Oxford Revisited

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Scott Smoot at New College, Oxford, virtually

Since September 13, I've biked 223 miles on bike trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Dublin to Oxford. In the photo, I'm riding past the campus of New College -- "new" because it was founded so recently, in 1379.

I lived there during the summer of 1980 in a "new" dorm, built around the time of America's Civil War. Below is a photo I took from my room. Across the way is a segment of the old city wall, one of the oldest structures in the city.

There to study works by Woolf, Beckett, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats, I put my heart into it. My classmates -- like me, A.B. Duke scholars from Duke University -- met once every week in small seminar groups and twice with a tutor. The tutorial sessions were much more intense. Fellow student Chichi and I took turns presenting papers aloud for our "tute." We had to defend our ideas with evidence from the text. It was good training for the work I would do on Henry James that year. But maybe it backfired: I declined my nomination for a Rhodes scholarship. Dad couldn't believe I refused the offer, but my feeling was, been there, done that.

Some highlights and firsts:

• My first experience of social drinking: sherry with classmates and teachers
• The song of a lark that told me I'd worked through the first all-nighter of my school career -- and the last
• A run on trails around town that I thought was two miles, but was really eight. My running companion Tom Robey concealed the truth until the end. There's a lesson about expectations and endurance -- and ignorance.
• Research at the Bodleian Library, where the earliest librarian wore a suit of armor for his official portrait. Its outstanding building "the Radcliffe Camera" is a family heirloom. So said my grandmother, Harriet Radcliffe Smoot.
• Virginia Woolf's fiction didn't do much for me -- except the last gesture in To the Lighthouse -- but her personal essays introduced me to a genre that would become central to my teaching and, since I started this blog, central to my life.

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