Cambridge 2

June 20, 2010

Sun out, air soft and lovely. I think my investing in a sweater at Marks & Spencer’s was the voodoo needed to bring summer to this place.

One sad student, constantly on the verge of tears, phoning her mother five times a night. She is very beautiful and everyone likes her, so it is difficult to see what the exact problem is. All through our happy supper at the Castle her eyes were red and puffy from the effort not to cry. She came to my room tonight to assure me it was nothing personal, and as baffling to her as it is to us. I felt powerless, but also pretty well in sympathy, remembering the few times I was almost dead of homesickness, after having been away from home many times, having a great time where I was. In my instance, looking back, it may have been a feeling of out-of-placeness, of not belonging, however kind people were to me. I think the same is true for her. In either case, there was no way out but through.

Met a Chinese student in the Castle. He had just got double firsts, and I praised him, and we talked of the history of medicine, he lauding the guy who discovered the life cycle of cholera, whose name I forget. Sic transit gloria mundi. . . . Anyway, I saw him on the street later, and was glad. This is in fact the night when I slid into Cambridge, locking in with a snap like a piece in a puzzle. Each journey there is such a night, and I am glad when it comes early. After the colloquy with the sad student, I went walking. It was late, but this is the shortest night of the year, and we are far north, so there was still dark blue light in the sky, and, most notably, a gleaming half moon. I walked along the backs, with the road to my left and the varying sweetnesses of flower and flowering shrub and aromatic grass to my right. The Castle supper, however jolly, had not set well with me, and at one point I had no choice but to find a place to eject it. The Saint John’s playing fields are not, apparently, completely fenced in, for I plunged through some shrubby onto the edge of a vast expanse of moonlit lawn. There the deed was done, and there I gazed at the blue, perfect, tranquil beauty of the Cambridge night. Despite my reason for being there, it was romantic. I found a road across the river and into the colleges. The graduates of Trinity were partying by candlelight on one side, the happy boy and girl voices making music on the gliding river. The word “privilege” comes constantly to mind when one speaks of Cambridge or Oxford, but I think we should allow the word a context not of exclusion but of universal fulfillment. Why should we grudge it that somewhere, where the worlds gather together like the tip of a spear, things are perfect. I was glad for those kids and their perfect night. I prayed in the moonlight that it might last forever. On the left side of the bridge came on of those moments that are etched in the mind, and till the end of days will stand for something. A pair of swans and five cygnets were asleep on a brick boat ramp leading down to the water. I stopped to speak to them, and bless them as I passed. Just beyond them–he must have heard me speaking to the swans– was an angler baiting his hook. When I passed on a little, he too spoke to the swans, assuring the pen and the cob that he meant no harm and they needn’t bestir themselves. The instant I saw him, baiting his hook, a dark vertical above the snow horizontal of the roosting swans, condensed in the mind as one of those moments of perfect beauty. For a while I walked through a medieval city–except probably more well lit– and then home, just as the road was lengthening.