{"id":158,"date":"2004-09-02T14:40:05","date_gmt":"2004-09-02T18:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/?p=158"},"modified":"2021-01-11T19:57:57","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T19:57:57","slug":"some-sacred-and-profane-memories-a-year-at-oxford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/2004\/09\/02\/some-sacred-and-profane-memories-a-year-at-oxford\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Sacred and Profane Memories – A Year at Oxford"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text of a Speech Delivered on Sept. 2, 2004, Parents & Friends Lounge
\nby Jordan H. Gaul, IV ’05<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In the words of the old Sammy Cahn song, “It’s nice to go travelin’, but it’s oh, so nice to come home.”\u00a0 It’s great to be back at Hampden-Sydney, and I’d like to tell you some of my general impressions about the value of a foreign study program.<\/p>\n

I grew up on the banks of the Brandywine River, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania \u2013 about an hour\u2019s drive outside of Philadelphia.\u00a0 Downingtown is located someplace in that indefinite swath of farmland where the suburbs end and the great sprawling countryside that stretches through Lancaster County and across the Appalachians begins.\u00a0 When I was very young, a trip to Pittsburgh to visit my aunt and uncle seemed to me to be an expedition of unfathomable scope, and strangely enough it still retains something of the mystique of my early youth.\u00a0 I grant that, in the history of letters, no one has ever tried to argue that Pittsburgh \u2013 of all places \u2013 is somehow an exotic destination.\u00a0 But this feeling of mine has nothing to do with time or space: the trip which I make several times each year from my home in Chester County, PA, to Hampden-Sydney is longer by both measures.\u00a0 It has to do, I think, with a kind of imagined boundary, running between the places I know and those I do not.\u00a0 I have never been further west than 80 degrees longitude, although I did once make a trip to Lexington, Virginia, just scraping against the meridian. Someday, I am resolved to see the American West: but for now, for me, it exists only as an abstraction, as does, indeed, anything beyond the Ohio River. Neither is a great distance, or unreachable, but both are still foreign to me in the sense that they are unknown.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There is a word in German, Wanderlust, which is as close to a perfect cognate as any I can think of.\u00a0 It refers to a “moving-desire,” which is to say, a hunger for travel.\u00a0 It\u2019s something primal, irrational, something intensely human.\u00a0 And, I suspect that precisely this fundamental human impulse, the urge to move, is related to the great migratory patterns that shaped the hazy era of human prehistory.\u00a0 For the past few years, leading up until last summer, I had known it well.\u00a0 Indeed, it had come to a spiritual boil: I simply had to go and see what else was out there.\u00a0 My life had been remarkably settled up until this year, in which I have seen the great ruins of classical antiquity in Rome (and eaten superlatively well on the staples of their modern cuisine); watched hazy, golden sunsets in southern France; discussed subtleties of reformation theology late at night, while overlooking the waves of the North Sea in St. Andrews; \"\"<\/a>and even surveyed the Valley of the Kings amid the brutal majesty of the Egyptian heat.\u00a0 To say nothing of the many evenings I spent in London (cf.: “Varsity Students’ Rag,” John Betjeman), or the money I burned on little indulgences, of which I regret not so much as a single penny.<\/p>\n

This year, of course, was the year I went to Oxford.\u00a0 There is some dispute over whether I, or others, have enjoyed this most, depending upon whom one asks, and on which campus. I flatter myself to think I\u2019ve had most of the fun, though.<\/p>\n

Enough has been said elsewhere, and with H-SC sending a trickle of young men to St. Anne\u2019s every summer, presumably more will be said in the future, about the virtues of the Oxford system.\u00a0 But the institution\u2019s reputation hardly requires my exposition. To praise it would be in bad taste, and I will refrain from that particular narrative sin.\u00a0 There is only so much that can be accomplished through the purely anecdotal anyway.\u00a0 No stories, no matter how engaging, could really portray my experience accurately.\u00a0 There is a unique thrill to traveling, a thrill which is only multiplied by living in close quarters with a foreign people for an extended time.<\/p>\n

In the end, much of what we learn makes interesting telling, but the most important details can\u2019t properly be put into words.\u00a0 They are purely experiential; they consist in the moment, in the doing, in the gradual acclamation to the intangible rhythms of daily life.\u00a0 The most important things we learn in life we cannot read or hear.\u00a0 No good advice, no matter how compellingly stated, can ever convince us to alter ourselves – in a genuine or meaningful way – unless we have lived out its consequences; no principles of human nature, even if believed when illuminated second-hand, are ever fully grasped until they have been seen with our own eyes; no descriptions of people or places can approximate the visceral sensation of speaking to, or touching, them.\u00a0 And nothing in books or pictures or what we are told can tell us too much about the things we think we love.\u00a0 And yet we live second-hand lives, relying for our conception of reality on external information.<\/p>\n

Living overseas and traveling around the world, in even just the gasp of a year’s time, has opened my mind to so much, and allowed me, if even for a little while, to live first-hand.\u00a0 I had a diversity of experiences this year.\u00a0 I played poker with Phil Hellmuth; had dinner with Peter Hitchens; heard Noam Chomsky lecture; saw Michael Heseltine lambaste the Blair government; met more members of Parliament than I can recall; and stood at the Graves of Nelson, Wellington, and Blake.\u00a0 I spoke at the same dispatch box as Gladstone and Disraeli and defended free trade before the Oxford Union.\u00a0 I walked daily down the cobbled streets where Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were martyred for the faith of the English people.\u00a0 I saw the Pieta of Michelangelo, and knelt in the Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament, in St. Peter’s Basilica.\u00a0 And I stood as close to the spear point that pierced the flesh of Christ on the Cross as I am to you now.\u00a0 So much of this is not a visual experience.\u00a0 It is spatial.\u00a0 To share in the same physical relationships of enclosed areas and forms as great men throughout history; to see the light at precisely the midday angle they would have hundreds – or, in the case of my travels in North Africa, thousands – of years ago; to smell the same local foliage and to have the same flesh and drink marinating in your guts, is a transcendent feeling.\u00a0 I felt it once before, when I stood in the old Senate chamber in Washington, DC, before I recited part of Webster’s 1830 speech on the Foot resolution.\u00a0 But, in England, and traveling through Europe and Africa, history is everywhere, and accessible in the most intimate and immediate way to anyone who is interested in it.\u00a0 The chance only needs to be seized.<\/p>\n

Last year was the greatest year of my life, and I encourage you all to go ahead and to take advantage of the opportunities that I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Text of a Speech Delivered on Sept. 2, 2004, Parents & Friends Lounge by Jordan H. Gaul, IV ’05 In the words of the old Sammy Cahn song, “It’s nice to go travelin’, but it’s oh, so nice to come home.”\u00a0 It’s great to be back at Hampden-Sydney, and I’d like to tell you some of my general impressions about the value of a foreign study program. I grew up on the banks of the Brandywine River, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania \u2013 about an hour\u2019s drive outside of Philadelphia.\u00a0 Downingtown is located someplace in that indefinite swath of farmland where the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23,24,26,39],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-year","tag-egypt","tag-england","tag-gaul","tag-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2747,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/2747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hsc.edu\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}