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The Nature of Oxford
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Inspiration
‘A college is not simply a place or organization where certain
kinds of teaching and research take place. Like a tribe its identity is
intimately interwoven with it surroundings—its pictures and its ornaments,
its buildings and its gardens.’
-Peter Snow, Oxford Observed (1991)
QUEST
It is with this exact idea that I have set out, among the
colleges and secular meeting places at Oxford, to seek out the
nature that is coursing and contributing to the continuance of intellectual
exploration. Walking along the streets of Oxford one is hard
pressed to find much evidence of nature except maybe in the quick glances
through the gates of Trinity College or All Souls College during the hustle
and bustle of the city beat. It is in taking pause of this all too familiar
and unnatural beat that I have oriented myself back to nature, from whence I
came, to identify the places beyond the buildings that is Oxford University.
-A.J. Del Cueto
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RATIONALE
Having always maintained a latent love for nature it wasn’t
until I found myself in the midst of gothic architecture with its natural
tendencies and the excursions of Professor Bump that this love has awoke.
Never before had I taken so much notice of quads, lawns, trees, and water. In
fact our mere departure from the United States forced me to take
notice of place, of where I live, of where I study, and of where I want to
spend the future. Tony Hiss sums up this idea by writing that ‘we all react, consciously and unconsciously, to
the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are
only now becoming known to us.’ As a young, quasi-intellectual student it is
especially important to consider the nuances of rational ideas as they may
apply to my life.
During the first few weeks of study at Oxford, as the University
became the backdrop and subject of our learning, my initial thoughts turned
back to the States and the University of Texas at Austin. I thought about
the six pack, the fountains, the quads in front of
the tower and wondered what my relationship with nature would be upon
returning to UT in the fall. I questioned whether I should transfer again as
I had just recently from Santa Clara University where nature sometimes seems
to receive as much attention as the students if not more. As Hiss also writes
‘in short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and
become.’ With this in mind I made a conscious decision to spend my final days
at the University among its various colleges exploring the nature of Oxford and its importance
to me.
Nature at Oxford is next to
inescapable, with gothic architecture it is worn on most all buildings.
However, Oxford is not by any
means a repetition of conformity in its image. In fact, every college,
theater, library, and cathedral is different. This diversity of place does
not however end at the stone. Most important is the nature that the gothic
architecture sets out to mimic. At every location that I explored, the
abundance, modesty, or absence of nature conveyed a message to me. Throughout
my personal excursions, my encounters different places, in my thoughts about
different colleges I attempt to convey the message that the particular place
related to me. Other times I try to embody the message of the place in the
writing, and still other times I attempt to theorize about what the
underlying system or logic behind a place might be. It is this unique
personal interaction with different places that evoked a different way of
looking or expressing the subject matter. I never really found myself looking
for the same things or try to weave a rigid theme throughout the unique
experiences. I believe that Hopkins’ had the very same
idea. He sums it up best in his world view. “Hopkins viewed the world
as an expression of the universal in and through the individual, and he
invented the notion of ‘inscape’ to express the unique individuality of each
natural phenomenon.” I found that this was especially true in the places
where I found abundances of nature i.e. Christ Church and Magdalen College.
An A.J. Del Cueto Creation
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