Allow me to preface this post by apologising for the slightly nerdy title. I’m afraid that this past week was wholly consumed by coursework for my econometrics tutorial. Consider the above title as a part of my continued effort to purge all thoughts of multiple regression, best linear unbiased estimators, and hypothesis tests from my mind. (It also occurs to me that each of these observations could have easily taken up its own post, but I believe in, above all else, verbosity!)
Beyond the Wicket Gate
In one of those strange twists of fate, one of my best friends from high school who goes to university at Princeton is also doing her junior year abroad at Oxford. Last weekend, we met up for brunch, and, afterwards, she took me on a quick tour of her college, Worcester. Oxford is known for its harmonious architecture, which is quite remarkable when one considers the fact that the it has slowly developed over the centuries. Indeed, when my dad came to visit (unnecessary digression, but he was en route to the Continent for business and decided to swing by) and I pointed out all of the different colleges along the way, he remarked that, while they were all very nice, he could not see many noticeable differences between them.
But one needs only to actually venture into the colleges to realise that, in fact, they could not be more different. Pembroke, as I’ve noted before, it a very small college, composed of three self-enclosed quads. First years and visiting students are all battalled — that would be Oxford-ese for billed — for six dinners a week, thus bringing together the same group of a hundred or so stduents for an hour almost every day. This no doubt contributes to Pembroke’s well deserved reputation for a very intimate and welcoming environment. Worcester’s grounds, however, are much larger than ours and include a lake and sport fields. All meals are pay as you go, which means that there are fewer occasions during which the college’s student body can gather together. I have to imagine that these structural differences between our two colleges suggest that our respective Oxford experiences will be quite different.
Of course, from a purely architectural standpoint, the colleges are also quite diverse. Queen’s College features stately outdoor corridors with high vaulted ceilings along the borders of their main quad. Trinity College feels like an English manor in the countryside. Neighbouring Balliol College certainly doesn’t lack in brilliant autumn foliage. Hertford College seems like a little town unto itself with winding paths and narrow towers. A goal of mine is to visit as many colleges as I can before this year is over. The list to date: the colleges mentioned thus far, as well as Nuffield and Brasenose.
Classically Oxonian
This past weekend, my extracurricular obligations brought me into contact with the Oxford Union Society, almost always just referred to without Society or without both Oxford and Society. It is not unlike the Philodemic Society at Georgetown, in one respect, but it also brings speakers to Oxford, hosts classy parties, and has a very cheap and very good bar, or so I hear. It demands a steep price of £180 for lifetime membership. Needless to say, it has more than its fair share of pretentions.
I was leaving the Union when I spotted four gentlemen — students, I believe — sitting at a picnic table in the courtyard. They had a couple pints of beer between them, and, in between bursts of animated conversation, they smoked their pipes, the scent of tobacco wafting through the evening. AsI walked by the them, I shook my head, wondering if this sort of thing could happen anywhere else in the world.
Academic Masochism, Epitomised
I try my best to keep my membership in useless Facebook groups to an absolute minimum, but, when I saw that a number of my friends had joined one called “Oxford University: Where Your Best Isn’t Good Enough, Since 1117,” I simply couldn’t resist because all of the comments were so unbelievably true. While it is possible be mired in awful amounts of coursework at any university (hello, Georgetown!), I am completely convinced that, at least within the humanities and the social sciences (the sciences themselves are, I think, Oxford’s weakest subject, and a visiting student at Pembroke who does science at Princeton assures me that it is far more brutal there), the intensity and depth of work here is just unmatched by any other institution. (There is also the slight matter of having the same routine week in and week out: hideous amounts of reading, essay due this day, essay due another day, repeat.)
My favourites include:
- “When the 6.30 fire alarm really pisses you off because it’s eating into the valuable all-nighter essay time.”
- “When you no longer have a reading list; you’re just expected to intuitively KNOW everything on the subject.”
- “When you don’t double take at any street performers EVER as you have somewhere to be. Even tightroping-violinists.”
A Tale of Two Wars
A strange fad has swept the United Kingdom as of late: men and women of all ages and walks of life have taken to pinning paper poppies to their outerwear as they stroll through Oxford. I was utterly perplexed by this. In fact, this was the first time since arriving in the UK/England that this had happened. Today, though, I got an explanation for this. Men dressed in uniform and holding a donation bucket in one hand and a tray of poppies in the other, a bit like a cross between a Salvation Army volunteer and a hot dog hawker at a baseball game. They were representatives from the Royal British Legion, which suggested that this had something or another to do with the armed services. I later asked a classmate of mine about the poppies, and his response was simple: Armistice Day on November 11, which marks the cessation of the fighting of the First World War. I, of course, should have known this: I spent the first three and a half years of my K-12 education in Canada, which observed the occasion by distributing poppies at a school assembly.
The U.S. has its own set of duly observed military holidays, but they’re very general celebrations of the sacrifices of servicemen and women throughout the country’s history (and they are always about the Second World War; the first hardly pricks the surface of American national consciousness) and, certainly, they do not manifest themselves in this very public phenomenon of rememberance that I have witnessed here in England. This phenomenon is even more striking when I consider that displays of patriotism that are so ubiquitous in the States — flags, mottos, reverence toward the Founding Fathers, and so forth — are, on any given day, conspicuously lacking on this side of the Atlantic. This contrast lends Armistice Day an even greater solemnity. The First World War, after all, was the “war to end all wars,” so great was the sacrifice of the nations involved that the anniversary of its end is, almost one hundred years later, still worthy of a place in the pantheon of national memory.
Quirks of the Tongue
They say that Americans and the Brits are “separated by a common tongue.” Britishisms like biscuit, mobile, and rubbish are no longer exciting to me, I am afraid, but I learned a new word this weekend: blag, defined by urbandictionary.com as, “to gain, usually entrance to a restricted area or club, or some material good, through confidence trickery or cheekiness.”
