and scholars into separate, independent colleges (I'm in St. Catherine's College), the scholars further organize across colleges into subject "faculties." The History Faculty is the organization of historians in Oxford. Some of those scholars are also lecturers, and anyone in the University at large is able to attend their lectures. The lecture list, then, is the list of all the history lectures for the term.

A Few Oxford Photos

I'm still not sure what is the best way to share my photos, but I always upload them to Facebook first. So I'm going to try out posting the link to the Facebook album (click here) and see if everyone can see the photos there. If not, leave me a comment.

The Stars & Greater Purposes

You can't see the stars here. I've always told myself I could never settle anywhere I couldn't see the full night sky. Something about gazing up and imagining just how far that pulsating light must be traveling, and then immediately sensing the infinite insignificance of your own existence, is such a relief; it's especially refreshing when you've once again managed to get stuck in the tangle of your own anxieties and preoccupations. You imagine what it really means for the universe to go on and on and on infinitely, and you begin to grasp -- and yet, as these things go, not quite grasp at all -- that everything in that universe must be, mathematically speaking, infinitely small. Picture a Google map, for instance, and that little doohickey that allows you to zoom in and out on a given point (a Starbucks around the corner, say). Well, now just imagine that that doohickey allowed you to zoom out forever, never stopping. Try to find the Starbucks after zooming just a few minutes. And that would be you, and that would be me, that little coffee house lost in endless, unrelenting expanse.

But there's a paradox (or, really, a half-truth) here, of course. Just as I stand there feeling infinitely insignificant, knowing that if I were just a spot on an infinitely zooming Google map that I'd soon disappear, I know it just can't be true. You see, if you think about it, there's only one being who could ever possibly be controlling that zoom doohickey. It's a being who would have to be sufficiently infinite (that is, infinite) to be outside the map. Ah, here we have a being to whom we owe our purpose. If that being didn't exist, and there was no one to zoom in on us, well, we all really would be infinitely insignificant, and only that. Happily, 'tis not the case.

What does all of this bad metaphor have to do with being in Oxford, you ask. Hm. Well, these past two weeks I've had to keep these things in mind more than usual. The first week of academic work here, for instance, went pretty terribly. I had to hear some very harsh words from my academic (not to mention intellectual) superior, had to endure the scorn and frustration of many who aren't big fans of the States United, and realized in the frigid cold just how lonely studying abroad seemed to be. Draining is a good word to describe that week.

Last week, my second week (it's actually called Week 2, which is handy), went much more smoothly. I still had to take walks every once in a while to clear my head, and I had to buy myself some Cadbury chocolate more than a few times to motivate myself to stay in this country rather than plead for someone to deport me. Just kidding. (Well, not about the chocolate.)

The difference last week, besides a little bit more comfort and familiarity with the city and its rhythms, was that I tried with a lot more gusto to keep that old celestial perspective on life. Coming to a new country alone to study at what may just be about the most intimidating institution of higher learning in the world can easily convince you that you've made a mistake somewhere along the line. "You made a wrong turn, and look where you ended up! Oxford, for heaven's sake! And now you're stuck here and you have to get through it, and it's incredibly hard and no one respects you because you're American and that tutor said such-and-such and my life is coming to an end, isn't it?" That was the general direction of the internal monologue for a while.

But when I prayed and thought -- long and hard -- I started to see my life here in Oxford as something more, or maybe something much less, than a difficult/rewarding/once-in-a-lifetime experience. First, there should be no doubt that I made no wrong turns. That was a hard pill to swallow, but the tap water's not too bad here and it got swallowed eventually. When I really think about it, and as I thought about it last week, I can't say I believe for one second that my being here is possibly incorrect. Any dope who observed this entire business of my getting here would conclude that it was neither by chance nor by unsure steps. But my second realization is perhaps the more important: What we see and what we do and what we say is not the entirety of the story. The maxim is true, after all, that no man is an island. To spend any amount of time mourning your own supposed misfortunes (though that being who controls the infinite Google zooming doohickey might not agree that they're misfortunes at all -- aha!) is to ignore that your life is about more than your own emotions or thoughts or even actions. It's easy to slip safely into a cocoon of self and blind yourself to the world outside your dark hibernation. Hence the refreshment of a stargaze every once in a while.

The fact is, I have not come here, I have not traveled here. There is little of me in this, and less and less by the day. I was brought here. And I have to trust, by my own idiotic metaphor but more importantly by the assurances I have in an everlasting, ever-faithful, living God, that being here, finding myself in rough spots, in moments of isolation and silence and (if it's not too strong to say) persecution, and discovering that I am not at all an independent young man but a frail, highly dependent soul, is to find myself exactly where I'm supposed to be.

After all, God works many things in the desert. And the night sky's not bad either.

City of Dreaming Spires

So it's finally happened: I've finally made it to Oxford. If my math is correct, there have been about sixteen years of dreams which have preceded my arrival.

I was a small boy from a small town when I first fell in love with England. I don't know really where the obsession came from. I for one think that it's my deep respect for the power of the imagination that was, and is, what's propelled me here. Books, movies, writers, wonderlands formed in slightly twisted but always well-meaning minds, -- the English have mastered the art of transcending this dull Earth in worlds beyond, where life is punctuated with tea and made far more interesting than normal terrestrial existence with fanciful battles and meetings with sage old wizards. No one does mythmaking better than the English. For those living life mainly in those dark, mysterious recesses of the mind, then, this is the place to dream of, the nexus of our quiet mental engines.

But getting here -- to Oxford -- has been much more interesting of a story than that of my obsessions with England. Of course any person can dream of becoming an astronaut or the president, yet who of those dreamers achieves it? Few of them, really -- and usually the ones with some great uncle in NASA or the politics business. But how many ordinary Joes actually end up where their childish minds' eyes saw themselves in the distant future? Sadly, many, many fewer. Thankfully, I've had the truly joyous blessing of teachers along the way who challenged me and goaded me on. They saw a few dull sparks and cut off their own branches of knowledge and wisdom to kindle the fire that has sustained me. They are the cause of this fantastic adventure.

I've walked the snowy roads that weave through this medieval village with this on my mind and heart; I pass by great cathedrals of learning, ancient centers of intellectual life in a world that has so often rejected ideas and books in favor of quick, baseless solutions to problems and general emptiness; and all the while I see cheerful, smiling teachers striding along the footpaths, undeterred by brown slush and falling snowflakes and the inevitable collision with a romping, frolicking undergraduate who maybe does not quite appreciate the dedication of his own tutors to his own formation as a human being.

And everywhere and at all times, too, I think of dear Professor Lewis, whose handsome Magdalen College neighbors St Catherine's. A saint if there ever were one, but a man whose faith and great love of ideas were not always working together or to the same end. He was, at the moment of his rededication to Christ -- in his thirties, I believe -- famously "the most reluctant convert in England." Even though Oxford is now very much the harbor for the atheist academic strains which have left the University (in the broadest, most universal terms) diseased with cynicism, relativism, and, perhaps worst of all, arrogance, the shadows of men like Lewis and Tolkien still dart about, their voices echoing in the libraries and the halls, reminding this place of truths that cannot be overcome, of absolutes and laws and axioms and principles that, passé as they seem to the modern man, still stand, even in the face of millennia of onslaught and assault by the greatest minds. It's among these shadows and echoes that I feel truly welcomed to Oxford, as though in some small way I have inherited a bit of their mission here and in the world. I can only pray that I am to be blessed with a fraction of their courage in standing against what, from one small man's perspective, would seem a looming, overwhelming wave of rebellion against the true nature of Creation and against the will of the Creator.

"When the Night over London Lay"

After arriving last week in London, I've seen quite a bit of the city. Most of my time to explore has been at night. The first night my roommate (from Hamilton College over in New York State) and I sought after Big Ben and took the Tube, the London Underground, for the first time. I couldn't help but imagine the first scene of Prince Caspian when the Pevensie children return to Narnia as a train whooshes through a downtown Tube station.

Since then I've met a lord, seen a show in the West End, met quite a few American students also readying themselves for study in British universities, and eaten at this London McDonald's I'm writing from a total of two (wonderfully tasty) times. I'd say that my first great impression is that Londoners are not the friendliest folk in the world. Sometimes I've wanted to take some of them by the collar after they give me their "Yuck! An American!" glare and remind them that not all Americans are bosom buddies of George W. Bush -- the man the English love to hate.

But aside from the political and spiritual atmosphere here in the UK (best described as hostile), England is, as far as I've been able to see here in London, basically the same place the American impression would lead one to believe. Sure, its mythic qualities are much diminished, and its quaintness is hardly perceptible in metropolitan London. And yes, the scars of air battles have long healed (thanks, I've been tempted to remind, to American dollars), and no one really wears tweed. In fact, as one woman told me, the English wear nearly all black (which is true) because of their deep depression and social shyness. And no one really says "God save the Queen"; some talk about her, with a lot of resentment (though not nearly as much as they reserve for her son and heir), but then again many will eventually admit that they admire the monarchy and the Englishness it represents. But the accents and the exactitudes and the foggy cold all prove to me that I've come to the true England. But what a strange and thoroughly confusing country!

Tomorrow I'm off to Oxford, about an hour northwest from London. There my true adventure begins. I've got a week to settle in before tutorials start in earnest. I've been warned of the indescribable rigor of Oxford study, which has made me nervous. But I trust that I'm here for a purpose deeper than my own amusement or struggle, so none of those cautionary words mean much of anything to me. The banner under which I trudge forward is not my own.

(Oh, and photos of London to follow soon.)