Good Vibrations

Oxford. I have been struggling to find the right words to explain my experience at Oxford thus far. It is a place of magic, of history, and of beauty. Mostly though, I've found it to be a place of inspiration. As I walk the streets and stumble upon the same paths once taken by Tolkien, W.H. Auden or Lewis Caroll (among many others) I feel a sense of the history of this place vibrating around me. As Luke Gibbons states in "'Where Wolfe Tone's state was not': Joyce, monuments and memory", William Benjamin said it best in the Flaneur section of his Arcades project when he wrote:

The most heterogeneous temporal elements thus coexist in the city. If we step from an

eighteenth-century house into one from the sixteenth century, we tumble down the slope of

time. Right next door stands a Gothic church, and we sink to the depths. . . Whoever sets foot

in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams, where the most remote past is linked to the

events of today. . . Things which find no expression in political events, or find only minimal

expression unfold in the cities: they are a superfine instrument, responsive as an Acolian

harp- despite their specific gravity- to the living historic vibrations of the air.

As a native New Yorker, I have not had much interaction with buildings and places of such history. When I was a child, I thought that my grandparents' house on Burton Street in Bath, NY was about as old as it could get as my father had grown up there. Which is why, as an American walking the streets of Oxford, I find everything around me inconceivable in its age, beauty and history. I find myself straining to hear the vibrations that echo from each building, stone, or tree. I feel inspired.