oxford, oxford
what I thought about oxford last time is still true, but winter casts it in an altogether different light. the sky was alarmingly blue the day I arrived, and those splendid gothic spires stood like impossible cutouts against the rarefied air. a day or so later, something inexplicable awoke me in the middle of the night, and I peeled aside the curtain to see the city dark, silent, diaphanous, and quite exquisitely shrouded in snowfall.
snow! oxford in snowfall is splendid beyond recount. the next morning - the next three mornings! - I would scurry to the bodleian down those wide paved boulevards, snow crunching underfoot, coffee steaming furiously in my hand, grinning with glee; I would walk through those monstrous doors, shaking off the snow and the searing cold; I would find my table, the one beside the furnacelike radiator and the floor-to-ceiling window; and for a while I would sit and watch the snow settle thick, fast and arctic outside, while I snuggled closer to the radiator. and then I would read. endlessly. feverishly. hours evaporated in the velvety silence of the library, in the heavy dusty tomes, in the boxes upon boxes of papers and manuscripts crumbling with age and decrepitude, in the reams of folios encrusted with spidery illegible script....in the textures of history that completely consumed me for those glorious days. and suddenly it would be closing time.
oxford also found me, one night, hanging half out of my friend's window, snowflakes settling on my eyelids as I mumbled incoherently about how words were in everything, really, no seriously. a nearly empty bottle of vodka perched innocuously nearby. then the other night, screaming hoarsely to (god, of all things) chumbawumba blaring out of the club's loudspeakers. oh well. work hard, play hard.
then there was saturday, and all the time it brought to wander through the tangled warren of the city's cobbled streets, paying homage to OUP, rummaging through a rare print sale and antique bookstores cloistered away in invisible passageways, running my hands along the luminous apricot-coloured sandstones of christchurch's formidable walls. then the late afternoon brought the inevitable english downpour, and I glady sought refuge in a cafe, a pot of tea, an armchair and a marvellous book, as the rain sullenly thundered down outside.
so, the cup runneth over. life is sinfully good from where I'm standing right now -- and not least because on my third day in the library, I came across one of those archive gems that we historians just live for: a completely random morsel of information that wholly alters your view of a historical subject. the irascible, irrepressible sir george maxwell, whom so many of his contemporaries generally viewed as an unparalleled nuisance, had scrawled this on the back of a dull memo on the state of tin in malaya:
in a thinly disguised code I eventually managed to deceipher, starting with "I" in the top-left corner and reading down and up the columns, the whole thing says:
"I am in love,
as you may see,
I love but one
and thou art he [HE??],
read up and down
and you will see
that I love you
does [do??] you love me"
what does this MEAN?? didn't he have a wife and several children? who was this addressed to? was it just a perverse, narcissistic private joke to himself?? did he have a male lover??? and most importantly, why is it grammatically incorrect????!!? ?!?!
the questionmark is the historian's most central tool -- this much is clear, if nothing else! back in cambridge now, at any rate for several days.