Without Reservations (24 page)

Listening to the voices around me I found myself remembering my first meeting with Naohiro. How quickly, I thought, he and I passed from small talk to real talk. I could still hear his soft, musical voice telling me on the train to Giverny,
You must go to Sainte-Chapelle to stand in the light;
and my own voice responding,
And you must go to Père-Lachaise Cemetery to stand in the past.

But it was unfair to compare this first meeting with my classmates to that encounter with Naohiro. It was also preemptory. As the candlelit dinner at Brasenose progressed, I found myself drawn to several people in the group.

After dinner I set out alone to explore Oxford. It was a cold, windy night and the streets were almost deserted. Within a few minutes I was shivering, my body tensed in knots against the strong wind. Common sense told me to turn back, but the magic of Oxford propelled me forward, into one narrow lane after another. Finally, the cold and the cobblestone streets, some so uneven that the stones hurt right through my shoes, became too much of a struggle. I decided to return to Brasenose.

The problem: I hadn’t a clue as to where I was or how to get back to the college. I’d brought along a map—I learned early in my travels never to be without a map—but it was the same one that had led me in circles earlier in the day.

I looked up at the street signs. I was somewhere on a residential street called Holywell, which on the map appeared to be not too far from Brasenose. As I stood beneath a street light studying the map, a woman turned the corner and headed for one of the houses. She unlocked the door; a circle of light spilled out. I could see through the door the warm glow of lamps and pictures lining the pale yellow walls. An orange-and-white cat, back arched, tail plumed up into the air, suddenly appeared to greet her, rubbing up against her legs. The woman bent to stroke the top of his head; the cat leaned in to her caress. “Did you miss me?” I heard her ask in a voice flushed with affection.

A wave of homesickness washed over me. Standing on a strange street, a cold mist swirling in on top of the wind, lost and alone, I thought of the warmth of my own house, of my friends, and of Tasha, the cat who waited patiently for me to come home. Then I remembered the cold, spartan rooms that awaited me at Brasenose,
the lumpy cot with its unyielding pillow and scratchy sheets. A part of me wilted.

Walking back to Radcliffe Square, I thought of something my mother used to read to me. It was a passage from a book by her favorite naturalist, Wendell Berry. In it he offers advice to those about to enter the wilderness. “Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place,” he wrote, “there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.”

Eight years earlier my mother had carried his words with her into the hospital. I’d found them neatly copied in her handwriting on a piece of paper in her handbag, the one I took home from the hospital after she died. She’d taken them with her to prepare for the journey ahead of her. It was to be her last trip, one that would take her into a new kind of wilderness, an unmapped territory known only to those who entered it.

Still, I knew that every small wilderness we enter—even one composed only of the unfamiliar streets of Oxford—offers a chance to practice for the larger one that lies in all our futures.

The course on “The English Village and Cottage Life” focused on the history of village life in England and how these small communities shaped the character of the English people. I found the lectures to be mixed: some quite stimulating, others deeply boring. Lectures on England’s land migration patterns, for instance, simply did not do it for me. Still, others in the group seemed intensely interested in the same lectures I found dry and statistical.

At least, that’s the impression conveyed by the fury of their note-taking and the number of questions they asked during such lectures. This kind of academic zeal often sent Ellen, a hip New Yorker with a sarcastic streak, into orbit. “What is it with this note-taking and question-asking?” she’d hiss into my ear. “Isn’t there a statute of limitations on trying to be the smartest kid in class?”

The answer, I could have told her—but didn’t—was: no, there is no statute of limitations. I knew this to be true because occasionally during a class I found myself listening not only to Ellen’s mocking comments but to those of an inner companion as well: “Perhaps,” this companion—whose name was Insecurity—whispered to me, “you’re just not as smart as the others.”

At such times I reminded myself that life was not a test and no one was grading me. Except my own superego, of course.

As the days passed and the group settled into the routine of lectures followed by trips out into the English countryside, I realized how much life at Oxford resembled life in high school. Small groups formed, hints of romance surfaced, complaints about the lodgings arose, rumors flew.

“Did you hear about Jane and Mike?” a classmate asked at breakfast one morning. “They’re gone. Just up and left. No one knows why.” But everyone had a theory. As the day progressed, several explanations emerged for Jane and Mike’s abrupt departure, ranging from sudden illness to impending divorce.

I loved it. All of it. I loved being back in a learning situation surrounded by opinionated, smart, and complex people. I loved the political arguments that started at dinner and ended hours later in a pub on the High Street. I loved the rumors and the gossip. I even loved watching the way in which small circles formed and broke away from the group. I saw it as a valuable lesson in the psychology
of how people select—often after an initial mis-selection—the company they prefer to keep.

All of it, even the occasional petty or snide observation made by one person or another, I found endearing. Endearing because it was so
human.
I viewed the group, myself included, with a lenient, familial eye, one that ultimately valued our connectedness over everything else.

Of course, caught up in the group dynamics of the situation, we were in fact functioning as a family. Although the hierarchy was blurred—sometimes one group seemed dominant, at other times not—we all had our roles within the family. There were the elders of the group and there were the young and the restless. There were the intellectuals and the practical-minded; the charismatic leaders and the uncertain followers; the sophisticates and the naifs; the winners and the losers; the fun-seekers and the complainers.

It was this last category that, ultimately, interested me most. I found myself observing each classmate from this angle, looking for signs—I gradually came to think of them as symptoms—that identified them as either fun-seekers or complainers. The fun-seekers, I noted, were spontaneous and flexible. They approached each day and each situation with a willingness to ride whatever wave came along, just for the experience of it. The complainers, on the other hand, would only catch a wave if it was exactly to their liking. Anything else drew loud protestations about how it was not what they expected.

I wanted to be a fun-seeker. Not only because I just plain wanted more fun in my life, but because intuitively I knew my energies were working in that direction. To my surprise, it was Albert who gave me my first lesson in how to seek out fun.

Albert, along with the rest of us, had been sucked into the vortex of this purloined family. He spent a lot of time with us, eating
meals, going out in the evenings, acting as a sort of guide and concierge. His role was that of the Oxford insider; the one who knows the system and how it operates. My guess was that the insider role was not the one usually assumed by Albert, who seemed a reserved, almost shy young man. But as time passed he seemed to grow into it. And to enjoy it.

Albert, the son of psychiatrists, liked to tell stories about Oxford and, as he grew more comfortable with us, about himself. Although he was probably not aware of it, his personal stories often opened up a view, for those who cared to look, into the inner Albert.

One late afternoon while sharing a glass of sherry with a half-dozen of us, Albert recalled a temporary job he’d had in London, one ruled over by a difficult, demanding, never-satisfied boss. He commuted by train to London every day. One day his train was late. “By the time I arrived at the station in London I was already fifteen minutes late,” Albert told us. “And I knew when I got to work I would be fired. So I thought about it for a few minutes. Then I thought, ‘Why not turn this mishap into an adventure?’ So I decided to go to Cornwall right from Paddington Station.”

He never returned to the job. “But,” he said, “I had a wonderful time in Cornwall.”

For some reason I was quite taken with Albert’s philosophy of turning a mishap into an adventure. When I returned to my rooms that evening I, who never took notes in class, got out my spiral binder and wrote, “Must experimentally test Albert’s Theorem of M=EA (Mishap equals Excellent Adventure).”

However, I didn’t realize fully how much it impressed me until several weeks later in Italy when I found myself, by mistake, on a train going to Assisi instead of Arezzo.

Dumped out of the train, standing in the station at the foot of
Monte Subasio, three miles below the Umbrian town of Assisi, I thought, “Why not turn this mishap into an adventure?” On an earlier day trip to Assisi I’d explored a charming small hotel that hung over the mountain’s edge, thinking that someday I would return for a longer visit.

Fate, or so I convinced myself, had plunked me down in Assisi sooner rather than later for that visit. I decided to stay for a few days.

That night, as I sat on the outdoor terrace of the hotel, I silently toasted Albert, the man who turned a mishap into an adventure. And who not so incidentally made me realize how simple it is to do. How simple and how necessary. It seemed an important lesson.

As things turned out, it was not the only lesson I was to learn from Albert during my stay at Brasenose. It was through Albert that I met Barry, the Oxford instructor I would remember above all others.

T
he first field trip scheduled for the class was to the Cotswold village of Burford. For me it came just in time, this jaunt out of the lecture hall and into the actual countryside that gave rise to cottage life in England. I had already cut class one morning to travel on my own to the nearby village of Woodstock, and was really looking forward to visiting Burford.

It was a sunny, cool morning when we left Oxford for the hourlong drive to the Cotswolds. Through the windows of the bus I watched a gentle wind move the sun slantwise, like the beams from a lighthouse, across the sea of Oxfordshire meadows. Sheep grazed, streams gurgled, dales quietly rose into hills, tall grass bent before the wind. We had arrived in quintessential English countryside.