Today marks one week of being in Oxford. As I write this, I sit in the shared common space of the house I’ll be living in for the next few months, called The Vines, along with twenty-eight other students studying Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford. We’ve completed orientation so the unfamiliarity and busyness of the last few days has been replaced by a stillness and warmth as we start to feel more settled and plan for the coursework and tutorials ahead. There are lots of windows in this room, so I have a nice view of the green expanse of the grounds as the rain falls.
Doesn’t feel quite real yet, the fact of my being here in this place. But I also can’t imagine being anywhere else. Every time I walk past the many colleges, the beauty of their architecture leaving me awestruck, or enter the Bodleian Library, my spirit begins to stir and my imagination reawakens in a way it hasn’t for many years. I think of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and many others of those revered writers and understand why they were so often inspired. Oxford, both as an institution and city, is deeply Romantic1 and stimulates the mind and heart to leap to new heights, unlocking within oneself wells and streams of thought and creativity previously unknown.
There is a building belonging to the university called the Clarendon Building, right next to the Bodleian and Sheldonian Theatre, near the center of the city. On its roof stands the nine Muses, goddesses of music, song, and dance, the inspiration of many writers and poets. According to Greek myth, two muses invented theory and the practice of learning.
The original purpose of the Clarendon Building was to house the Oxford University Press, cultivating its role in advancing knowledge, literature, and scholarship, and the Muses perfectly symbolize this. I'd like to imagine that the Muses, if real beings, would sing over the city, striking chords within the chambers of our hearts, amplifying the music and dreams within us. Perhaps, in a way, these statues do simply because of what they represent. And it makes me curious as to how often those who walk past them stop for a moment and allow their hearts and minds to be stirred, echoing the cry of the narrator in the Odyssey, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…”.
Matthew Arnold was right to call this place the city of dreaming spires. I wonder what dreams will awaken in me.
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, / She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.” — Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold
In the sense of the Romantic movement which placed an emphasis on the imagination and emotions.