Over 15 years ago, my husband and I visited New York and the oblivious spot to visit was, of course, the WorldTradeCenter – twin towers. We asked an old man for direction when we got up the subway. He was ever so old and honest and not only told us the way to go but also said: “I’ve been living here for sixty years but never been up to that tower!”
Later I did wonder if he ever managed to get up there because a few years later, both towers vanished from the horizon. Yet I must say that it is common that one does not always appreciate things that are close to him the most. I have been spending years exploring Oxford and its beauty, yet when it comes to history, there are still many unknown stories. And they are ever so interesting:
The famous classical philologist, Benjamin Jowett (1817-93) once informed one of his students: “If you do not believe in god by eight tomorrow morning, you will be sent down” - absolutely shocking, isn’t it? Yet I somehow have a feeling that something quite similarly shocking must be going on right under our nose in some kind of newly twisted form!
In some of the colleges in Oxford, compulsory tutorials are minimal. This has been going on since ancient times, as explained by the novelist Martin Amis (25 August 1949 - ): “The unique freedom of Oxford is that you don’t have to account for more than, say, ninety minutes a week for eighteen weeks a year. That’s about three days out of three years of your life. Conventional ways of filling that time are gone; it is all yours now. It doesn’t happen to you before and it never happens to you again.” This is amazing! I personally believe that this freedom is one of the keys to the successes of Oxford (Or at least one of the things valued by some Chinese students, for one I know well, hardly ever had any formal lessons in three years of study for his D.Phil.)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822), one of the major English Romantic poets,found his first lecture so boring that he never returned for the second. A year later, he was expelled by the college (not for this reason though) and never came back even when he had the chance. Many years later, he had a sailing accident and drowned in Italy. Now, he lies in the college, a life-size, snow-white marble sculpture borne by two winged, bronze lions, with the Muse of Poetry at his feet. The college welcomed this statue back in 1893, put it under a blue starred cupola, and thus created a pantheon for its lost son. This is a true story yet quite unbelievable. It takes a lot to send down a student and a great deal more to give him a home forever!
There are many more “strange” things to outsiders yet normal within this place, good and bad. It is the combination of everything behind all these stories that has made the OxfordUniversity such a unique and outstanding place on Earth.
