Through the looking glass

see all photos »

It was saturday after having rested from the nightmare that became getting back to the UK (mental note: if I reincarnate... in a person.. i will be european just to avoid dealing with immigration questions).

So a little bit rested phisically and mentally, I got again restless and had to check my UK travel guide and look for somewhere to take a train and spent Sunday. Didn't have to look too much to decide about Oxford. JRR Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and CS Lewis lived, worked and wrote there. They took people and places in Oxfordshire and made them magical, I longed to see those places and walk the same streets, looking for their ghosts in every corner. They are not visible there though, Lewis Carroll is just a painting in the Harry Potter stage of one of the Oxford colleges and a gift shop occupies what they assure is the real shop where the real Alice would buy candy when she was little. But he is not there and I'm not sure anymore after reading his biography on the train ride back home if I really would like to meet him.

could it be that as luck would have it two people with similar imagination lived at the same time in the same place feeding of each other fantasies and have created by the power of their fame a myth of otherworldliness for this city?

see all photos »

I didn't know CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien knew each other and read to each other the fantasticc worlds they built. There truly must be something about the surroundings that encourages the creation of mythical places and creatures, that invites to believe in magic and write about it, or else could it be that as luck would have it two people with similar imagination lived at the same time in the same place feeding of each other fantasies and have created by the power of their fame a myth of otherworldliness for this city?

By the end of the day, I started to believe the latter is the more valid theory. It is a nice little city, with a lot of history to be sure, but the real magic lies within the walls of the colleges with the giant supply of overactive imaginations and all the books in the world to get lost in.

But I'm diverting too much from the tour of the city and what I saw, although here more than other places I have been to, the ghost of stories and literature can be felt, it is not as magical as London itself, it seems to me Oxford tries to hide a little the fact of being a college town with a mantle of repectability and importance, although a college town in Britain would never have the same meaning as a college town in the US. I guess is that feeling of a city not being quite owned by its inhabitants, because most of them are transient. But again, the same could be said about Venice, but Venetians are proud and own up to their city.

Oxford's buildings also are younger than the aura of antiquity the city gives itself would make you believe. Most buildings are 18th century (built or renovated during that period), and after a while you start seeing the clear marks of the modern times. I guess it is unfair to judge a city with this romantic view of wanting to find the perfect old town where you can actually walk the same streets and go to the same buildings great people walked thousands of years ago. In my view, only Rome can live up to that expectation.

The lively streets around Broad Street were full of young people just moving to their colleges for the start of a new term. Parents helping their kids with their computers, or blankets, or books, were everywhere. You could almost feel the pride of those parents, because there are a few universities in the world with as much pedigree as Oxford. The honor of being thought by the world as the place where the brightest people go is what drives and feeds this place.

My favorite sight were the faces, crumbling human faces standing guard at the fence outside the Sheldonian Theatre. They were truthful, not pretty but standing proud not pretending to be anything more than silent guards.