A thing of beauty is a joy forever

A thing of beauty (but not what this blog is about). Photo credit: Jamie LaBuzetta

I’m on the road for the next few weeks with my family, so the blogs may tend towards storytime and confessionals.

To wit…a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Keats wrote that and it has stayed in my mind despite not, in my opinion, being a particularly beautiful line itself. It does have a beautiful setting in that stanza—the long exhale of “pass into nothingness,” the idea that the physical quality of beauty is appreciated in sleep, and specifically the painfully poignant idea that Keats, that dying-of-TB-at-age-25 wretch, represented the concept of beauty as “quiet breathing.”

I first came to Oxford in the fall of 2002–this was Michaelmas Term, the first third of my junior year studying abroad at Pembroke College.

Bear with me here; it’ll all tie together.

I was coming from Switzerland so I didn’t have to cope with jet lag, and I arrived on one of those brassy autumn days that have all the charm of summer without the oppressive heat. After dropping my luggage in College I thought I should wander around the city a bit—this being in ye Pre-smartfone Dayes. I gravitated towards the Bodleian Library, and came through the main library courtyard towards the Radcliffe Camera (pictured above). I don’t have a picture to share of that exact moment, but the RadCam was bathed in afternoon light, framed by the filigree ironwork in the archway. I probably stopped dumb for a moment and just stared at this scene.

Two figures brushed past me, walking into my field of view.

I can’t remember much about them. I think they were young—in other words, older than I was then, but not by much. One seemed to be showing the other around. With a sweep of arm he indicated the whole square: the crenellated wall of All Souls to the left, the spires and portico of Brasenose to the right, and in the solid middle this curved and carved and columned seat of learning. And he said,

“This is the quiet face of stress and panic.”

My goodness how I love that line. I didn’t even understand, at that point, the specific stressors he referred to: the weekly cadence of essay research and writing, the longer build towards the (Greek-sense but sometimes also English-sense) crisis of Mods and Finals: the determinative exams in first and final year that set one’s degree. I only had a vague sense that I might not be able to hack it here, and that there was a lot of activity going on beneath the facade of calm.

But in that moment, in that sunlight, in that introductory phase of my Oxford experience, yes, the Radcliffe Camera was the “quiet face of stress and panic.” Thank you, random tourer. That phrase does not appear anywhere on Google; I wish I had composed it instead of merely recording it. But it is a thing of beauty and a joy, to me, forever.