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.)