Chiaroscuro

I should start by saying that Oxford is amazing-looking. Even though I can't say I see everything here in a positive light (more on that below), and much as I realize the deep problems inherent in the University system due to its medieval nature, and as much as I see the flaws in the whole idea of a privileged canon of western education, it is still cool to be here where those traditions more or less started and where they have been going on continuously for the last 800 years, give or take a bit. Oxford is pretty much the ultimate college town--it is small enough that the best and most common form of transport seems to be bicycling; it is ridiculously picturesque, steepled and storied, with spreading lawns and stooping willows draping their bows over old stone walls to skim the surfaces of the glassy streams.... It's enough to make anybody succumb to maudlin sentimentality.

The building where I am studying, which houses the special collections for African and the British Commonwealth, is completely over the top: it looks like a castle placed in the middle of a walled garden. The inside is even more palatial seeming, with arched ceilings, carved newel posts, and tapestries on the wall. I wanted to take some pictures of the inside, but I was totally intimidated by the security guards (and didn't want to advertise my tourist status. At least I got one of the outside.

However, this building also seems stand for a particularly piebald moral heritage. It is called "Rhodes House," and I think they have the events for Rhodes scholars here, but it is also full of pictures and busts of colonial administrators of South Africa, which is a little disconcerting. The antechamber that I have to pass through to go up to the library on the second floor has and inscription over the arch to the memory of the "high ideals of Cecil Rhodes"--I assume that the authors were NOT referring to Apartheid, but it's not a happy thing to contemplate.

I feel like the more I learn, and the more aware I become, the less I can take anything at face value, and the more I realize the dark undersides of even those things that have always seemed fine to me. It is not always a pleasant realization, although it suppose it is an inevitable one.