April 25: A la recherche du Oxford

My final week in England was spent with my grandparents and my cousin Josh, anarchist, teetotaler, and, to the chagrin of Grandma and Grandad, vegan. That he opposes all systems of government and declines drink our grandparents abide; that he refuses bacon and eggs sends them into spasms of alarm. On an afternoon early in the week Grandma asked in a voice strained, decorous, and amplified, flashing a smile at me, to whom she was speaking, while casting a doleful glance across the room at Josh, for whom she was speaking, ‘Nealson, don’t you wish Josh would eat meat?’

Abashed, I replied in a similar tone, ‘I’m just happy that Josh has principles and upholds them consistently’, a phrase both typical of my sententious demeanor and entirely artificial. Minutes later my grandfather, who announced on seeing the infant Josh for the second time ‘He’s looking more normal now…’, expressed a message identical to that of his wife, only he circumvented my services with a query typical of his candid demeanour and in no way artificial. ‘Josh, when are you going to start eating meat again?’

Josh carried on manfully in the face of this interrogation, despite receiving little emotional support from myself, for I was adrift on a sea of reminiscence, a voyage that had begun two days earlier as a coach transported me out of Oxford. Resting my temple against one of the vehicle’s second-tier windows, I had watched as Tom Tower, Cornmarket Street, and the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin drifted across my field of vision and vanished behind me. By straining my senses I sought to ensure that the skyline of the city left the deepest possible impression on my memory; and as my home of the past eight months finally receded in the distance—never more, perhaps, for me to gaze upon it with an accompanying sense of proprietorship—I at last faced forward in my seat and began indulging my most maudlin impulses.

My aim in this quiet reverie was to crystallize my experiences in Oxford, to make of them something hard and gemlike, an object to be periodically unsatchelled, polished, and admired throughout the (hopefully) long succession of subsequent years. I have since realized that my memories possess no such unity. My remembrances of Oxford are not a sprawling, commodious mural, but a series of portraits, eclectic and neat, each with merits peculiar to itself.

I mean such memories as that of my spry roommate Charley springing from his bed on a winter morning, gazing out the window and unselfconsciously addressing the world: ‘Ver’s dee money, Lebowski?’; of Leilani pivoting so that her hair leaps out behind her in a silky brown spray, brandishing a square purse inscribed with the skyline of Paris, advising Laura that the boy passing notes to her in the Lower Camera ‘just needs a little radiance in his life’; of Jonathan’s arm flashing furiously against a white background during our snowball battle, his brow set in defiance of Trevor and Kevin’s onslaught, even as their missiles explode on his tweed jacket and hunter-green waistcoat; of Sarah-Barcus garnishing dinnertime conversations with macabre musings; and of scholars transforming into megaliths as Katy and Beth dance beside Stonehenge like the ‘little children’ in This Is Spinal Tap.

These scenes have taken their place beside my terrifying boyhood P.E. classes and the idyllic adolescent summers I spent at Sebago Lake to become irrevocably of a piece with my past. No more stable than my present existence, they are, however, more distant, and therefore less accessible. What was once a pleasant but mundane component of the matrix of sensations comprising a typical weekday—Joanna’s Technicolour jumper, for example—is now imbued with nostalgia as a vestige of a definitely concluded era of my life, one already beginning to seem alien to me.

I suspect, however, that my eight months in Oxford are less remote than they seem, that they are, in fact, enclosed within the recesses of my own mind, and that the world is littered with sensations secretly holding the power to expose them—the taste of a chocolate digestive, perhaps, or the sound of Earth Wind & Fire’s September floating from the stereo of a passing car; perhaps also a muttered line from Robin Hood, or even a glance at one of the heavy-handed and contrived essays I wrote for my tutors (e.g. ‘Horace’s Odes: A Salvationist Reading’). Hundreds of keys lie strewn across my path, like so many hidden portals to Narnia, waiting for me to discover them unwittingly and unlock the trove of memories I have assembled this year.

Indeed, even as I flew towards Newark, NJ on Saturday (having once again assumed my Continental Airlines alter ego, ‘Nelson’) I was reminded that the fugitive appearance of my past is merely a façade, a screen behind which lurks a loyal companion. For as I lifted to my lips a paper tea cup handed me by a stewardess, the whole of my external surroundings seemed to dissipate, from the plastic seats to the flickering television monitors to the man dozing beside me, and with my mind's eye I saw a deceased spot of time, resurrected by the familiar taste of the beverage I had sipped at the kitchen counter in 8 Crick Road, beside Jonathan and Laura, with Dianna nearby scrawling an aphorism on our quote board, with stained mugs in the sink and The Clash singing on the stereo, with Jenni and Susan declining a Greek noun beside the oven, with birds feeding outside on the green lawn, at which I gazed through the tall open window ventilating the room, an aperture that along with the rest of this scene erupted in an instant, like plaited fabric unfolding out of a paper package, from my cup of tea.

March 19: Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god...

‘Neal, I don’t think the Lake District is going to work out’.

Lucy’s words, murmured in a timorous and apologetic voice above the din of the Sheldonian Theatre, triggered a thought pattern that would lead to my tramping through Rome for four days like a horde of Visigoths, sleep-deprived, unkempt, and conscious of an acute want of culture; but at the moment of their utterance my response was simply to turn in bewilderment to my avuncular roommate Charley reclining languidly nearby (in contrast to the shock of brown hair sprouting from his scalp), who twisted his lips in incredulity at his sister’s pronouncement. He briefly met my gaze before looking beyond me at Lucy and exclaiming with a short recoiling motion of the head:

‘No way!’

The next day I sat in the kitchen at 8 Crick Road cradling my chin between my fingers in an attitude of pensive mock-Proustian reflection. I explained my dilemma to Jonathan.

‘The whole Lake District thing doesn’t seem to be happening. I don’t know what I’m going to do over spring break’.

Jonathan replied without hesitation that I should come with him to Rome. Offered as an interactive appendix to his classics seminar, Mr. Kirpatrick’s annual tour of Rome promised by virtue of his own leadership and organization to be an edifying experience. I pondered for a moment. ‘You know, perhaps I will’, I exhaled.

Thus, following a series of hastily arranged but smoothly executed travel arrangements, I found myself mounting a hill in central Italy to see looming before me—vast and seemingly unreal, like some spectral apparition—the Colosseum.

I blinked in the assertive Mediterranean sunlight. ‘This is a structure of some significance, correct?’ I asked.

It was the first of many historic locales at which I was to perceive thoughts moving through my mind as through a thick sludge. We had spent the previous night in wakeful transit, which partially accounts for the lassitude of my synapses; but in truth a simple ignorance of Roman history constituted more than the moiety of my stupefaction—especially in the presence of the ardent classicist Jonathan, who, set before the ruins of Ancient Rome, was at last able to divest himself of the burden of his erudition, and did so with tangible excitement and relief. At each edifice knowledge spumed from his lips like foam from a pressurized canister. Pivoting on his heels before a towering monument he might begin, with characteristically precise enunciation:

—‘Now this is really interesting, because this obelisk was erected by Caesar Augustus in 42 B.C. as a gift to his friend The Sun, and as you can tell by the hieroglyphics it’s been nicked from Egypt. This was something the Romans were quite fond of doing…’
—‘Is it the world’s biggest obelisk?’
—‘No’.

Or perhaps:

— ‘Now this is really interesting; this triumphal arch was erected by the emperor Titus to celebrate his victory over the Jews. It was Titus’ father Vespasian, you may recall, who famously said on his deathbed, “Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god”’.
—‘Why did he say that?’
—‘Because after his death the emperor was conventionally regarded as a deity’.
—‘Hey, is this Titus as in Titus Andronicus?’
—‘No’.

Or even:

—‘Now this is really interesting, because it’s a sizeable sculpture representing merely a single human foot. The only other statue we’ve found like it is on Mt. Carmel’.
—‘Wait, wait, wait. The only other one is on Mt. Carmel?’
—‘Yes’.
—‘Okay, so how about this: foot in Rome, foot on Mt. Carmel, statue spanning the gap in between. Eh?’

Over the course of the tour a discernible trend emerged in Jonathan’s pedagogical method. Although happy to volunteer information, he conserved his patience by replying to unpromising queries and suggestions in monosyllables.

— ‘So can anyone tell me whose bust this is?’
— ‘Is it Diocletian?’
— ‘No’.
— ‘Domitian?’
— ‘No’.
— ‘Marcus Aurelius?’
— ‘No’.
— ‘Antoninus Pius?’
— ‘No’.
— ‘Hadrian?’
— ‘No’.
— ‘Hadrian’s lover?’
— ‘Yes! Now can you recall his name?’
— ‘No’.

On the morning of our second day in Rome I was abruptly awoken from a sleep only nominally different from that of death and told to prepare for mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. As I stumbled to my feet waking life seemed as terrifying and inscrutable to me as the phenomenon of nature must have to the earliest Greek philosophers. In an adjacent bed Dave Jacobson, a film student from California, lifted his tanned head and gave utterance to the entire room’s feelings: ‘Dude—lights out, lights on’.

But inside the Vatican such subjective preoccupations dissipated and the external world was brought sharply into focus. Every corner of the church housed huge marble statues, sinewy saints and muscular apostles draped in robes rippling like storm-beaten surf, their hands hoisting tablets or bloodstained shawls aloft in the sacred air, their eyes fierce with inspiration. The following day, in the Sistine Chapel, I turned my face upwards to see a similar motif: prophets and holy men, pagan Sybils and Our First Parents, even Yahweh Himself, all arrayed in soft-hued garments within which muscles strained portentously and folds formed along the grooves of joints or ligaments. Even my rude aesthetic brain cognized Michelangelo’s vault as an arresting work of art, and I continued to stare at it even as I was escorted to the exit by a peevish Italian security guard who took umbrage at my informing him, in no uncertain terms, that my right to photograph the painting was protected by the constitution of the United States of America and if he had any problems with that he could take it up with the Federal Government.

A catalogue of our sightseeing itinerary in toto would require a lengthier exposition than either the space or the time allotted to me permits; suffice it to say that we obeyed Horace’s advice ‘carpe diem’ unrelentingly while in his home city. In one day we might visit, perhaps, two museums, three basilicas, an obelisk, the Forum, Bernini’s Saint Theresa in Ecstasy, the Palatine Hill, the Pantheon, and an ice cream shop. With everyone save the indefatigable Jonathan afterwards satiated with classical history, our conversation during the walk back to our hotel would roll away from the subject of Rome like a lazy eye.

‘Yeah, I like Wes Anderson’s films (although I thought Life Aquatic was too long), his cinematography is rad, if you look at the shots and the blocking most of what he’s doing with the dolly is just pure symmetry. It’s sweet’.

And Jonathan would wait for an opportune moment, some lull in our discourse, to suggest,

‘Would anyone care to see the Triumphal Column of Marcus Aurelius?’

On the return flight from Rome to London I sat between Jonathan and Beth, congratulating the former on his stalwart leadership and discreetly informing the latter of my total mental and physical exhaustion. As the flight crew demonstrated the aircraft’s safety features I drifted into a reverie of equestrian statues, tyrannical emperors, twisted marble torsos, percussive Italian speech, fluted Corinthian columns, Latin inscriptions, and spaghetti carbonara. Then, in a reactive movement suggesting that Newton’s laws apply to the phenomena of mental as well as physical life, my thoughts, after their retreat into the immediate past, rebounded forwards beyond the present and into the immediate future like a stone launched from a sling. Restlessly I turned again to Jonathan:

—‘Hey, are you going to mass at Christ Church tomorrow morning?’
—‘No’.

February 27: Calm Like a Bomb

Throughout my boyhood my father would take advantage of the solemn moments he and I shared to turn to me and say, ‘Your mother is a special lady, you know’. No doubt I needed these reminders, for having at that age only limited experience of the world I was inclined to accept unquestioningly the reality with which I was presented, so that I did not think it strange that most of my adult role models bore military titles such as ‘Captain’ or ‘Lieutenant Colonel’, that my father spoke with a British accent, or that my mother routinely prophesied over our dinner guests, with tears coursing down her cheeks, that Jehovah-Raffa would break off them any unclean spirit and bless their offspring to the thousandth generation.

Nor did it occur to me when I appeared in the living room to inform my mother of there being no food in the house (by which I meant no tortilla chips in the house), that the petite woman sitting before me with an open Bible resting on her lap was at that moment pressing to her lips a hot coal borne by a winged seraph, or receiving divine confirmation that the daughter of a woman in her prayer group would soon be healed of cancer. The easy cohabitation of the mundane and the supernatural in our household seemed unremarkable to me then. But my father’s words - ‘Your mother is a special lady’ - would soon be echoed by other, less expected voices.

First there was Sarah Baker: blonde, svelte, possessed of a small, enchanting bell-like voice, and four years my senior, who bestowed upon me more of her attention than was quite merited by an ill-dressed fourteen year-old with a unibrow. I was flattered until I realized that she wished only to speak with me of my mother, whom she greatly admired. Perhaps I was the first crestfallen adolescent in history to say to himself, ‘She’s just using me for my mom!’

Later came Ms. Matrazzo, the English teacher who interrupted class to tell me, ‘Neal, it was lovely to meet your mother during parent-teacher conferences last week. She wasn’t at all what I expected’. I looked up from the calculus assigment I was then hurriedly and surreptitiously completing beneath my desk to inquire, ‘How so?’

‘Well, I expected her to look more like you. But she was gorgeous…’

Doubtless my mother’s poise and tact, her lustrous hair and soothing voice, contrast with certain particulars of my person so as to mute the family resemblance between us - though this becomes audible again after only a glance at our features, for it has often been observed that above my body, which is that of the Richard Munn, hovers the face of Janet Munn, albeit obscured by a swath of stubble.

I hadn’t seen my face’s template since September when I met my mother in London two Saturdays ago. I wondered as I approached our rendezvous point - Victoria Station, Platform Nine and Three-Quarters - if I might find her changed, or if she might find me changed. Then again, her energies were diminished by jet-lag, as were my own by essay-lag (I’d been up much of the previous night writing a rather heavy-handed and contrived piece on ‘William Booth and the Phenomenological Tradition’), so we could devote attention to little besides the comprehension and articulation of English sentences. The external surroundings of the London Underground, Trafalgar Square, and even the National Gallery were immaterial to us that day, as they always are to friends with much to discuss. I did most of the talking, for she, with characteristic grace, chiseled and polished our conversation so as to make an exquisite setting for the gemstone of my exaggerated stories (‘Then I walk up to Jasper Griffin and say “Hey! I dig your scholarship, man!”’).

At 8 Crick Road that evening I introduced her to my fellow residents, whispering details about them to her at intervals like a snob at a ‘society’ party (‘That’s Jonathan: he reads nine languages, including Greek and Latin’; ‘That’s Leilani: she fell out of a tree last term’), and after her departure it was generally agreed that she is a pleasant and striking woman, although some of my female housemates were a trifle perplexed by my sharp declaration, upon their broaching the subject of my mother: ‘You won’t get another word out of me! I know what you’re up to, and I have too much self-respect for that…’ O, Sarah: my heart, my heart!

February 13: Cityscape with Frieze of J. Griffin

For over a fortnight, Jasper Griffin has been the unofficial mascot of the Classicists at 8 Crick Road.

I first saw his name—that unforgettable epithet, redolent of gemstones and mythic beasts—on the syllabus sent to me at the beginning of term, a single A4 page dryly instructing me to read the Iliad, the Cambridge Companion to Homer, C. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational, and a trio of works by one ‘J. Griffin’: Homer: A Very Short Introduction, Homer’s Iliad, and ‘Homer on the Divine’ (in Phronesis 1982, pp. 71-77). It was immediately apparent, then, owing to the favouritism shown him on our reading list, that this ‘Griffin’ fellow was regarded as a privileged authority by the lean, understated, well-spoken, and inquisitive personage of Mr. Jonathan Kirkpatrick, tutor to myself, Beth, and Jenni; analyst, chef, photographer, philologist-in-residence, and apologist for Great Britain to our entire household.

I crossed uninvited the threshold of Jonathan’s quarters one night shortly after receiving this syllabus, and after glancing around to acquaint myself with the room’s adornments—Russian novels, pneumismatics posters, a bust of Caesar crowned with a purple fedora, Jonathan himself seated at an oaken desk—launched into a short speech I’d composed that morning while shaving.

‘It seems to me, Mr. Kirkpatrick, sir, that your habit of brewing coffee twice and tea thrice daily, and, what is more, peddling these drugs—for they are drugs, sir, and you know it—to the residents here at 8 Crick Road is exercising a singularly deleterious effect on the life of our community. We are all perpetually in a state of mental agitation, a state already exacerbated by the heavy academic burden which, as you know only too well, we all must bear for these eight weeks, but made even worse by these pernicious solicitations of yours’.

Doubtless chastened by my insane spiel, Jonathan bit his lower lip and cast a furtive glance at his computer screen before asking,

— ‘Will that be all, Nealson?’
— ‘Yes. No. Just one more thing: is that a copy of Jasper Griffin’s Homer: A Very Short Introduction I see on your desk?’
— ‘Indeed it is…would you like to borrow it?’
—‘Yes, if you don’t mind’.
—‘Certainly. Enjoy it, he’s a fine scholar. I studied classics under him at Balliol’.

This explained Jonathan’s favouritism. I studied classics under him—that is, under the tutelage of Jasper Griffin, the man whose book I now held in my tremulous hand, from which book’s glossy white cover peered a face supposed to be Homer’s, but which I fancifully envisaged as that of Professor Griffin himself, so that in my imagination Jonathan had taken instruction from a bearded, stooped, slightly crazed-looking, not to say blind old man to whom I furthermore attributed a fiery temper and, for a voice, a high-pitched warble.

Through reading Dr. Griffin’s books, whether in the comfort of my bed, where I might look up to see my soporific roommate Charley asleep at his computer, or in the amber light of the Old Bodleian library, where I might suddenly find Beth standing beside my desk clutching a copy of Homer’s Iliad and inquiring in a coy, yet friendly manner, ‘You’re reading Jasper Griffin, too?’, I came to hold almost a Socratic view of the man, admiring his intellect even as I continued to ascribe to him the repulsive physical qualities inspired by my first glimpse of his book.

Gradually his name became shorthand for Homeric scholarship in our house, and could, with light irony, be quoted as an unimpeachable authority during dinnertime Classics discussions, as Salvationists might invoke the opinions of ‘The Founder’ to decide matters of ecclesiastical reform.

—‘Jonathan, I’m worried about Hector. I don’t think things are going to end well for him’.
—‘Well, maybe you’ll be wrong. Maybe he’ll survive’.
—‘Not according to Jasper Griffin…’

—‘Look at the stars tonight. It’s amazing to think that when Homer gazed up at them they might just then have been emitting the light that we’re now seeing’.
—‘Except that he didn’t gaze up at them since he was blind’.
[Pause. Hush of January night in North Oxford.]
—‘Touché’.
—‘Mm’.
[Selah]
—‘Although, according to Jasper Griffin, that’s just a romantic legend…’

And, as Charley and I have now shared so much mirth over certain lines from movies (‘That’s what I call pulling it back and letting it go, eh P.J.?’ –Robin Hood) that one of us has only to cite such a line, or a fragment of such a line, in order to make the other laugh uproariously, regardless of how obliquely this line may be related to the present conversation, so the mention of Jasper Griffin’s name was eventually connected to merriment by a direct link, signifying not merely a comedic allusion, but comedy itself; and I came to reference Professor Griffin whenever I wanted to elicit an easy laugh from my Classicist friends, even if the ship of our conversation was yet many leagues away from the shore of Homer.

Imagine, then, my awe when on Saturday night, emerging from the ‘New Theatre’ after taking in a performance of Verdi’s Aida, Beth and I found ourselves accosted by a visibly excited Jonathan Kirkpatrick, who, grinning and leaning forward confidingly, whispered: ‘See that tall man in the coach queue over there? That’s Jasper Griffin!’

Having by now walked several metres past the queue, we spun around immediately, hoping to take a long look at this legendary man. The pavement was crowded and noisy, but as we retraced the steps we had made a moment before, drawing nearer to the Professor, we moved stealthily, as though at risk of disturbing a sleeping giant. Beth was several paces ahead of me when I stood parallel with the tall figure in the queue. It was then that I asked myself: What Would Jasper Do?

The answer was inescapable: Jasper Griffin would never let Jasper Griffin walk out of his life without at least a word of introduction. Hence I strode boldly up to the tall man, extended my hand like the ebullient American charmer that in my heart of hearts I still am, and asked, ‘Excuse me, are you Jasper Griffin?’

His most obvious characteristic was his total lack of conformity to the mental image I had drawn of him. His bearing was erect, his features broad and friendly, his expression alert and self-satisfied. He wore curly neo-Edwardian sideboards but no beard. Fastening on me a candid and penetrating gaze, he returned, ‘Yes, I am Jasper Griffin; and who might you be?’

At this I uttered the meaningless syllables of my name, and a cloud of loneliness sprang up from the pavement to envelope us, entombing Jasper and I, like Radames and Aida, in an isolated, hermetically sealed social enclosure—only I was trapped not with my beloved, but with a stranger and a foreigner, a man ten thousand times more intelligent than I, in the face of whom I felt totally defenseless. It was a great relief, then, to hear Jonathan’s voice puncture this cloud like a beam of sunlight, breaking in with the familiar greeting: ‘Hello, Jasper’.

Soon the entire brigade of 8 Crick Road Classicists—Jonathan, Jenni, Beth, and myself—had assembled around Professor Griffin; and though it was disquieting to hear him speak on subjects other than Homer (as though he ought to commence even his most casual interactions with ‘Rage—sing goddess, the rage of Achilles…’) we were soon set at our ease by his disarming and unaffected wit. ‘You’ve just been to the opera, have you? Well, so have we. Jolly good death, wasn’t it? Yes, it’s always nice to meet the fans’.

Walking away, Jonathan declared that although retired, Professor Griffin still seemed vigorous; and I tried to explain my impetuousness to Beth, who, smiling, exposed a ridge of almond teeth that gleamed like the gel in her angular dark hair.

— ‘I couldn’t let him just walk out of my life like that, you know? It felt awkward for a moment, I suppose, but still, at the end of the day I’m not regretful’.
—‘No, I think you did well’.
—‘You think so, do you? Yes…I suppose it was a rather daring move, after all. We Munn men do have a streak of audacity in us, you know’.
—‘Mm’.
—‘Mm. Indeed’.

February 6: Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

Kant, with moving simplicity, formulated what he took to be the three fundamental questions of philosophy:

1. What can I know?
2. What must I do?
3. What can I hope for?

While Camus, a man with a somewhat bleaker outlook, wrote that the only truly interesting philosophical question is:

Why don't you kill yourself?

But Karl Jaspers expressed my own feelings best when he supplemented Kant's list with:

4. How is communication possible?

Communicating with other people is the most difficult thing I do in a given day, second only to forming the resolution to step out of bed when my alarm clock sounds. In third grade, upon firing a quip across the lunch table and receiving back from my classmates a volley not of laughter but of hostility and scorn, I was mortified to discover that not everyone in the world shared my sense of humour, that the stories I found riotously amusing were to others tedious in the extreme, and that, what is worse, my very personality might to some be an object of loathing; the breezy innocence of spirit which easily purchased the delight of my parents and the adoration of my sister was, in the less charitable world of my public elementary school, not even recognized currency.

My naivete has hardly diminished more than a decade later; for upon arriving at Oxford in September I wanted everyone I passed in the street to know me, to greet me, to be charmed by me, and to return my smile. In short, I expected the same reception I receive at Gordon College, like a monolingual British literature enthusiast who, on pulling from the shelf a copy of L'Education Sentimentale, expects to find Flaubert's French as limpid as the prose of Jane Eyre, or like a trombonist who is surprised to find that he is not a fluent soloist when he first places his fingertips on the strings of a guitar. By now, however, I have become accustomed to anonymity; and the people I share the pavement with are inanimate objects, as unaffected by me and hence as inconsequential to me as the spires of Merton and Christ Church, or the stone gargoyles that adorn them.

I fear that when I am no longer a student, when I have ceased to live always on the cusp of a dramatic change in scenery, habit will assimilate and thereby render unnoticeable not only strangers on the street but my loved ones as well, perhaps even my own family. For how often have I seen married couples sitting silently across from one another, at restaurants in Vienna or at rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike, aiming their gazes in approximately similar but wholly discreet vectors, like parallel lines stretching eternally in the same direction without touching? And how many men are aware of their wives' and children's daily activity only as I am aware of the soft whirring of the fan in my room--that is to say, dimly and intermittently?

Perhaps it is precisely the difficulties I encounter in relating to others that will spare me this fate. For generally I perceive people as a bare outline which memory assists my imagination in filling with colour; but occasionally a jarring misstep, some real or imagined social gaffe, brings the objective reality of a person to life in my consciousness, as a sudden immersion in cold water might make me aware of my body.

Such an epiphany occurred only recently, in fact, as I walked from a tutorial at Regent's Park College (where my instructor had ruthlessly criticized my admittedly heavy-handed and contrived essay 'Hegel: Did he have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?') to my home at 8 Crick Road, and saw in the slanting sunbeams of the afternoon my friend Laura Carlson coming towards me on a bicycle. Her rough grey coat, compressed at the waist and studded with buttons in front, formed a picturesque contrast with the soft wave of auburn hair that covered the side of her head but had divorced itself from, and allowed to flutter freely before her face, a single delicate tress. I, seeing her approach, lifted my hand in greeting and then moved to pluck from my ears, like a woman removing her jewelry after a ball, the two white buds that comprise the nozzle of the hose through which my iPod Nano (a gift from my American uncle) was just then pumping 'Tequila Sunrise' into my brain. As she drew near I saw Laura raise her eyebrows and curl her lips in a friendly manner, as who should say, 'Lovely weather we're having, isn't it?' And, assuming that she was soon to slow to a complete stop, I called out a question the specificity of which was intended to commence a moderately lengthy and substantive exchange: 'Did you give Jo my card?'

But Laura, yet to master the dynamics of her new bicycle, was concentrating on steering and did not realize that I expected her to stop until she had already sped past me, and had time as she disappeared in the distance only to pivot her head and call back: 'Yes! She loved it!'

This interaction left me to wander home thinking such thoughts as: 'You didn't even greet her! You just launched into your own selfish questions! She's going to think you're so rude. You have no social I.Q.'; while Laura, no doubt breathless as she pedalled up Headington Hill, reflected: 'You should have stopped! It was so obvious he expected you to stop! He's going to think you're so rude. He might even think, were he acquainted with such categories, that you have no social I.Q.'

Meeting again later that evening, Laura and I both launched into apologies while our friends looked on, bewildered. And though by the day's end I believe--rather, I accept on faith, as I would a tenet of theology--that we reached a mutual understanding, the method by which we came to this happy collusion of minds is to me ultimately as enigmatic and profoundly veiled as life itself. How is communication possible? By miracle, perhaps? For the true surprise, in my opinion, is not that communication occasionally falters, but that it occurs at all.

January 29: Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler?

Munn the Elder beside a statue of Sammy Bartram

Munn the Younger inside 'The Valley'

When my English grandfather was a boy he lived in Southeast London and could hear, as he lay awake at night clutching a cornet under his arm, the sound of Nazi Doodlebugs humming in the sky; a sound that might either expand and contract gradually according to the proximity of the flying bomb, as a mosquito’s beating wings take on a shriller buzz in proportion to their distance from one’s ear, or else cease with heart-stopping abruptness. In such cases the Doodlebug’s fuel supply had run out, as had the luck of those near the terminus of its tragic descent.

In happier times, before the Blitz, my grandfather would sit in the kitchen and listen to sounds of a different nature, namely football fans cheering at ‘The Valley’, where, perhaps, goalkeeper Sammy Bartram had just made a miraculous save, the sporting equivalent of the Battle of Britain. Not surprising, then, that decades later Grandad continues to revere the names of Churchill, wartime hero of 20th century Britain, and Bartram, netminding hero of the Charlton Athletic football club.

But if fewer people know of Bartram than of Churchill, this is not simply due to the lesser historical importance of Bartram’s accomplishment; for even within the microcosmic world of F.A. Cup football Charlton is a relatively obscure squad. Upon hearing of my family’s allegiance to ‘The Addicks’, most Englishmen lower their heads and say: ‘I’m sorry’.

Still, never mind that Charlton have performed abysmally this season and will likely face relegation to a lower league; Charlton is the idol of Grandad’s youth, which is why it was meaningful to him when my father took me to a game at the Valley; which is why it was meaningful to my father to take me to a game at the Valley; which is why it was meaningful to me to be taken to a game at the Valley.

‘The Valley’, you have by now surmised, is Charlton Athletic’s home stadium, so named for the topographical feature it inhabits, and surrounded by the crowded but not unpleasant borough of Charlton itself. Football matches temporarily pressurize the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. Exiting the London Underground on game day I first noticed that I was surrounded by the opposing team’s fans. The sensation was a sinister echo of Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland: ‘Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Oxford anymore…’ Aston-Villa’s supporters wore no tweed, no full-length grey coats with rows of purposeless buttons, and no delicately woven scarves adorned at the tips by silk tassels. Denim trousers and hooded sweatshirts prevailed. Rather than leather-bound books these men toted half-empty bottles of lager. And their conversation took the form not of dialogue but of a chaotic froth of banter which, suddenly and at a signal invisible to myself, coagulated into an aggressive and atonal chant. All idle chatter ceased, or rather, was subsumed into the song.

‘Villa! Vil-la! Vil-la! Vil-la! Vil-la! (And bollocks to bloody Birmingham!) F—k you! You’re a c—t! You’re a c—t! You’re a c—t!’

My father noted that Aston Villa’s supporters denigrate their side’s chief rival, Birmingham, even at games in which the latter takes no part, like those Boston fans who chant ‘Yankees Suck!’ when the Red Sox play the Milwaukee Brewers, or even when the Celtics play the Minnesota Timberwolves.

The Valley itself seemed as pleasant a facility as any American stadium, with the remarkable difference that its seating plan included a section specially reserved for the opposing club’s supporters. This was encircled by police officers in riot gear. Looking at them I thought of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, in which a horde of Manchester United fans trash the city of Milan, and of that policeman who nearly lost his life when he tried to stop a group of Chelsea fans tipping over a bus filled with Arsenal supporters. And then I thought of the lower reading room at Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, and wondered that one small island should contain such disparate subcultures.

Charlton fell behind 1-0 early in the game, but scored the equalizer shortly after halftime, at which point my neighbour (not my dad) turned and gave a brisk middle finger to the Villa supporters. Then, in the 90th minute, Charlton broke the tie and the Valley erupted in celebration. Had my grandfather been sitting in the kitchen of his boyhood home just then he would have guessed the match’s result from the cheers; but in fact he was listening to the game on the radio as he drove his car through Stevenage, turning to Uncle Railton and saying, quite accurately, ‘They’ll be cheering at the Valley today!’ I am told that Railton concurred with this judgment, and put out his hand gently to steady the steering wheel, just in case. For my part, I gave a series of enthusiastic high-fives to a series of enthusiastic cockney strangers, revelling in the camaraderie of victory, much as I had after the Red Sox’ World Series championship in 2004, when there was a small riot on the Gordon College quad. On that night I ran outside barefoot and nearly lost several toes to frostbite. Only minutes later a type of muted Christian vandalism emerged out of the mob frenzy—a soccer net was inverted, but quickly set right.

On the Underground after the game I remarked to my father that I’d enjoyed the acerbic banter surrounding me during the match.

‘When that guy called the referee a “tosser”…was that because he tosses people out of the game?’

Assuming a facial expression and manner that recalled to me our age 13 ‘Birds & the Bees’ discussion (which ended with my being handed a copy of Dr. James Dobson’s Preparing for Adolescence), my father said, looking into my eyes with just a hint of jocularity, and speaking in a low voice: ‘To “toss” means—to masturbate…’

And I remembered an aphorism I’d been taught by my old literature professor, Dr. Peter W. Stine, when he discovered that I didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘cathedra’: ‘It’s a bad day when you don’t learn something…’ Ah, how right you were, Stine; but, happily, today was not to be such a day...

January 14: Buon Natalia Tutti

There is a pale romance to the mountains my uncle and aunt look out upon from their balcony each morning; a cold, austere beauty, like the beauty of moonscapes and constellations. These mountains, though known to the world as ‘The Alps’, will forever be known to me as ‘The Place Where I Nearly Ruined Christmas’.

The beauty of my aunt and uncle’s home is unlike that of the Alps—not the pristine stillness of a lunar horizon, but the vital frenzy of rainforests and coral reefs. Ten year-old Imogen sits, her hair short and tousled, plucking ‘Smoke on the Water’ on a Spanish guitar; five year-old Esther laughs as Dennis, a Jack Russell terrier, licks Auntie Sharon’s nose, cheeks, eyes, and lips. ‘He loves you!’ Esther shouts. Pipsqueak the cat steps off the back of the couch onto Imogen’s head and begins licking her earlobe. ‘That cat is disturbed’, Uncle Railton says, ‘she was separated from her mother too early’. Outside on the patio two guinea pigs try to crawl up the side of their pen, while a rabbit falls asleep inside the engine of Sharon’s derelict Volvo. The concrete slabs of the patio abut a soft carpet of dirt beneath which, Railton tells me, grow the parsnips he planted in July. The garden, sloping sharply to become a steep hill, is matted with young grass and stalks of bamboo. Blue sheaths of frost glisten on the tips of the grass-blades. Something is strumming, squirming, yelping, crying, breathing, singing, growing, or philosophizing in nearly every corner of the Munn estate in Northern Italy.

I say ‘philosophizing’ because during the Christmas season a particularly well-trained eye might have noticed, in the midst of this scene, a pale, thin young man with brown hair and a broad head sitting on a couch, resting his right foot on his left knee, gazing down at a volume of Nietzsche. I knew it would be unwise to be caught reading a German philosopher at Oxford, so I smuggled Twilight of the Idols with me onto the continent.

I read one chapter in two weeks. How can I justify such indolence?

In a word, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to ponder the mysteries of Being when one is vacationing with the Munn family in Lombardy. My uncle and aunt, though English, embrace the Italian values of leisure and luxury in dining, giving tacit adherence to a maxim that has inspired my own household at every Christmas and summer holiday throughout my youth and early manhood, namely ‘Don’t skimp on the food on vacation!’ The main course at Railton and Sharon’s house often consists of some dish that seems exotic to a student accustomed to noodles and buttered toast—a turkey curry with lentils and lime pickle, for example. The heat of one such curry exercised such a purgative effect on my sinuses that I found myself spluttering, gasping, and reaching for a tissue. ‘Sorts you out, curry does’ remarked Railton’s friend Andrew with a droll smile. Typically the meal then progresses in two variably ordered but seldom-omitted stages: dessert and a ‘cheese course’—essentially a pretext for comparing the merits of Stilton and Roquefort and, by metonymy, England and France, with the latter denounced as effete in both cases.

For the sake of health I take exercise even during the holidays, and in Italy I was often accompanied on my morning runs by Dennis, who, sprinting alongside me in the Alpine foothills, seemed ‘in Dog Heaven’, as Railton put it. Dennis and I developed an affectionate bond after several crisp December mornings together, which is why I was shocked one day—the 24th , in fact—to see him abruptly desert me, disappearing into the woods without so much as a yelp or an imploring look. My confusion was alleviated a moment later when a stray wolf-like animal, its fangs bared and its grey hairs bristling in the breeze, pursued Dennis in a rage. With growing horror I traipsed clumsily after the two canines, praying that I would not stumble upon Dennis’s mangled corpse. I envisaged the poor animal supine, his soft belly splayed open, exposing to the forest atmosphere a stew of red innards flecked with grey and white hairs. I called aloud: ‘Dennis!’ By this time the woods were still, and there was in them no more indication of my jogging companion than might be found on the plains of Siberia. An internal monologue recited itself to me: ‘He is gone and it is Christmas Eve and Oh what will my cousins think No and he was there only a moment before and No and God is in his heaven alls right with the world but I can still feel my heaving chest No yes I can see Esthers face No crinkling like a paper bag only with sorrow Can we recover him in one day No and No we cant No and No’.

After an unsuccessful search lasting over forty minutes in duration I began to walk dejectedly home. On the way I heard the barking of dogs all around me, but these animals remained phantasms, mere spectres of sound; nowhere did I see an actual physical dog, still less the one terrier that I still vaguely sought, with that irrational hope which persists in all of us when we cannot find the reason for our having lost something.

Approaching Railton and Sharon’s property I upset by my mere presence a flock of guinea fowl crowded behind a wire cage, who immediately took up a collective shriek in which I thought I could distinguish, for all that I was covering my ears like Frodo Baggins hiding from a wringwraith, cruel taunts. ‘You lost your five year-old cousin’s dog on Christmas Eve?? Why, you’re worse than the Grinch!’

Ascending the hill to the building that I had by this time privately dubbed ‘House of My Sorrow’, I paused for a moment, resting my foot on a granite boulder and surveying my uncle’s saplings, and thought ruefully that in delaying my return I prolonged my cousins’ happiness. Better not to reveal the tragedy of Dennis’s disappearance until absolutely necessary.

Suddenly a familiar sound emanated from the balcony above me—the same place where, on Christmas Day, Railton and I would emerge to play a set of carols on trumpet for the benefit of a group of Tuscan hikers. I looked up. ‘Can this be?’ I wondered, like a man who discovers that the woman he has pined for secretly since his youth is in love with him, and indeed has been throughout all the years of his miserable solitude. It was undeniable: the voice now confronting me belonged to none other than Dennis, who, by some method at which I can only guess, had evaded his aggressor and returned home, aided only by his own instincts and (as I suppose) superior olfactory capacities. With that habitual complacency that arises whenever our desires coincide with reality, I entered the house through the back door, assuming—or rather, finding myself suddenly in possession of—a nonchalant air.

Only a few hours later I sat on the sofa, with Dennis and Imogen resting on either arm, watching ‘The Snowman’, and all thoughts of the day’s earlier crisis were annihilated. And perhaps it was only by an unconscious reflex of accumulated memory that I felt glad and relieved at little Cindy Loowho-like Esther’s yuletide happiness, for as she recited from memory the next day a poem in Italian, ending with ‘Buon Natalia tutti!’ (‘Merry Christmas to all!’), I thought not of the concrete fact of Dennis’s brief disappearance, but only of the emotional abstraction of my having narrowly avoided spoiling this most magical of holidays for two impressionable children and one vulnerable dog. If the fates allow, indeed.