Fifth Week Already!

Hello Family and Friends!

I apologize for my tardiness in writing an update on my life here in Oxford. It is hard to believe that I am already at the end of the fifth week of Oxford's eight-week term. I now have seven essays behind me and five more to go before the five-week post-term classes, for which I will write three long essays. I am thoroughly enjoying being in Oxford, both as a beautiful place and as an age-old center of learning.

It took a few weeks to get used to shortened days and lengthened shadows in the midday sun. The angle of the sun here in Britain makes it feel like the entire afternoon is a prolonged twilight, although now that spring is approaching, the sunshine is lasting longer. My primary (ie: only) mode of transportation is by foot, and I've loved walking around Oxford all the time. The old college buildings are so lovely that it never gets boring to walk the same paths over and over. For most of the lectures I am required to attend, I cut through the park a few blocks away from home, which is also beautiful.

I am still enjoying the academics, and finding Oxford to be more of an academic retreat than the bootcamp I had anticipated. That's not to insinuate that I'm not working hard, of course, but that having a quieter schedule than I do at home, I have more time available just to enjoy learning rather than rushing through it in the small windows of time between other commitments. The work I'm doing is much like what I do in Torrey - read books, think about them, and go to class (or in this case, tutorial) prepared to discuss them. What's difference here is that the requirement of an essay for each tutorial forces me to put the amount of effort into pre-class work that I should be doing at home anyway. I am really grateful for this opportunity to hone skills that will continue to benefit me in my academic work at home.

Incarnate Words

“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

~ Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.I.14-17

Shakespeare’s plays are overflowing with clever language and questions about language. The plays are significantly self-referential as they not only present profound ideas about human experience, but also critique the very mode of the that presentation – that of language and performance. From Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” to Claudius’ “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” it is evident that word and reality are not always the same thing. While we can “represent the sentiment of our mind by speech,” as Melanchthon puts it, we can also misrepresent our thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Words can either reveal reality or conceal it. It requires discernment to recognize when words are distorting reality, and when they are displaying it as it truly is. This question crops up at the core of Shakespearean drama.

Words are a mysteriously meaningful and distinctly human way of expressing realities both concrete and abstract. Great poets are those with the greatest grasp on reality and the keenest use of words, and as Theseus’ words quoted above communicate, the poet incarnates abstract ideas by putting them into words that we can tangibly comprehend. Dorothy Sayers also expresses this in her Mind of the Maker, in which she discusses the creativity of the writer, who puts an idea into words. Sayers makes an analogy to the Trinity, saying that the Idea (likened to the Father) of the author is revealed through the Word, which is incarnated in the writer’s work (The Holy Spirit is represented by the compelling power of the writing.). The incarnate word “brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea,” she says.

Language is a vessel of man’s understanding of intangible, immaterial things. As such, it stands between man’s god-like quality of the intellect and his animal-like quality of a material body, which includes the tongue that speaks and the ears that hear. No wonder Hamlet, a melancholy scholar who is obsessed with words and slow to act, understands man to be “in apprehension…like a god,” while at the same time being a “quintessence of dust.” As words can aid us in the apprehension of the immaterial, we must use them with caution and accuracy, striving to represent our ideas truthfully. We had best heed the words of Hamlet, that “We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”