by Bruce Feiler
To and fro the two dons went, tossing around their pointed references and bandying about their pet theorems. One, Cyprian, was passive to the point of being aggressive; the other, Thaddeus, was aggressive to the point of nearly passing out. Just as Terry believed that students came up to Cambridge to learn to be ladies and gentlemen, Cyprian and Thaddeus each had ideas about the purpose of higher education. When the food was served and Ian returned, it quickly became apparent that their ideas were incompatible—with each other, and with mine.
“I think Cambridge has a bad name,” Cyprian said. “People have one of two ideas about us. First, there is this image that all we do here is dress in white suits, sip port, and have garden parties. This group thinks universities are all about learning manners.”
“That’s what Terry thinks,” I said. “He’s got a point.”
“Second, there are those who believe that all we do is sit around in leather chairs and shuffle shards of facts around with no discernible purpose whatsoever.”
“That’s what I think,” said Ian.
“I’m offended by this notion of superfluence,” Cyprian said. “Education is much more than just ‘Bean Counting for Intellectuals.’ I want my students to contribute to the world—to be artists in their own right.”
“So you want them to be novelists,” said Ian.
Cyprian rested his chopsticks on his lip and thought for a moment. “In a way,” he said, “yes. I think what I do is art. Art is all relative anyway, and I’m creating something that is as beautiful as anything I read.”
“But wait a minute,” Thaddeus said. “You don’t footnote art. I may be more than a bean counter, but I see myself as a critic. It’s my role to be removed from the world, to examine a text and interpret its meaning. Scholars should be readers, not writers.”
“But universities have to create more than scholars,” Cyprian suggested, never shifting in his chair, never raising his voice. “They have to be extratextual. There’s a list of skills on the wall in my faculty listing all the things students can take from classics into the work force. We must teach them to think for themselves, to take what they learn from here and apply it in new and creative ways.”
“I don’t want those skills,” Thaddeus scoffed. “If everything has to be applied, the mind becomes corrupted. Scholarship doesn’t have to change the world. It just has to understand it.”
“Then who will change it?” I interjected, as they turned to look at me. “Look at the Crisis we’re in today. The world may go to war this week and you don’t seem to care. For some people ideas are more than criticism. They are more than art. Shouldn’t ideas have a role to play outside of this place, outside of our heads?”
Thaddeus thought for a moment, and then said, “No. A university should be a place for thinking, not acting. It’s the last remaining empire….” He let this last phrase role off his tongue, then set his spoon down to consider it. “It’s an empire of the mind.”
Cyprian smiled at the artful move.
Ian nodded his head with admiration.
I sat back and tried to check the blow. “But empires don’t last forever,” I said.
That only set up his rhetorical mate. “This one will,” he said. “And I should know. After all, I have a ‘Doctor’ before my name.”
For an American, living in Britain is often like living in a time warp. A variety of elements contribute to this feeling. Telephones have numbers that range from five to seven digits and receivers that weigh from three to five pounds. Rooms have light bulbs that are sixty watts too low and electrical outlets that have varying configurations of holes so household appliances are always sold with no plugs attached. Even the air is congested with a postnasal drip that impedes the passage of time. But nothing contributes more to this sense of delay than the national obsession with conversations, which proceed slowly and surely around the country every day with a passion for language, a zest for altercation, and the occasional whiff of old-fashioned snobbery.
Given the national fixation with interpersonal communication (the great British hobby, for example, is accent spotting: foreigners, they say, can never learn how), it comes as no surprise that the famed institutions of higher learning in England have long been dedicated to cultivating conversation. Since their inception, Oxbridge colleges have made the art of breeding a central priority—learning to dine in Hall, learning to debate at the Union (where I, very much in need of breeding, was already preparing to take my turn). Victorian dons, for instance, believed their role was to help students assume their place in “our happy Establishment of Church and State.” “The University’s job is to teach you the language of being a gentleman,” Terry might have said. “The rest—the mere grammar—you can learn on your own.” Students, meanwhile, indulged in the luxury of their exclusive training by mingling conversation with camaraderie. “As Cambridge filled up with friends it acquired a magical quality,” wrote E. M. Forster at the end of the nineteenth century. “People and books reinforced one another, intelligence joined hands with affection, speculation became a passion, and discussion was made profound by love.”
Over time, this love of conversation at Oxbridge was transformed from an idle pastime of the upper classes into a broader ideal of higher education. Nowhere was this philosophy more apparent than in the meetings of the Apostles, an elite Cambridge debating society founded in 1820 to ponder such questions as “Is there any rule of ethical action except general expediency?” or “Have the poems of Shelley an immoral tendency?” The group, officially called the Cambridge Conversazione Society, eventually included such luminaries as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, and—at least once, a foreigner—Ludwig Wittgenstein. “It was a principle in discussion that there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing considered shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation,” Russell wrote in his autobiography. “We discussed all manner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detachment and interest scarcely possible in later life.” This spirit captured the essence of the English university: a perfect conversation, a pure critique of ideas, a virginal analysis of the natural world untainted by practical concerns. As Thaddeus might have put it, the role of a university education is to learn the language of analysis—the lingua franca of the Empire of the Mind.
But the language of discourse changed dramatically over time. In the Middle Ages all students at Cambridge were required to study a single curriculum, comprising grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, and geometry. They were also asked to demonstrate proficiency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In the 1850s, in response to pressure from Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, the university began offering its first degrees in the natural sciences. Within a century, Cambridge scientists had split the atom, discovered DNA, and won over twenty-five Nobel prizes. But as the fields of knowledge expanded exponentially in those times, Cambridge resisted the moves in other countries to broaden its course requirements. Instead of bringing such applied subjects as chemistry, physics, and engineering into the classical curriculum, Cambridge isolated them as second-class faculties. “The true enthusiast rejects and scorns the application of any test of practical ability,” wrote don Leslie Stephen. “Knowledge, he thinks, is knowledge; the more remote it is from all contact with concrete things the better.”
By requiring students to narrow their course of study, Cambridge (and Oxford as well) undermined their students’ broad-minded education. The “conversation,” in short, began to break down. Gone was the universal curriculum; gone was common knowledge. What developed in Oxbridge during the twentieth century was a new hierarchy of learning with the top being reserved for abstract, philosophical subjects (such as classics, or French existential poetry) and the bottom being assigned to practical, applied subjects (such as engineering, or international relations). Real men read Caesar’s Gaelic Wars in the original and discussed its use of
the subjunctive; neophytes read it in spotty translation and then, of all things, tried to apply it. The stigma against mingling with the present is so great in the Land of the Past that at least one person I knew in my course would lie to any woman he met by telling her that he was studying history, while I—Egads, he reads the newspaper!—was doing I.R.
In essence, Cambridge in the twentieth century became a place to seek refuge in the past. “The pursuit of learning, like every other great activity, is unavoidably conservative,” wrote Michael Oakeshott, a prominent philosopher who is still memorialized in Cambridge by a dining society that bears his name, in 1950. “It is not a race in which the competitors jockey for the best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium; it is a conversation.” A conversation, he said, has no predetermined course, “we do not ask what it is ‘for,’ and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion—it has no conclusion, but is always put aside for another day.” Above all, a university offered students what Oakeshott called “the gift of an interval”—an interim in the tyrannical course of time to taste the mystery of conversation without the necessity of at once seeking a solution.
That interim in time still thrives in Cambridge: it is what gives the town its timeless charm; it is also what gives the university its unaltered, time-warped pace. While in some ways I admired the isolation that kept Cambridge students true to their heritage, I couldn’t help wondering how equipped they would be to leave their guarded courtyards. Also, in a time of international crisis, I wondered how concerned they were with nonacademic problems at all. The messages, on this front, were quite clear: universities exist for cultivating the individual mind, not the public good, insisted the former philosopher-prince of King’s College, Noël Annan. “The need to mix classes, nationalities, and races together is secondary,” he wrote. “The agonies and gaieties of student life are secondary. Even the awakening of a sense of beauty, or the pursuit of goodness itself—all these are secondary to the cultivation, training, and exercise of the intellect.”
On the surface, I should have been the ideal participant in the “conversation” at Cambridge. I had left school several years earlier but had come back looking for more “stimulation.” I had traveled extensively but had still returned to the academy for more “intellect-tual” training. Yet when I arrived at Cambridge I found myself uneasy in the university environment, where insight is rarely measured by breadth of experience but by breadth of bookshelf instead. Had I read Plato in the original? Did I agree with Northrop Frye? Was I extratextual or intravenous-symbiotic? At one point in my evening at Ian’s, for example, Thaddeus asked me what languages I spoke. “Japanese,” I said, to which he replied, “What else?”
In the upper reaches of academe one is always one language, one theory, or one book too short. Outside the academy I rarely discussed books in the course of a day so as not to seem too pedantic; inside the academy I rarely discussed books so as not to seem insufficiently read. Above all, as I wandered around Cambridge, I longed for a conversation in which the university and the universal could speak with each other, without regard to specialty, nationality, or, even worse, degree, such as who has the word “Doctor” before his initials and who has more initials after his name.
“So what did you think of our little feud here tonight?”
Ian and I were carrying dishes into his gyp later that evening. He had taken off his camel-hair jacket and was wearing only a droopy black jumper with the logo of a British fencing society emblazoned on the chest. As he walked with dirty glasses in his hands, he would suddenly lunge forward every now and then and pretend to stab an invisible enemy.
“I think you’re all full of crap,” he said, parrying in my direction, pretending to riposte, and thrusting some leftover beer onto my sweater. “The problem with this place is not that we don’t have enough art, it’s that we have too much. We’ve all lost our balls. We’ve forgotten that underneath all the mind games and the gentle manners we’re all still animals.” He set down his glasses and grabbed his crotch for emphasis. “Aristotle said that all our thoughts, even our souls, begin in the deepest part of our bodies.”
“I suspect that most dons would rather discuss existential philosophy than animal instincts,” I said, turning back toward the room.
“Isn’t that the problem with the academy?” he said as he followed, happy at last to offer his undisclosed theory of education. “We’re all trapped in this bubble, removed from the rest of humanity.”
“Don’t look at me,” I said, even though he hadn’t. “I agree with you.”
“We’re just learning how to masturbate—intellectual masturbation. I learn how to argue, you learn how to argue, but neither of us learns anything from the other. That’s the problem with what Thaddeus was saying: here we only learn how to talk; we don’t learn how to touch.” He sat on the edge of his bed, ran his fingers through his hair. “In the end, we just go back to our rooms and wank off with our books….” He picked up a copy of Thomas Hobbes from his bed and threw it on the floor.
“Is something bothering you?” I asked.
“No,” he snapped. “Well, yes.” He lay down on his bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. I sat down in the one chair in the room that didn’t have a broken leg. “What happened to my passion?” he said. “I wanted to be great. I wanted to be famous, and brilliant, and beautiful, too. I’m already beautiful, I know.”
“Allow me to disagree—”
“But I’ve lost the rest. I used to have ideals. I believed in Plato and the higher good. I believed in virtue. ‘Virtue,’ Socrates said, ‘is aspiring to fine things and being able to achieve them.’ But I can’t believe that anymore. My girlfriend of two-and-a-half years leaves me for no reason. Louise Rogers won’t even respond to my letters. This place, with its books, is corrupting my mind. It’s telling me I have to be gentle, and soft, and kind. It’s telling me I have to be rational and ignore my body.”
He rolled to one side and propped his head on his elbow.
“Take this war thing. I’ve been listening to the radio recently—all the talk about midnight deadlines and lines in the sand. It’s really brought out the male instinct in me. It’s made me want to stand up and fight. Do you know what I mean?”
He stuck out his hand to prevent me from answering.
“It’s the same with women. When I see a beautiful woman, I want to be an animal—a tiger—and jump all over her. It’s my Persian side, my father in me. But I can’t. I’m supposed to be sensitive and considerate—all this crap about English manners. My mother wanted me to go St. Paul’s so I would learn the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Good Lord, deliver us from the deceits of the flesh and the devil….’ They don’t get it. Mankind is basic instinct, and all the books in the world can’t get rid of that. Thaddeus is like Plato with his idea that we have to separate the thinkers from the doers. It’s very Cambridge. Aristotle knew that you can’t take the body out of the mind any more than you can take a man out of his world….”
When he finished his soliloquy, Ian curled himself into an embryonic ball underneath his comforter. I stretched my legs onto his bed. For a moment we sat in silence, two bodies in fact cut off from the world, and then simultaneously we both sat up and looked at the radio: “What’s the time?”
Ian reached out from beneath his duvet and flipped the switch of his beat-up box with the broken rabbit ears. We didn’t hear any words, at first, we didn’t hear the call, but the whistles, the blasts, the cries from the earth, and even the static from the live microphone were unmistakable. Shutting my eyes instinctively as if somehow that would help me see, I felt my muscles—from my groin to my head—stiffen in anticipation of the inevitable blow. The Crisis, at last, had turned to War.
XI
TALKING
The Fruits of War
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of
weeping than you can understand.
—William Butler Yeats
“The Stolen Child,” 1886
The chaplain’s voice was quiet. His eyes serene. His words flowed into the fire-baked room in a caramel whisper that palliated the mind and relaxed the body as cough syrup coats an aching throat hoarse from too much abrasion.
“Good evening, my friends. Thank you for joining us here tonight. I hope you all will take this opportunity to open your souls and speak from your hearts. This is an experiment in conversation.”
Nick Sagovsky, the chaplain of Clare, was seated cross-legged on the edge of a chair rubbing his palms in a circle. His black shirt was ironed against his slight frame, his pale skin clung to his high cheekbones. A bowl of fruit—orange, violet, dots of pale green—sat open in the center of his room atop an old sailor’s chest.
“I don’t expect that we will come to any earth-shattering conclusions in this meeting. I don’t think we will solve any problems. But I have been struggling with how to understand my conflicting feelings over the last few days, and I wanted to share these struggles with you.”
He clapped his hands together silently.
“That was a personal note,” he said. “Now I thought we could go around the circle and each of you could say why you came to this meeting. I didn’t want experts to come and tell us how far a missile can travel or how fast a Tornado can fly. I wanted to hear you speak. I am wearing my collar tonight, but in truth I am wearing a different hat.”
Nick sat back slowly in his chair, leaving a pause in the center of the room like a hole in a pond where a pebble had been dropped.
After several moments a woman to my right—at three o’clock in our circle—began to speak. “I came because I’m overwhelmed,” she said. Her name was Amanda, she had reams of frizzy red hair. “I have been watching the news on television, but somehow I don’t feel anything. I don’t know what I’m meant to feel. It’s partly because I don’t know anyone who’s there. Partly because it takes place so many miles away. But I find it all very distant. My country is at war, and I don’t understand why.”