Hello,
I was more than a little pessimistic last time I posted, as a result of a rather melancholy, stagnant mid-Hilary; a three-week period that passed in a manner redolent of not so much wading through treacle as sprinting through it; a rather exhausting, frustrating feeling born of trying to get a colossal number of things done in an increasingly decreasing window of time. When combined with the concomitant feelings of exhaustion, frustration and being generally modcearig, it is perhaps unsurprising that I was disinclined to note anything especially positive about my Hilary term. Thankfully, a very productive, pleasing Eighth Week helped to remedy that overwhelming sense of fatigue and listlessness somewhat. A number of things happened that turned a mediocre term into one that I am able to look back upon, if not fondly, with enough positive memories to keep me rather in love with the Oxford Experience.
I’ll structure this entry chronologically, which I’m sure makes a pleasant change from the Miscellany of memories that have constituted most of my posts this term; it is a pleasant change for me, at any rate. In fact, I shall cheat a little and start with Saturday of 7th Week, in which I was playing yet another game of football for the Hall. For the first time in what felt like weeks, even if it was not, British Spring had deigned to make an appearance, so I was able to play in the sun; a lovely change. The game was away at Hertford College for the 3rd XI, again a little short of players. It has appeared to me over the past few years that my form mimics that of Chelsea’s Premier League form; once March appears and the moving forward of the clocks becomes imminent, I suddenly begin to play better. Perhaps this merely shows that I lack the stoicism to play well in wind, rain and conditions of below ten degrees. In any case, I added four to my season’s tally in a 5-3 win, and even when the opposition are poor to mediocre, scoring threes and fours (and sevens) is always good for the confidence of a center-forward. Perhaps if Chelsea were to loan Torres to Morecambe or Barnet, he would regain his form and confidence – though I fear that his decline is as inexorable as the addition of ‘LOL’ and ‘chillax’ to the Scrabble dictionary.
After this extremely enjoyable hour and a half, I returned to work on Samuel Beckett’s plays, tucked away in a corner of the Teddy Hall Library. I have been trying to familiarise myself with the annexe known as the Vestry recently; the Vestry is the one part of the library that remains open after the 1 A.M. closing time, which means that anybody who is mad enough to work past one o’clock or anybody who is in the throes of an essay crisis remains there into the night. To fail to do so leads to the unfortunate situation that one of the Teddy Hall Aesthetes experienced; that is, he was locked into the library (if I remember correctly, in the tower) into the night, with only the sound of the rats that inhabit the Crypt for company. In any case, I foresee myself spending a considerable amount of time in the Vestry next term, so that is where I spent most of Saturday after the game. For the Eighth Week essay, I chose to compare Waiting for Godot with Endgame in the light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories and hermeneutic.
In the end, the essay became slightly rushed due to the combination of too much sport and too much other work, but thankfully my tutor seemed pleased enough. Eighth Week was odd, insofar as Tutorial Partner was doing her essay on Irish poetry that week (returning to her heritage, she said), meaning I had my tutorial with two second-years, both of whom were doing Beckett as part of an English and French course. Far from being daunting, it was an interesting departure from the normal tutorial system. Though my tutor had strong objections to Schopenhauer, for reasons that I am currently attempting to research, she seemed to receive my essay well. This was no small relief; it is always worrying when one chooses to focus upon an idea or critic that one’s tutor does not like, because it means that one feels incredibly vulnerable. There are few things more unnerving than sitting in a tutorial and hearing one’s tutor say, ‘I’m not quite sure that I like that…’ Even more worrying was the word ‘Yuck!’ in the margin of one of my marked pages. To my immense relief, it referred to the theory of Schopenhauer’s I was paraphrasing (I hope).
Next up was Teddy Hall Relays, on Wednesday of Eighth Week. For those who are unfamiliar, Teddy Hall Relays is a running event held every year in Eighth Week. I’m sure most people reading this, if not all, are well acquainted with the relay format; Teddy Hall Relays, as opposed to being 4 x 100m or 4 x 400m, is four ‘laps’ of six kilometers. Now, lacking sagacity (where has that been heard before?), I resolved to do all four legs alone. This was partially due to my inability to find a team to do the event with, partially due to my masochism, and partially due to my wanting to use it as a measure of my form going into the Richmond Half Marathon. I was not expecting much, even taking into account my 18:08 in 6th Week. In the event, however, the result exceeded my expectations; I came through the event unscathed, went through 21K (the half-marathon distance) in 1 hour 27 minutes, and completed the course in 1:36:47. Given I was attempting to go through in under 1:45:00, I was obviously delighted – all the more so when it transpired that i had won a prize for the fastest person running individually. How many people were mad enough to do all four legs alone, I do not know, but the bottle of Oxford’s finest beer will remain in my fridge as a memento until my father finally drinks it.
On Thursday, I even managed to go some way towards rectifying my inexcusable misanthropy this term. The Kelly/Emden contingent and I (Emden is the name of another, slightly more aesthetically pleasing building at Teddy Hall) went for a very agreeable meal at Byron; surprisingly, everybody was able to attend, which is something of a rarity in Oxford (or, perhaps, I only believe so because I so rarely left Kelly Building this term). After two hours there, I went to the end-of-season Football Awards Dinner, which will stand out as one of the highlights of Hilary. The event was held on the upper floor of a rather quaint pub off of Magdalen Roundabout, the Cape of Good Hope. (Symbolic? Perhaps.) It was lively and jovial without ever becoming disagreeably raucous, and it was perhaps the only occasion where the entire regular 1st XI were together that term (again, I cannot attest to this with any great certainty; my attendance at Football Drinks has been as sporadic as my attendance at Park End this term). The awards themselves were some of the most interesting moments of the evening, partially due to their iconoclastic lack of political correctness (‘The Jimmy Saville Award for Touch’; ‘The Adolf Hilter Award for Inspirational Speeches’, and the like. Quite frankly I associate Hitler with other attributes, but there we go.). I was incredibly surprised by the number of ‘awards’ – in inverted commas because the prize for winning one was drinking half a pint – I managed to win; ‘The Lance Armstrong Award for Potential Doping’; ‘The Oscar Pistorius Award for Hasty Shooting’; ‘The Anders Breivik Award for Accurate Shooting’, and ‘The Alf-Inge Haaland Award for Most Likely to Bottle A Tackle’. Aside from these more humorous awards, I was absolutely delighted to win the Golden Boot – which readers know was my goal from the start of Michaelmas; runner-up for Goal of the Season, and, most pleasing of all, Young Player of the Season. By far the biggest compliment was being made Vice-Captain for next season. It was something I never expected, and something I’m hugely looking forward to taking on next year – after all, we English students must find something to fill all of that free time other students spend working… To conclude briefly, football has been one of the definite high points of Hilary term; playing in an environment so much more positive than my school team has been a welcome change, and though it has taken up a colossal amount of time on occasion – namely Sixth Week and Seventh Week – it was worth it; twenty-six goals and sixteen assists in twenty-four games was a return infinitely beyond my expectations and the end of Michaelmas, and I look forward to attempting to emulate the rugby team and win Cuppers next year.
To finish the term, only one noteworthy event remained; Principal’s Collections, which is a brief meeting with the Principal of college along with one’s tutors to discuss the progress that has been made over the term. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had large reservations regarding my performance in Hilary; I thought that it was at best inconsistent and at worst a considerable deterioration from my Michaelmas performance. In the event, it was far more positive than I’d imagined it; there are still considerable problems with my essay style that need to be rectified if I am to achieve my targeted Distinction in Prelims, but both of my tutors were mostly positive, and both estimated my term’s work at a borderline-First level. In fact, reading that I’d managed to produce First Class work on more than one occasion in Hilary was probably the highlight of Eighth Week, because it was perhaps the most reassuring thing I’d read or heard over those eight weeks. I had one very important, very helpful meeting with my Personal Tutor afterwards to discuss the essay issue in more detail, and whilst I cannot underestimate the problems it may cause me, I left the meeting feeling better than I’d felt about – well, everything – since the last week of Michaelmas. The term afforded one last highlight on the day of departure – a title-deciding game for the MCR against Kellogg College. Teddy Hall needed to win and better Jesus’s goal difference to win the league and seal promotion; in the end, we won 9-0 and thus a league title was added to the promotion gained with the JCR team.
This resulted in my leaving college rather later than everyone but the Law students, who were unfortunate enough to have Prelims at the end of Hilary. One of the eeriest things about life at Oxford is how quickly everyone is gone and how quickly you yourself are gone once term reaches its conclusion. It was utterly disorientating to return to a virtually empty college after the game, and a sense of ennui returned in a rather large degree. There is something very lonely about college before the start and after the end of term, and the overwhelming thought in my mind as I wandered around college and Oxford waiting for my father was Quomodo sedet sola civitas.
So, where does chiasmus come into this entry? Well, the more pertinent term would most likely be ‘chiastic structure’, but I felt that it did not read as neatly as ‘Chiasmus’. Chiastic structure, for those who are unaware, is an application of the literary device ‘chiasmus’ to a narrative, and I feel like this provides an apt analogy for my time at Oxford thus far. The first ‘A’ of the A-B-B-A structure would be the period in early Michaelmas, which is in itself analogous to Charles Ryder’s first months in his Oxford and Brideshead idyll; a time where he found ‘that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened onto an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any windows, in the heart of that grey city’, a period where ‘the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer’. Like Charles’s idyll, though, the Christmas Vacation served as the first ‘B’ of the structure, where Brideshead is deserted; Sebastian’s alcoholism and depression causes a disjunction of a beautiful union, and Oxford loses its lustre: ‘The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers’. The ‘Brideshead’ analogy unfortunately breaks down, as Charles finds brief solace in Julia; the start of Hilary brought no such equivalent to ‘the forerunner’. The start of Hilary continued the desolation and sola civitas; the days were imbued with not so much an autumnal mood as a wintry chill: ‘The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare beside it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley.’ And the end of Hilary acts as the second ‘A’ – albeit an etiolated, poor equivalent to the initial period of ‘idyll’ – a ‘monochrome, monotone sequel‘, perhaps. In fact, here the Brideshead metaphor does work to an extent; after all, there is the brief period in the epilogue where Charles finds solace in memory – ‘It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians. And there I found it that morning, burning anew among the old stones.’
Thus, that concludes my Eighth Week entry, but, in lieu of a postscript, I shall briefly note some of the things that have happened since I came back down. Just to reinforce the notion that my Oxford narrative currently exists in chiastic form, two things occurred that seemed to be something of a regression to the early-Oxford weeks. Firstly, my plantar fascitis has returned, and in vicious form; I completed the Reading Half Marathon in a rather dreadful 1:34:24, but the pains in my shins, calves and plantar fasciae were notable from the third kilometer, and the last three miles were – if my readers will forgive me the hyperbole – nothing short of agony. Thankfully, it seems to have been in rather speedy remission since Sunday, and I may be able to run on Saturday if I take a painkiller or two. Secondly, a few hours after coming down – oh, how contrived this seemed – I heard from ex-Girlfriend for the first time in over three months – a brief text, merely to see how I was doing. The truth would have no doubt opened a rather large can of worms, and, though she was good enough to give me the option of not replying, I felt weary of resentment (‘Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so, so tired of being cynical!’) so replied. The action of a blundering fool? Well, perhaps. But, quixotically or not, I do not feel on the verge of a second entrapment, and I feel strong (or self-preserving: which?) enough to preclude such an eventuality happening again.
Finally, I met an old friend of mine from my quondam school last week, and could not resist dropping in to the English Department after doing so. It was delightful to catch up with the teachers who were such a help to me, especially during my second application. It resulted in them asking me to come in and give a lecture/class of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Brideshead Revisited on Friday; yes, it has added to my workload, but I was rather flattered to be asked. How useful my insights will prove to be is another matter entirely; I have re-read Brideshead, because it is one of my very favourite books (no Lolita or Sense of an Ending, but wonderfully written and so, so pertinent currently (See: A Twitch Upon the Thread) – but have not read Tess fully since I did the A2 myself – thus, I shall have to trust to my memory. Disaster may ensue.
On that note, I should probably conclude. Revision is currently a categorical disaster, and I would hate for the chiastic structure to repeat itself, and end Trinity in the same manner I begun Hilary.
Regards,
Jack
jacknmoran 