Putting this up to shame myself into going back next week and doing a better one.
School remains time consuming and interesting, though there are always strange cultural blips to remind me that I am far from home. The hyper focused work ethic I am used to is almost gauche. Today a prof actually said 'I would never expect you to work on the weekend' which is unheard of in New York. They still expect super good work, just done faster, I suppose. I work comparatively slowly, and do wind up putting in weekend hours, though now I don't talk about them.
Still, I keep running off to the heaths and hills and parks, and they are amazing. A week or two ago I and had a ramble in Surrey, which looks like this:
Green how I love you green!
I didn't have a map and the written instructions I brought were outdated and said things like 'Pass by the kissing gate on your left and then go through the kissing gate on your left but not that one' so I got pleasurably (and thoroughly) lost. I ran up a hill to get a better view of where I was trying to go, and came upon an RAF memorial, all solemn and quiet.
They hacked down the trees on the back of it pretty messily, but it's out of sight so it doesn't matter.
I walked through the silent loggia with my boots ringing too loud, and read the names and the notes and looked at the grainy pictures of the young, square headed men and felt stirred. The place hit the exact right note of martial glory paired with 'don't let's do this again'.
It was also completely deserted
And I ran up the wonderful spiral stair and got reoriented at once.
Crap photo, but you can see London.
I had the worst lunch of my life in Runnymede, looked at the Magna Carta memorial which is so boring I didn't even photograph it, and lay in the grass under the ancient pollarded willows and watched the sky and felt slightly ill, but glad. I will never grow tired of these fields and old trees, this sense of civilization running back so far that I don't feel an interloper as I do in the woods at home. I thought that in Japan I was running into the mountains all the time to seek a respite from a culture I didn't understand or feel a part of; apparently I just like being outside. I always come back feeling shining and saturated, like a freshly shed lizard.
Also the trees have incredible presence
I'm too wrapped up in school to really shatter my romantic conceptions of England properly. It's easy to smile at the yellow brick houses in Battersea and revel in the boats in Greenwich and be slightly condescending about the (really genuinely bad) food. Doesn't help that my new classmates are from every corner of the world but England. I am starting to become immune to the accent though; more and more I can identify nonsense, even if it presented on a beautifully articulated verbal salver.
I've been to the Tate twice to see the Pre-Raphaelites, and while the paintings make me tingle and sigh, they are quite small and perhaps just a bit overwrought. I saw the REAL Death of Chatterton and just about fell over. They had sensationalistic stereoscopic tableaux of it to look into, too. The actor being Chatterton had a nicer face and worse hair.
I'm assuming my gentle readers have a accurate mental image of the real one. And if not, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 holes in my art historical knowledge but Chatterton...
I'm still not sure whether or not I miss New York. I miss my loved ones of course, always and persistently, and I miss everything not costing double and tasting soggy. But home means staying put and writing a thesis and growing up just a bit more and that's scarier than the most exotic country.
I'm listening to all kinds of things these days, but here is what was in my head when I was tromping over the fields in Surrey. I thought of the dead airmen and the long hedgerows and the new houses just in sight. I thought of the poppy wreaths in the quiet memorial, and the school children I saw bouncing round a maypole on May Day. I put a forget-me-not in my lapel and went back to the town.
-Isis
No comments:
Post a Comment