Letter from Cambridge |
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Family
1 February: Everyone arrives from Heathrow early afternoon, absolutely exhausted. The kids are limp noodles of semi-consciousness, barely aware of me or their new surroundings. We pour them out of the car and into bed or sleeping places one way or another, and unpack the rest of the baggage. Good to see Lucy and everyone.
Getting settled takes a bit, and there is much to be done for the whole family that did not need doing for just myself. The next few days are spent acquiring more living possessions: dishes, mugs, lamps. We poke around town and everyone gets oriented a bit. The kids discover the bread stall at the open-air town market, which has croissants and cinnamon rolls, as well as wonderful rolls and yeasted delights of every sort.
It is fun watching Aaron and Heather adapt to a slightly different scene here. I have no idea how much they will take away, but to hear Aaron ask for “crisps” instead of potato chips is a kick. One learns the important things quickly. It snows one night and the kids awake with squeals of pleasure and rush outside to do snow things that morning. Aaron returns for some food at lunch time with the announcement that he has assembled “the world’s largest snowball.” We are still waiting for Guinness certification.
Over the next month folks go to museums, as there are many in town including the Fitzwilliam, with some armor and Egyptian antiquities, and the Zoology museum. I take the kids one afternoon to the Botanical Garden, and one day I take Aaron to the Imperial War Museum, a longish bus ride to Duxford, with several huge hangars full of various mostly military aircraft. The visit involves some lengthy discussion with Aaron about war, why it happens, what it is like. I stress that it is the last possible option for resolving disputes and signals a failure for every other kind of action. He knows his grandfather served in the field artillery during WWII but there is something quite different about knowing that and seeing a howitzer up close, at least for a 9-year old boy. Lucy and Aaron go to the incomparable British Museum in London one day last week. One evening we all make our way to London for the theater, great fun. We are joined by Gene for a week, a grand treat, and the kids easily settle into an enjoyment of their older, absolutely fascinating, brother, who tickles them, reads them stories and tells tales of his adventures. Missing only Maggie, we are a full, noisy lot for the week he is here.
The month flies by and before any of us are ready, everyone is set to head back to Berkeley. They will join me again in June for the summer, and I will miss them.
Gonville and Caius College
The Newcomers were treated to a tour of Gonville and Caius College, one of the older Cambridge colleges in town. Gonville and Caius is one of those double-founded colleges that seem to happen from time to time in university history. Edmund Gonville got the place launched in the mid 14th century but things had begun to fall apart a bit after a couple hundred years, so John Caius (everyone in town pronounces it “Keys,” his original name, “Caius” presumably being some sort of highbrow Latinified adaptation after he had gone and done some university studies in Padua) a Gonville Fellow, and big name medical doctor, pumped in his fortune and refounded it. He got to add his coat of arms to the college seal too, so that must have felt good. He was a character, and “eccentric” is one of these English adjectival understatements that may be used to describe him. Clearly one accustomed to running things his own way, he set student curfew at 8pm, about a hour earlier than every other college in town, and stipulated an unusually restrictive set of admissions: no blind, deaf, lame or otherwise physically comprised men need apply. When students or fellows disagreed with him, he was wont to put them in the stocks in the college courtyard. My, my.
The college itself is gorgeous, some of the buildings dating from the mid 14th century. The main hall for dining is sumptuous in the extreme, positively bristling with coats of arms, gilded beams, and portraits of famous graduates, including Crick, the DNA fellow and the mathematician John Venn, whom for all of us who teach or use Boolean algebra in our searches will remember fondly for giving us those handy little “Venn diagrams.”
Luckily for me, this is also the college of physicist Stephen Hawking, so access was a bit better than what one usually gets here in town, with hidden elevators to spirit you around inside the warren of halls and corridors. An extraordinarily large number of rooms seemed set aside for receptions of one sort or another, one of which was designated for use by a college “wine club” due to meet that evening, so some hundred wine glasses were lined up ready for use.
The library was next door and I had to be hoisted up a set of steps. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the working collection upstairs so while everyone else poked around there I had to be content with the shelves of showy, leather bound volumes on the ground floor.
On the way out, as folks were looking for advice on how to get me back down the front steps, I said “just put me at the top of the stairs, point me straight out and give me a little push.” Lots of nervous laughter ensued. We got down okay, three folks hoisting, and at the wide bottom landing there was just one more step to street level. Mr. Wheelchair Athlete waved off any extra help, he was going to do this last step himself, thanks for the assistance on the previous series. Well, although I do this dozens of times a day, I managed to misjudge my takeoff and instead of hitting both wheels simultaneously on landing, I was off a hair, and promptly, like something in a slow motion Monty Python skit, tipped over in front of two dozen visiting scholars and college types. Sprawled out on the pavement, my face reddening while I silently but vehemently cursed my brainless lapse in judgment, I probably caused a few heart palpitations amongst the easily startled. I am quite capable of falling ten or more times a year, but usually don’t find a way to do it in front of a crowd, especially one that knows me and will run into me again. Just what I want my image to be for this group. The first pair of hands to pull me back into the chair was accompanied by a dry “pride cometh before a fall?” aside, and I had all I could do to grit my teeth so I didn’t reply “seemed to occur concurrently in this case, don’t you think?” I dusted myself off and joined the group for tea back at the Master’s house, trying to look as unruffled as possible.
The project
I am making some progress. Using the library is not as easy as I had hoped. As mentioned earlier, the catalog is a miserable affair, hard to search, and utilizes an opaque classification. In a chat with one of the librarians, who I had to send after some items in the open stacks that I could not reach, I learned a little more:
Me: “Looks like you use some sort of modified Dewey system here?” (Since it employs a strictly numeric code for their so-called “classmarks.”)
Librarian, with a glint in her eye, suggesting the possible presence of irony: “Well, this is the University of Cambridge after all. Dewey is an American creation. We couldn’t possibly do something like that.
“We use an in-house system, which only superficially resembles Dewey.”
(I could have sworn I heard her thinking “the resultant confusion creates a lot of amusement for some of us” but I am not sure that is precisely what was in her mind.)
For items not on the open shelves (“open stacks” to you librarians reading), one needs to fill out a form for retrieval, your name and address are required fields, and wait for them to magically appear on the retrieval shelf in the reading room. Thirty minutes is the standard promised time and I have had that happen more than once. More frustrating is when the work goes un-retrieved and you have absolutely no idea why. Is it missing? Checked out, although the catalog record does not show that? Couldn't read my impeccable handwriting? Lost in the paperwork shuffle? I will probably follow-up when I get to some essential work that cannot apparently be gotten, but the whole business is intimidating enough, and I have so many different sources I am trying to get my hands on, that I will wait until it is quite important.
Writing output so far:
56 pages
27,269 words
My goals are an hour of writing as a minimum each day (taking one day off a week) and a thousand words a sitting. I achieve the first regularly, the second less often. Each day I want to have made some movement forward. It is hard going sometimes, and I continue to turn over the project in my head, how to frame my questions and issues, how to articulate them to my audience, and decide, in fact, who my audience will be.
Cultural events
My extracurricular life for the past week and the one to come shows signs of activity. I attended an evensong service, not once but twice, at the awe-inspiring King’s College Chapel last week, and heard their legendary choir in action, the high notes of the young boys’ voices filling the chapel to its vaulted heights. An organ recital followed Saturday night and I was treated to a thunderous rendition of Bach’s most famous Toccata and Fugue, and some other, lesser, pieces. There is something quite special about listening to a musical instrument in the location for which it was designed, and hearing, nay, feeling the deep bass notes of the low chords blast through the immense space is an unmistakably moving experience. You feel like a lightning rod for some 40,000 volts of electricity pulsing through the vaulted ether, which then connects and nails you to to the floor, all nerve endings tingling.
The newcomers also got to Magdalene College. The unparalleled Samuel Pepys, of the famous diary, was a fellow of the college and left his huge late 17th century library to the college in 1703 on his death. (I won’t begin to tell you how I have mis-pronounced his name all my life until now – his surname is spoken as a one-syllable “Peeps” by the townsfolk. Luckily before my visit I knew enough to pronounce “Magdalene” as “Maudlin” so I was not an entire rube.)
Pepys showed all the symptoms of being an obsessive collector, among other things having special bookcases constructed for his collection, which was organized by size of item, smallest to largest (all 3,000 of them.) Since he had been secretary of the Admiralty, these cases were constructed by navy wood-workers, and showed some distinctively nautical touches. Their design was a first, and widely copied afterwards.
As Navy secretary, and later president of the Royal Society, he was unusually well situated in the midst of 17th century intellectual culture. He had copies of Newton’s Principia, some of Hooke’s works, multitudes of items from Erasmus, and all manner of dictionaries, lexicons, and other reference works. He apparently was determined to have a copy of something from every known language and script, so the variations were extensive. It took some doing to shoehorn me up the twisting steps to the top of the library, but I was grateful to have a chance to view this collection.
This week will include a series of lectures on the history of cartography, and next weekend I will head to Oxford for an archaeology conference, hopefully getting to some of the college libraries as well, although that is posing some difficulties at the moment. Last Saturday night also graced me with the lunar eclipse, for which the weather cooperated with a cold, clear sky, and I was able to watch from the nearby fields, quite remote from city lights, as the moon’s white glow was overtaken by the earth’s shadow and the eerie, coppery reddish color replaced its previous powerful luminescence.
Kind regards from Cambridge
Ned
March 2007