“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said.”
Philip Larkin, “The Trees”

From my study window I can actually see things getting greener. Every time I look up a new bud has appeared on a branch. We woke up one morning and the weeds had taken over the garden again–or at least looked as if they were gathering their strength, their troops, oiling their guns, polishing their boots, getting ready for the invasion. Now that we’re on British Summer Time the cool air has moved back in and between North Oxford and the Radcliffe Camera my fingers go numb and I have to stop and put my gloves on. But at least in this, my third spring in Oxford, I’ve finally learned to carry the gloves with me well into the season.

It’s a great time for trickery, spring. Philip Larkin had it right (he so often did), and the way the trees are turning green (like someone is putting a new layer of paint over them every day), the way the flowers are coming into bloom, is just like almost catching a whisper that someone almost sent out on the wind.

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I’ve written about this before, but a blog post I read earlier today made me think of it again.

It’s to do with Javier Marias’ All Souls–a book which I selfishly maintain paints one of the most stunningly accurate portraits of Oxford I’ve ever come across. It’s not about the city; it’s about my city. And here’s why: his narrator and I share a space. We both inhabit a world where, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.”

And I almost can’t tell you what that means, because it means so much. It is, stripped of context, what it means to live somewhere else. It means that when you meet friends for a drink and you look back, through the cider haze, what you see and what they see exist in parallel universes. This is the lonely side of it.

The happy side of it is that sometimes, just walking down Broad Street or cycling past the gaze of idle pedestrians, you have the strangest feeling: you’ve become weightless, your skin translucent like a fish, your mind lucid. Time overlaps with itself; Georgian architecture with Classical and Norman, Wren, Wolsey, Aldrich, a collage of names and periods. And your name? Unknown. You float down Turl Street, past the mouths of three colleges, each one guarded by a stiff porter in bowler who watches you without interest, who has seen a thousand just as young, and as possessed with the charm, beauty, and blamelessness of this youth, as you are. Oh, but this is freedom. Terrible, beautiful freedom. You are separated from your own history and yet at one with it. You can be things, where everyone around you must pretend.

So you become like a candle: self-contained, brief. I feel abbreviated here, and if I didn’t enjoy that feeling, I wouldn’t have stayed. It’s been nearly three years, and I can still pinpoint the moment at which I shed my history–which is full of wonderful things, ranches, farms, children, family, laughter, freshly picked fruit, waves and hills, sunkissed cheeks, but also of anxiety, selfishness, selflessness, a paralyzing shyness and a destructive self-pity. But then one day in May I stood in Christ Church Meadow and watched some little boys in stained cricket whites jogging across a field and thought: I’m not my past, my past is me. And then– is it coincidence?–that night, I was free and light enough to appreciate an encounter that could have been as tiny as an atom in my memory, and now here I am and that encounter is sitting across from me, and our past begins at the point where I felt for an instant that I had no past.

No one here knew me as a child. It’s the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse you could possibly imagine.

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When the light shifts so, too does something in the brain. In a funny we we spend all year, every year, chasing nostalgia into the next season, always remembering what it felt like, always imagining what it will feel like. At the edge of every change, we try to hurry it along by force of will and wishing.

Sometimes our memories become confused. Like this: something subtle about the evening makes me think, as I stroll down the Cowley Road, of Boston; it’s still cold out, you couldn’t say it’s Spring, but my body remembers the beginning of the thaw and a part of me thinks that what I’d like to do is walk to the end of Newbury Street and get a peanut butter frozen yogurt and eat it whilst examining the hopeful but still impractical fashions in shop windows.

So I go to G&Ds and buy a pint of Kenya AA Coffee ice cream and observe, as I meander home, the arrays of plastic buckets, charity shop dresses, lines of bicycles, glowing pub windows. I wear linen trousers and feel slightly, but not massively, under dressed. It’s a very enjoyable place to be, that place where every day is longer than the last, where the sudden appearance of the sun is not inconceivable, where there’s almost-but-not-quite a warmth in the wind.

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No matter what happens, and lots of things happen, there is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you look up at the Radcliffe Camera and it is late at night and the square is empty and the sky is patchy and the city is hushed, but full of possibility.

Other re-discoveries: I am after all my father’s daughter. I find that even the long, dull ride to work is made thrilling by putting extra speed into my pedaling. I like the wind on my face and I arrive wherever I’m headed breathless, slightly sweaty, full of misplaced energy. I can make even my beautiful, dignified, black Dutch girl’s bike with its four subtle gears go fast.

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Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

(From The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)

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