Blame it on the stairs.  Even in my exhaustion, my mind still tried to calculate: two flights, at twelve steps each, times thirty-eight round trips for a total of one thousand and twenty-four steps.  I had spent all day moving into my new dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, and I was pooped. My boxes of belongings and treasures from home were stacked up in my room, the items not yet stowed in the dresser, wardrobe, and desk that the University supplied; I would do that tomorrow. After a long goodbye with my parents, I descended the stairs once more to eat dinner at my new home. When I returned to my room, I crawled in my new bed, instantly falling into a deep slumber. Sometime during the night, I’m not sure what time because I hadn’t set my clock yet, a rattle woke me. I forced my heavy eyelids open and saw a dull light peeking around the doors of the empty wardrobe in the corner of the room. I couldn’t decide if I was hallucinating because of fatigue, but eventually my curiosity won out and I got out of bed. I warily stepped in the closet and followed the light, momentarily forgetting that I had walked far deeper than the dimensions of the wardrobe. Suddenly I was standing on a perfectly manicured lawn surrounded by old stone buildings. “This place surpassed my wildest dreams, I never saw anything so beautiful.”[1]

      “If you only saw the quad on these moonlit nights with the long shadows lying half across the level perfect grass and the tangle of towers and spires beyond in the dark,”[2] said a voice from above me. At first I assumed I was in heaven, being addressed by a god. “ ‘This place in the whole is absolutely ripping’[S1] [3] isn’t it?” the voice said. I crooked my head upward to discover the source of the divine voice. I was more than surprised to find a mere mortal hanging out his window, talking to me.  “Rooms overlooking the front quad always provide interesting things to watch. You don’t look like you are from here. Come on up! I’ll introduce myself and show you around.” I ascended the stairs, (this time I didn’t mind them), and before I could knock on the door that I assumed to be the one I was looking for, a hand was presented before me with a matching greeting, “Hi there, I am Jack, well, Clive Staples Lewis to be formal, but everyone calls me Jack. It’s nice to meet you.” I quickly shook his hand and introduced myself. My head was spinning. This had to be a dream: walking through my dorm room wardrobe only to find myself, presumably at Oxford, meeting C.S. Lewis. I decided to put the incomprehensible behind me and take Jack up on his offer of showing me around. “ ‘It is getting to be quite homely to me, this room, especially when I come back to it by firelight and find the kettle boiling. How I love kettles!’[4] But, you probably don’t care about my room, let’s get going!” As we departed the room I noticed “the exquisite smell of the wisteria pervading the whole room,”[5] which only served to enhance the fairy tale in which I was entrapped.  We started on our way and Jack explained that he had just    come                                 from dinner at the Hall. “Dinner at hall, especially in winter, [is] always a lovely sight. The great room was lit

entirely by table lamps, screened with silk shades. There was sufficient light to dimly illuminate the low-pitched oak roof and, on the walls at the far end, the portraits of old members of the college.” I regretted that I hadn’t arrived just a few hours earlier to be able to see the magnificent feast.

      We walked past a few bookshops and came upon a building flooded with people. “This is the College Library of the Union Society; it is ‘an admirable library where I have passed many happy hours and hope to pass many more’[6].” The activity around this library reminded me of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Texas, though I couldn’t conjure the same nostalgia. “I enjoy the library for its books, of course, but I also get great pleasure out of the paintings hung on the walls,”[7] he continued. Again, I thought of the Undergraduate Library and my mental picture was void of artwork of any kind. As we walked past the library, Jack stopped for a minute to talk to a young man. “He is a member of The Martlets, a literary and debating club that we both belong to. It is the only one ‘of College Clubs [that] has its minutes preserved in the Bodleian,’[8]” he announced proudly. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded impressive enough to me. We walked past Grace Hall, another place he enjoyed reading, and soon came to the Hall at Oriel. “That is ‘where we do papers, [it] is fearfully cold at about four o’clock in the afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves,’[9]” I found this mental image humorous, and began to wonder if any of the Oxford-taught authors whose works I enjoyed so much had been forced to cut short their stories simply because of freezing fingers.

As we approached University College, Jack paused. With a reflective look on his face, he said “ ‘I love every stone in it.’[10] This was my first home at Oxford and I will always hold a special place for it in my heart.” I wondered if he wished to reside there rather than at Magdalen. He thought for awhile and finally said, “ ‘When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate, who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could. They certainly seldom discovered one another, and never collaborated so as to resist the prevailing tone’[11] and I found this quite different than my days at University. It could be that this is just the way of undergraduates now, but I like to think that University students are simply superior. Being at University would be delightful, but I take this opportunity at Magdalen to instill some sense of community into these undergraduates, so I am glad that I am here.”

      Jack looked down at his watch and exclaimed, “Ah, I have let the time get away from me. My companions are coming over to my rooms at Magdalene for a meeting of the Inklings. We usually meet in my room. Thursdays are known to have a literary focus. We read to each other things that we personally enjoy as well as ask for criticism on pieces that we are writing.[12] I guess we don’t ask for criticism—we get it regardless! On Tuesdays we meet at the Eagle and Child on St. Giles, though we call it the Bird and Baby. ‘Of course there [is] no reading on Tuesday, and the talk often veered to College and English School politics, but whatever the topic one could rely upon its being wittily handled’.[13] You’ll see more when we get there,” he told me. When we walked into Jack’s room, I was blown away by the men present.

“You’re late, Jack” said Charles Williams, as J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield both shook their heads in agreement.

“Jack, I see you’ve brought a visitor. Hello, I am Ronald. Who might you be?” questioned the creator of Middle-earth.

“I am Merrell from the University of Texas at Austin, and somehow I ended up here at Oxford this afternoon.”

“Well, what a delightful place to end up. Welcome to the Inklings. We are an ‘undetermined and unelected circle of friends who [gather] around C.S.L[ewis] and [meet] in his room in Magdalen… Our habit [is] to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!)’[14].”

“Merrell, before we begin, you need to know that this man is in love with imagination” Barfield announced in regard to Jack, “and this man is in love with language!” referring to Tolkien.[15] “Last week Charles ‘read us a Whitsun play, a mixture of very good stuff and some deplorable errors in taste’[16]. I am anxious to see what he has for us today.” And with that, the men all took there seats.

I thanked both men for their explanations and clarifications and found in a comfy chair near the back of the room to listen to master authors haggle over works—opuses that I had already consumed the finished versions. These works were now classics, masterpieces. I listened to them “cuss and discuss” every little bit of a paragraph. The process gave me a new appreciation for their books. After the meeting adjourned, Ronald approached me and offered to give his tour of Oxford. I couldn’t believe my luck. Jack wandered over and said, “Is this ‘smooth, pale, fluent little chap’[17] offering to give you his Oxford tour? If that is the case, then I insist that I tag along.”

 Ronald leaned over to me and whispered, “No harm in him: only needs a smack or two,”[18] and let out a little chuckle. Soon, the three of us were on our way.

      As we walked down High Street Jack turned to me and explained, “Ronald comes by and has a drink with me every Monday morning. ‘Sometimes we talk English school politics; sometimes we criticize one another’s poems; other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of nation’[19] and that is how we have become such good pals.” As we strolled along my two guides began talking about Keble College and their war days. At Oxford, men training for the military were put at Keble, and housed in “a carpetless little cell”[20] most of the time.  Tolkien asked how Mrs. Moore and Maureen were doing. Mrs. Moore and Maureen are the mother and sister of Paddy Moore, Jack’s best friend in the army. Jack had promised Paddy that he would take care of his family if he died.  Jack said they were doing well.  “ ‘I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoy myself’[21] when I am with Mrs. Moore”. With this update, they fell into a series of old World War I stories. When their conversation came to a lull, I inquired whether they were able to write during the war.

                                                         “You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket but that’s all. You couldn’t write.”[22] I found this unfortunate because war seems to conjure up emotions that are usually not confronted, and I would have loved to read the writings that these men produced under the strains of service.

                               Eventually we came upon St. John’s Street and stopped in front of the house number 50. “That is where lived when I worked on the ‘W’ section of the Oxford English Dictionary[23], what a tedious task that was! Wingless, Winglet, Wingmanship…” Ronald trailed off. Our trio sauntered through the Wadham gardens which were “ripping” and were full of “lilac and chestnut magnificent”.[24] After we had adequately meandered through the gardens, the emperors watched us round the Sheldonian Theatre and arrive at Exeter College, Ronald’s first college at Oxford, which Jack also attended briefly. They showed me the Fellow’s Garden where students were playing croquet. We also saw the chapel, and the Rector’s Garden where the Rector and his family lived.[25] We walked along without stopping for sometime, Jack and Ronald chatting about the Oxford English School where Ronald was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Jack had the Magdalen fellowship. I was honored to be given a tour by two such distinguished Oxford men and to listen to them converse.

As we passed some playful deer in a meadow, I inquired as to where we were. Jack looked at Ronald and slowly grinned. “We are coming upon Addison’s Walk, Merrell,” Ronald said, all the while looking at Jack. “One night Jack and I, as well as a friend of ours, Hugo Dyson, were walking down this path, past the deer park, just as we are doing now, and were rounding out a discussion about Christianity. That night Jack discovered the ‘real though unforced gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination’[26] and converted to Christianity, although not completely!”

      “Not completely?” Jack asked, looking at his friend questioningly.

      “Well, you aren’t a Roman Catholic are you?” Ronald asked, and both men eased out smiles. I could barely comprehend that I was not only standing in the place that instigated Lewis’ religious books that I had poured over such as Mere Christianity, but I was with the author and his converter themselves. I had always thought, while reading Lewis’ books, what inspired him to think about the things that he discussed, and where each unique example came from. Sitting here in Addison’s Walk, the world was picturesque. I began to feel myself in Lewis’ shoes and understand how his mind could wonder to so many different topics.

The darker it got, the more I was reminded of the need to find a way back to Austin; I couldn’t miss my first day of classes and I still had all those boxes to unpack (though, I was beginning to feel a little hesitant about putting my coats in the wardrobe). Since time travel and teleportation were out of the question, I had no idea how I was going to get back.

 Ronald, Jack, and I eventually found ourselves back near Jack’s room and stopped in the quad where I had first arrived. We sat down and Ronald starting talking with Jack about his book, Lord of the Rings, the one he had been discussing during the Inklings meeting. Sitting down, I dissolved into a bench and listened to him recite the story that I had read a million times. As my eyes got heavy, I let them fall shut and slipped into the world of hobbits. His story faded and my mind took over.

[1]     The sunlight that illuminated my first day as a student in Austin gleamed through the windows and tugged at my eyelids, finally succeeding in forcing them open. Still in quite a state of bewilderment, I cautiously lifted my head from the pillow and sat up. I found myself in my bed in the dorm room—not quite sure if that is where I expected to find myself. All the boxes of my belongings were still packed, and the wardrobe seemed to be watching me innocently from the corner. My curiosity provoked me to bound from bed and peek inside the doors—empty. I wondered if all that had happened the night before had just been a dream. It probably had. Regardless, I awoke ready to begin my first day as a student at the University of Texas. After spending time with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I was ready to explore my school and develop memories, build fruitful friendships, and find accomplishment at my university just as those two inspiring men had done at Oxford.

Word Count: 2,545