Cambridge

July 13, 2011

Beginning to hear the phrases, “I am getting so sick of. . . . I can’t wait to get back to . . . “

Sight of two old English women with walkers barking at Chinese students in Italian, evidently assuming that all darkish foreigners are Italian. “Piano! Piano! They’ll knock you down in the street without looking back.” In fact, on this day anyway, the influx of juvenile Asians reached plague proportions, if judged on simple abundance and the ability to overrun sidewalks and shops. Why are they here? It’s difficult to imagine that traveling in swarms like that provides an individual much of an education.

Cold, dark day all day, and the worst of it now. I paid the entrance fee to have some time in the King’s Chapel. The Asian throng entered just a head of me, maybe forty Japanese kids with a couple of American leaders who, clearly, were not making themselves understood. The guardians of King’s kept hissing “No flash photography!” while the flashing from cameras and cells went on unabated. I watched them as they entered; the cameras came to their faces instantly. Not one of them actually saw anything before they started flashing photos, nor did many have time to see anything at all between the anxious posing for and snapping of photographs. It is experience completely mediated, like those Victorian women who used to view landscapes through tiny wooded frames, as though incapable of comprehending anything that wasn’t a painting. And this in a time when nothing really needs to be photographed at all, with all the views of every conceivable thing overflowing the Internet. This bothered me inordinately, as though some malign alien power had conceived a way to keep us from all direct human experience, from all uses of memory and imagination. Despite this, I enjoyed my stay in the chapel, the ceiling far and lyrical as a great forest, the air oxymoronically dim and bright at once, the tour guides delivering themselves of their mixture of fact and misinformation. It has been a vital space in my life, far beyond the actual time I have spent within it. I was so weighed down with memory and a sort of twilight melancholy that I was almost unable to leave. Would that make the papers? “American tourist glued to his seat in King’s College Chapel.”

Spent most of the evening in the Eagle, and its component the RAF bar, with the names of soldiers on the ceiling. I planted myself in a corner with a glass of wine I didn’t like well enough to drink fast, and watched. Covered many pages in my journal working out the details of the past week, which has been such a transformation in my life, effected with so little trauma that it is almost a scandal. Home to help the kids mop up the last of a spaghetti feast. When I went to bed there was still shouting in the night.