*Bright College Days

And I'm not kidding about the bright. Though the temperature has decreased and the wind blows strongly, the sun still shines. And on this Wednesday trip it shined on Oxford.

Oxford is a university comprised of individual colleges. Once upon a time, the colleges were separated according to studies and sex. The men's colleges are in the centre of the city, and the women's colleges are towards the edges. Clearly the women had to struggle to get what they could in the male dominated field of academia. I had the privelge of walking inside three separate colleges.

First I visted Magdalen College, which is actually pronounced "maudlin" do to its first medieval spelling. It actually isn't too strange that they keep the antiquated pronunciation considering that the required dress codes are academic robes that can be traced in fashion back to the habits of medieval monks. This college is perhaps the prettiest, and also holds the distinction of being the school where C S Lewis attended classes. It is thought that the stone gargoyles around the Cloister are what inspired the statue gardens of the White Witch in C S Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It also includes a large deer park gated to one side, and various other large groves and fields.

I also took a brief walking selftour of Christ Church College. This is also another of the more famous colleges, only now it is most often remembered for being a filming location of the Harry Potter movies. Like Magdalen College, it was large, ornamented, and right in the centre of town. The lawns were very big, and we even saw some footballers out playing on one of several fields. We all also got the unique opportunity of attending evensong at its cathedral. I never fully appreciated how beautiful a sound eight men can make singing psalms. They went through the liturgy using the older forms of Gregorian chant, plain chant, and Elizabethan compositions. Combined with the old cathedral setting and accoustics, it was an amazingly spiritual experience.

But then, past the Eagle and Child pub where C S Lewis and J R R Tolkein would meet, I went to Somerville College. The walk wasn't too far, but it was a ways away. And it was the nearest of the women's colleges. The architecture wasn't as grandly ornamented, nor so old as the others I had seen. It had a smaller and simpler beauty to it. And so the struggle women have had to get the same sort of education as men is still visible.

For an additional literary connection, the whole of Oxford is the setting of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey novel Gaudy Night. The mystery novel is set in the fictional Shrewsbury College, but it bares a stricking resemblance to Somerville. The descriptions of the layout and the lawns match well with the lawns I walked around. Somerville has a peaceful, feminine feel to it; if Shrewsbury is to have the same feel, then the mysterious acts of vadalism would be a disturbing contrast to the norm. It's like the way Hitchcock chooses what should be ordinary and safe places and people, and then the horrid happens. The contrast is what is most frightening, the most threatening. The world of cloistered academia suffering from the acts of a madperson falls perfectly in this form of terror. It makes up for the absence of a murder, the lack of physically harmful threat. Just the extreme juxtaposition of quiet study with grotesque insults, the "poison pen" is threat enough.