Quotes from "My Love Affair with England"

The past lives on, in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadows backwards.  The landscape also changes, but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become.
-Margaret Drabble, A Writer's Britain

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings . . .
-William Shakespeare, Richard II

The Greater Trumps

I am reading Williams again, and, like fire, he is pulsing in my blood. May we all "rise to adore the mystery of love" (108).

There had come into her life with the mystery of the Tarots a new sense of delighted amazement; the Tarots themselves were not more marvelous than the ordinary people she had so long unintelligently known. By the slightest vibration of the light in which she saw the world she saw it all differently; holy and beautiful, if sometimes perplexing and bewildering, went the figures of her knowledge [. . .] and she too, in a dance that was happy if it was frightening. Nothing was certain, but everything was safe--that was part of the mystery of Love. She was upon a mission, but whether she succeeded or not didn't matter. Nothing mattered beyond the full moment in which she could live to her utmost in the power and according to the laws of the dance. (191)

"By the slightest vibration of the light in which she saw the world she saw it differently . . . holy and beautiful" -- this reminds me of Lewis and Tolkien's argument for the power of fantasy: we see the world transformed into the mystery it truly is.

Essays Presented to Charles Williams

". . . nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public-houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal."
-C.S. Lewis, preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, viii-ix

"He was ready to accept as a revealed doctrine the proposition that existence is good: but added that it would never have occurred to him, unaided, to suspect this. . . It is one of the many paradoxes in Williams that while no man's conversation was less gloomy in tone--it was, indeed, a continual flow of gaiety, enthusiasm, and high spirits--no man at times said darker things. . . . But that was only one side of him. This scepticism and pessimism were the expression of his feelings. High above them, overarching them like a sky, were the things he believed, and they were wholly optimistic. They did not negate his feelings: they mocked them."
-Lewis, preface, xii-xiii

"No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed."
-Lewis, preface, xiv

"Creative fantasy . . . may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like caged birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you."
-J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" from Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 75

Feminism and Faith

"Rather than employ a variety of names to more effectively illustrate the mystery of God, the teachers and preachers of our childhood always used the male pronoun. Their words contradicted the lessons they taught us. Religion had given God a man's name while claiming that God was beyond naming, that 'he' was a mystery." -Patricia Lynn Reilly

We're reading Reilly's text, A God Who Looks Like Me, for Feminism and Faith, a group I attend on Thursday nights. So far, I'm not a huge fan of the book. Mostly, I think, because it's a bit too "self-helpish" for my taste. And I'm not completely sure where the author is actually going with her observations. However, it is a good jumping-off place, and has led to good conversations.

The group is a slightly modified continuation of something we started in the fall of 2007. It sort of died that spring (Megan, Tammi, Kohleun and I were the only ones who showed up on a regular basis), was discontinued last fall, and then resurrected this spring. We meet at the home of a religious studies professor (Kendra Irons, who Kohleun T.A.s for), make dinner, watch the occasional movie, and have discussions.

It's a lot of fun, and really refreshing. Most of the students are sophomores, who I hadn't met before this spring, but it's a good group of interesting (and interested) people.

If you want to be bored to tears, you can read the article I wrote about the group for my journalism class (fall '07). This is a great example of why I hate this particular form of writing:

A new women studies group at George Fox University will discuss the gender of God, body image, sexist language, female sexuality, the presentation of God in art, domestic violence, identity and other related issues.

At 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, Kendra Irons and Jill Lepire held the first meeting of a George Fox discussion group focused on women’s issues and faith. Twelve students attended the meeting on the outside patio of Newberg’s Coffee Cottage. Following meetings will be at 5 p.m. every Friday at Hoskins House, located at 214 River St. on the George Fox campus.

Irons, an assistant professor of religious studies at George Fox, facilitated the meeting, which Lepire, a junior double majoring in psychology and religion, organized. Lepire approached Irons about being the group’s faculty advisor in the spring of 2007. Irons said she agreed because she is passionate about helping women on the “road to feminism.”

Susan Suihkonen, a senior elementary education major, offered Hoskins House as the group’s venue. Suihkonen, who lives in Hoskins House with seven other women, said that they want their house to be a place of safety where people are accepted unconditionally. She sees this as an important environment for the women studies group because “being part of this group puts people at risk of rejection.”

The women who attended the first meeting ranged in age from sophomores to seniors, and were pursuing majors in religion, Christian ministries, writing and literature, art, international studies, elementary education, psychology and philosophy. When asked why they were at the meeting, most answered that they were becoming dissatisfied with the church and its presentation of a male God.

Katiana Hultz, a junior international studies major, said she’s excited about the group because it’s a place where she can be true to herself without offending others.

“We’re very limited in what we feel we’re allowed to think and believe,” said Hultz. “Knowing that there were other people who thought like this made me very happy.”

Virginia Woolf and Cambridge: why she isn't there

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that Virginia Woolf loved Cambridge. She was in awe of its wealth and history -- the heritage of learning it represented and embodied. Of walking there, she wrote: "The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning" (Oxbridge is the term used to sum up all that Oxford and Cambridge together represent). And of course, there is her description of the aftereffects of lunching at King's (a multi-course feast of partridges and ducklings and salmon and soup and cream and salads and potatoes and puddings and wines): "And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

This week, for my primary tutorial, I'm rereading A Room of One's Own (for the third time). It's an amazing text, filled (anti-feminists may be surprised to hear =) with compassion, good humour, and a lot of common sense. I've loved it every time I've read it.

My tutor assigned a piece of secondary literature, however, that's been making me realize how intensely ironic it is to be reading/studying A Room of One's Own in the context of Oxbridge.

On the one hand, Woolf was intensely aware that she, as a woman, was an outsider. Women were not allowed to receive degrees at Cambridge until 1948 (about 30 years after Oxford students), and in 1921 (just 7 years before Woolf gave her historical address at Girton) a mob of male students destroyed Newnham's beautiful bronze memorial gates, in celebration of voting "overwhelmingly" to prevent women from receiving degrees. "The symbolic and real violence of this chilling scene is mitigated in most accounts and turned into a joke to shame the women" (J. Marcus).

To add to this, there is Woolf's own account of visiting Cambridge -- an account riddled with exclusion: "He was a beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me" . . . "[A] kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library" . . . "and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge."

And of course, there is her less than shining description of dinner at Fernham (Oxbridge's female counterpart) to compare to lunch at King's, and her conclusion: "The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp of the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

While this is disturbing enough, and the starting place for Woolf's discussion of women and fiction, there is the added peculiarity that Woolf, the uneducated daughter of an educated man, never truly belonged at Fernham either, and, as Woolf, has never been accepted at Cambridge. Jane Marcus, the author I was reading (Virginia Woolf, Cambridge, and A Room of One's Own), states that nowhere in Cambridge is there a single plaque to commemorate Woolf's work, and that none of her manuscripts are available in the university's libraries (being held in open collections, instead). All her male relatives, and all her Bloomsbury friends (with the exception of her husband), figure prominently in library and college, and even her female cousins are well respected at Cambridge, having served as librarians and presidents for the women's colleges. Virginia, on the other hand, has only the remembrance of absence and trespass. She -- who visited Cambridge often to see brothers, friends, and a Quaker aunt (the famous Friends' theologian, Caroline Stephen), and delivered one of the century's most celebrated feminist lectures within its confines -- she is only an outsider:

"It is October, 'October, the birth of the year,' as Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own. It is Michaelmas Term in Cambridge, the birth of the academic year. How differently Woolf's elegy for the lost history of women writers echoes on these ancient stones. Why did I expect that she would have left some trace in this town, some mark on its walls? . . . Why is it such a terrible reality to face the facts of Virginia Woolf's analysis of the university as a patriarchal institution, to feel her discomfort here, her sense of being a stranger, as she complains in drafts of the essay? Not much has changed. I itch to take out a tube of the lipstick she so disdained and write 'Virginia Woolf Was Here' all over the walls that bear the names of the great dead who studied here, men's names of course."
-Virginia Woolf, Cambridge and A Room of One's Own: 'The Proper Upkeep of Names' by J. Marcus (1996)

Oxford in Print

Some of these are just funny (and yes, they do enjoy taunting Cambridge), others hit closer to home:

Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge . . . and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.
-Baedeker's Great Britain (1887)

What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels compelled to write about it.
-A. A. Milne

Who can . . . walk up the Oxford High Street on a sunny morning or linger on a clear night in Radcliffe Square and not be aware of something more authentic than the life of everyday?
-The Character of England (1950)

Folded in a druidical mist, viewed from a sodden hillside through a screen of dripping branches, seen against a clear dawn, its towers like diacritical marks upon the lines of a text, or coyly changing its colours as evening comes on, Oxford beheld from a distance is as elusive and capricious as it was when we were there within it. Matthew Arnold spoke of it, twice and memorably, as dreaming, but the only reveries were Arnold's, those of a flesh-and-blood Oxonian eternally lacing his quest for gravity with delicious inventions. Oxford never dreams, it is far too wakeful and predatory, too eager to take us for its own. Turning to look back from Cumnor or Iffley or as the Paddington train pulls out, each of us reads the chosen signals. A warning? An insult? An invitation or an embrace?
-Jonathan Keats in Drawings and Sketches of Oxford (1983)

"It doesn't matter what the professors teach, it's what the place teaches..."
-Quoted in Richard Tames' A Traveller's History of Oxford (2003)

The Oxford Sky

They say the sky is the same everywhere. But above Oxford -- anyhow above the roof of Christ Church -- there is a difference. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of Christ Church, lighter, thinner, more sparkling that the sky elsewhere? Does Oxford burn not only into the night, but into the day?

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (with some small alterations =)