Today I took the Metro out to Tynemouth with Michael, to have lunch, then see Andrew and Ingrid where they were selling prints at the Tynemouth Metro station. This station has a market every Sunday – with book markets four or five times a year in the summer months. It was only a regular market day, but there were some book tables – I bought two books, including Jan Morris' anthology The Oxford Book of Oxford.
Of course, as a self-conscious and intellectually defensive American, Oxford always induces a certain irritable resentment in me. It is so grand, so aware of its own power and worth, so certain that no one else can touch it... yet its style is unlike that of the arrogant lawyer- and scion-ridden Harvard, which is so much easier to hold in contempt. (Can you tell I went to a public university?... hey, UCLA has better weather than either... okay, okay.) So, one is left with envy. In fact, although I love Beerbohm's writings, I always have trouble with Zuleika Dobson – not only are its many in-jokes fairly opaque, but even a parody of Oxford pomposity from, as it were, the inside, shares in a great deal of that pomposity.
(Consider Beerbohm, then: "I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.")
But it's an anthology... and I always have time for Jan Morris. (Although Michael N. once irritated and worried me by offhandedly saying her style is a bit overdone... but, hey, he went to Cambridge.)
Well, it is a fascinating anthology. (Yes, I know I should be studying, my first Jung Institute exams are in three weeks, give me a break.) Given all the garbage and nonsense being thrown at British universities by the aggressively and stupidly pragmatic merchant-banker-idiots in government, it was lovely to read the following passage.
It is from 1577 – William Harrison, Description of England:
"From our entrance into the universitie unto the last degree received is commonlie eighteene, or peradventure twentie yeeres, in which time, if a student hath not obteined sufficient learning, thereby to serve his own turne and benefit his common wealth, let him not looke by tarieng longer to come by anie more. For after this time and 40 yeeres of age, the most part of students doo commonlie give over their woonted diligence and live like drone bees on the fat of colleges, withholding better wits from the possession of their places and yet dooing little good in their own vocation and calling.... Long continuance in those places is either a signe of lacke of friends or of learning or of good and upright life, as bishop Fox sometimes noted, who thought it sacrilege for a man to tarrie anie longer at Oxford than he had a desire to profit."
That sounds about right to me: after twenty years, we think it's time to check on your progress....
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