Three Windows at Oxford

Welcome back to the second year at Oxford. We start off by looking through three windows at Oxford: 1987, 1646, and 2021.

A Guestroom at Keble College, Oxford

The Senior Common Guestroom at Keble College

“I want to hearken back to how I felt on the first night [of my second year at Oxford], and in order to do that I need to pull out my journal. I’ll comment on the note that I made on my first night here. On my first night, of course, I was staying in the Senior Common guestroom—which was actually part of it. One of the dons had a suite of rooms. It included his office, a room he used to use as a bedroom, a kitchen, bath, and a little foyer filled with glass bookshelves and comfortable chairs, where students could wait for him. And since he no longer slept in his set of rooms, Keble uses that as a guestroom. That’s what I had. It was very cozily set up with its own tea kettle, down comforter, a nice big desk, and it overlooked the Fellows Garden. It was quite lovely.

I was lying in bed about 4:00 o’clock, and I noticed the sun was coming through the keyhole-shaped window. As it came into the room, it was like a stream of golden specks, the particles were suspended in the air, reflecting in the sunshine, like golden glitter floating into the room. I just thought to myself, yes, even the sunshine when seen from withinside the walls of Oxford has a magical golden quality, which was my old, first impression of being at Oxford. Somehow when you are inside, you are living in a magical kingdom.

Then following that sense of magic was the sense of being cloistered. When you are in Madison going to school [at the University of Wisconsin], its dominant mode of existence is very external, very outward. Students seem to all come out onto Library Mall; they come out to the Terrace. The Union is an external, extroverted place. Whereas, at Oxford, it’s the opposite. When you are coming up to Oxford, it is an inward-moving motion toward confinement. You have this very deep sense, especially when you live in college, of being within the walls, within the institution. It inculcates a very inward-turning sense, which is entirely different from the sense that you have in an American university.

It’s quite possible to really separate yourself from the surrounding community, if you want, and make an existence that is very . . . I mean, it would be possible to live in Oxford and avoid all contact with people outside the university, if you wanted to. If that was the kind of life you wanted to lead.

It was several days before I could get back to my own room [the same one I had during my first year at Oxford]. I am now completely settled in and everything’s unpacked. It took me about three days and fortunately all my stuff was stored in the Void in Staircase 4, so it was just a matter of carrying the stuff up the stairways, which was a little hard for me because my asthma has not completely gone away. But . . . now I am able to work. The last big manuscript is set up on my desk, and I leave it there all the time. I try to put in as many hours as I can per day to get it out of the way” (from the audiotape that I made for my housemate/boyfriend in 1987).

Photo by Dyu - Ha on Unsplash

John Aubrey’s Room at Trinity College

John Aubrey (an English antiquarian, natural scientist, and writer) was at Oxford during the English Civil War. In May 1642, Aubrey wrote a letter about his arrival at Oxford:

“Mr Hobbes encouraged me to come to Oxford and I am here now, in Trinity College. I have matriculated; I have written my name in the buttery book¹ and paid my 3d caution money. I study logic and ethics.

I lie in bed some mornings in my chamber, looking at the canonized saint in one of the windows: Gregory the Great. I was born on St Gregory’s Day, 12 March 1626, so am glad to have this window. . . . I cannot tell who the saint in the second window in my chamber is because it was broken before I got here: perhaps the students who slept in this chamber before me were less careful than I am; cared less for glass and other precious things. It is spring, and summer is coming. In my study window, there is a crucifix.”²

Keble window. Photo by Lynn Childress, 2007.

The Big Room at Campion Hall

For a third vignette, I leave you with a few paragraphs from Peter Davidson’s essay “Oxford at Nightfall” in The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered (2021).

“Brewer Street is dim, sheltered by the bulwark of the old city wall, lit by lanterns fixed high on the outer wall of Pembroke College, dim light only behind the coloured glass of the chapel windows. The sound and brightness of the main road fades with every step, more removed still as I push open the outer door of Campion Hall. . . .

The big room is still, as this quiet house grows quieter at evening. It is almost as though it grew more secluded and further away, when these lamps are lit in the library and fire is lit in the common room. It becomes like a manor house, silent at nightfall, remote and westerly and enfolded by wooded hills. The buds of the birch tree outside the window rustle in the dark like rain, the windows of Pembroke’s new building seem as far away as the lights of hill farms, dimming in memory on the slopes of the Pennines” (pp. 2-3).

Postscript

I would like to thank Riccardo Vocca for giving me a paragraph in his September newsletter Snob Things.

1. Members of an Oxford college enter their names in the Buttery Book, which is a record of the money they owe to the college. These books also provide proof that a student has been resident in college for the requisite number of days each term.

2. Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 2015), 39.