C.S. Lewis Was Here

Today marks three weeks since a jet-lagged version of myself stepped off of the bus at Gloucester Green with my mouth, quite literally, hanging open. Today also marks the last day of the group discussion tutorial that I have been attending during the month of September. Over the past three weeks, I have read thousands (and I really mean thousands) of pages at the city library, I have attended lectures on Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair, and I have, most importantly, been converted to a tea drinker. The world is never going to be the same.

Learning about Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair, as well as the legacies they have left behind, has made me start thinking about my own. Churchill is revered as the “bulldog” politician who, energetically and charismatically, conducted the UK through World War II, Thatcher is respected for her fierce—and sometimes radical—economic approach in the 1980’s, and Blair is admired for his compassion and kindness following 9/11. Each had a unique impact on British politics; each will be remembered in his or her own way. As I sat in Blackwell’s, sipping on my third cup of tea for the day, I began to wonder: what’s my story? How do I want to be remembered?

With these questions ringing in my head, I visited C.S. Lewis’ grave last weekend. His headstone is tucked away in a small cemetery next to an Anglican church in the Oxford countryside where he lived. When I got there, I was immediately struck by the serene peace that blanketed the neighborhood. My senses had grown so accustomed to the sounds and sights and—oh, God—smells of the city that stepping into the countryside was like turning off a loud stereo that had been playing for too long. My ears rang from the sudden hush.

I have always found a strange comfort in cemeteries. Spending time in one seems to center me and bring to me an inner tranquility. As I absorbed each gravestone in turn, I thought about the individual lives that each grave commemorated. They were all real people once, with real dreams and ambitions and fears. They had families that loved them, jobs they adored or hated, hobbies, favorite foods, and even bedtimes. My feet seemed to tingle with all of the dreams and ambitions, hopes and beliefs that I walked over, buried deep in the ground. It's crazy to think that we are all conscious, breathing souls at one point, each with relationships and families and goals and thoughts, and then one day... we're not. Where does that go? Is it all for waste?

Lewis grappled with this question, too, during his time here in Oxford. After the death of his wife, the great Christian thinker and writer dove into a deep depression and crisis of faith. In Grief Observed, he writes, “For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?” Lewis seemed to believe that our consciousness, and therefore the human experience at large, is transient. Our thoughts and emotions dive; they emerge, peak, and then they dive again. Nothing is permanent; everything is in flux. Thus, experience, knowledge, and emotion are passed on like Newton’s Laws—never created nor destroyed, but in constant motion.

Lewis certainly loved his wife, and his grief and love and memory of her compelled him to write some of the most poignant commentary on death that I have read. When Tony Blair first spoke in the United States following 9/11, he quoted Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "But soon we die, and all memory of [them] will have left Earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough… There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

I’m not exactly sure what legacy I want to leave behind yet, but I do believe that the only guaranteed record of our brief individual lives on earth lies in the memories of other people. What matters, then, is spending time with people, listening to their stories, hearing what they have to say about the world, and then passing those on so the individual—and their ideas—are never forgotten. And in turn, their memories of you and how you made them feel will be passed on to others, as well. Thus, a cyclical pattern emerges. But Lewis can rest assured knowing that this movement acts more like a spiral, insofar as it never overlaps itself. Rather, it whirls and oscillates—never repeating, never closing—until the entire world has felt one person’s touch.

Speaking of the rest of the world, tomorrow I embark on my week-long trek to mainland Europe, where I will spend the weekend with a group of friends in Munich for Oktoberfest, and then I will take a train to Paris to spend the rest of the week among the chain-smoking, beret-wearing elite. But right now, I am watching the rain soak into centuries-old British architecture from the warm, dry haven of the coffee shop inside Blackwell’s. It is my new favorite haunt; the baristas already know my “usual.” There is just something quite enchanting about being surrounded by thousands upon thousands of books that encompass the vastness of human knowledge, covering every possible genre and topic and idea. A written documentation of the history of the entire human race, practically humming on the shelves beside me. The conversations here meander from Germany in World War II to Ukraine as others peruse books by Coelho and Hemingway. Of course, there is the occasional buzz of the espresso machine, always present in the background. The style, the sophistication, the poise—this, my friends, is my life now.

Meanwhile, a self-described “ginger extremist” was accused today of a royal murder plot to put Prince Harry on the throne. It’s a strange, strange world.

Time Traveling

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. How it passes, how it moves, how it expands and contracts.

I have, for quite awhile, been struck by a particular way of looking at the world that I read about on the Humans of New York blog, of all places. The woman being interviewed explained her theory like this: "We are on earth of a finite amount of time. And time is a manmade perception. And we perceive time passing through change--seasons, aging, things like that. So to expand our time on earth, we must incite as much change in our lives as possible."

As a person who is obstinately against spontaneity or change of any sort, this insight was monumental for me. To even entertain the idea that change is not only good, but actually necessary, to live a fulfilling life, required a complete 180 degree turn. Yet this bit of wisdom has allowed me to embrace new and sometimes uncomfortable experiences in my life, and studying abroad has been the newest and most uncomfortable one to date.

Time, without a doubt, passes differently here in England. Did you know that until the latter part of the 18^th century, Oxford was in a different time zone than everyone else? Five minutes behind GMT, apparently. Back in the day, the time in each city was determined by a local sundial, making the local time at neighboring towns vary because of the sun's location and the shape and rotation of the earth. The clock tower in Oxford would toll five minutes after the one in London, and students would begin their exams. It wasn't until trains were invented that all zones became standardized, in order for arrival and departure times to be more precise.

People also move at different paces, depending on the place. People walk very fast in Oxford; the entire city is bustling by 8 AM and doesn’t slow down until well after midnight. Back home, people move at a more meandering pace, and I think we take more time to appreciate little things, like a sunset or a beautiful day. Yet the opposite is also true. Americans have a very strict sense of time, as exemplified by the fact that everyone in our group arrived fifteen minutes before the program’s orientation was scheduled to start. The British, in typical European fashion, have a very loose sense of time, as exemplified by the fact that the orientation started twenty minutes behind schedule and ended half an hour late.

Human perception of time is the least precise of all. The day I arrived in Oxford felt like the longest and shortest day of my life. Between boarding the plane, dragging my luggage around Heathrow to find my bus, riding the bus to Oxford, and then dragging my luggage around again—this time through Gloucester Green—to catch a cab to my new house, it felt like a whole day should have passed. At the same time, the newness of it all had me so fascinated and so ready to explore that I was disappointed when, all too soon, the sun began to set on my first day.

All of this is to say, time is completely relative to our own perception. It speeds up and slows down, lingers on moments and completely erases others, leaps ahead and grinds to a halt, and most of the time, we are unaware of its passing. Yet we can all expand the time we have here on earth by embracing every new moment as an opportunity for possibility and change.

With that in mind, I am entirely focused on being in the present moment this semester. I have spent too much time reminiscing on the past or looking forward to the future. Now that I am in such an incredible, new place, getting ready to have so many indescribable, new memories, I want to appreciate what is happening right now. After all, the past, present, and future are not mutually exclusive, nor does one bar the way for the other; rather, each one is a comma—a pause—before we are allowed to move forward again.

Right now, I want more than anything to pause.