Oxford Spring. It's always spring in our Oxford. Every year we come back. Every year, the new spring, which is to say the same spring. And the same Oxford, too. And the same gloomy thoughts about Oxford. And the same desire to get out of Oxford immediately.
'It's happening just as you predicted', W. says. 'The collapse of the universities. The collapse of civilisation'. Don't you realise how good we're having it?, I've always said to him. These are the best of times, I've said, over and again. It's going to get worse, much worse, I told him, and I was right.
Why did it take an idiot to tell him that?, W. wonders. Why, when it should be obvious to everyone? They're destroying the universities: of course they are. How could it be otherwise? They're destroying the humanities: shrugged shoulders; so what else is new? Let them destroy it all, W. says, looking around him. Let it all come down.
I read from my notebook:
There is no more university; there is a great and venerable, barely camouflaged hole, a game of ceremonies. Rectors, deans, lecturers, students, all move to cover over the void, a void that is governed over by the rules of dead time.
That was Blanchot during May 1968, I tell him. No more university … Or might we dream of another kind of university, another kind of lecturer, and another kind of student?, we wonder. Might we dream of a dispersed university, a university in motion, in exodus, without walls, without buildings? Of a university of the periphery that flashes up around certain bars, certain havens in the city – of a kind of learning that appears and then disappears, in nearly one and the same moment, leaving its students and lecturers dazed and wondering what happened.
Was I the student, and you the lecturer – or was it the other way around? Did I teach you something, or you me? Or was it something between us that spoke – was it the relation between us, the movement of conversation that took us as its terms?
Oxford after the end looks quite like Oxford from before it, we decide, walking through the city. The same colleges, the same river. And the same walk for us, through Christchurch Meadows.
After tragedy, farce, we agree, remembering Marx. And after farce? This. Us. Christchurch Meadows.
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