An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [58]
Merton was not only among the oldest and wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, it was also widely acclaimed for having the best food and the finest wine cellar. For that reason, I not infrequently found myself in Oxford for college dinners. Those evenings were evenings far far back in time: sipping sherry and talking with the dons before dinner began; walking together, in procession, into the old and beautiful dining hall; watching with amusement as the black-gowned, scraggly undergraduates rose to their feet as the dons came in (the deference had a certain appeal; curtsying, perhaps, was not such a bad thing after all). Heads bowed, quick prayers in Latin, students and dons alike, we all would wait for the college warden to sit; this then, would be followed by an immediate and overpowering din of undergraduates scuffling with chairs, laughing, and shouting loudly up and down the long dining tables.
At the high table, the conversations and enthusiasm were more restrained, and, always, there was vintage Oxfordtalk, usually clever, often hilarious, occasionally stifling; excellent dinners with superb wines were all noted on elegantly calligraphied and crested menus; then we filed out into a smaller, private dining room for brandies and ports and fruit and candied ginger with the warden and fellows. I cannot imagine how anyone got any work done after these dinners, but, as everyone I met who taught at Oxford seemed to have written at least four definitive books on one obscure topic or another, they must have inherited, or cultivated, very different kinds of livers and brains. For my part, the wine and port would inevitably catch up with me, and, after pouring myself onto the last train to London, I would stare out of the window into the night, caught up, for an hour or so, in other centuries, and happily lost between worlds and eras.
Although I went to Oxford several times a week, most of my life was centered in London. I spent great and vastly enjoyable amounts of time wandering through parks and museums and took long weekends with friends who lived in East Sussex, walking along the downs overlooking the English Channel. I also started riding again. I felt the return of an amazing sense of life and vitality when taking a horse out through the misty mornings of Hyde Park during the cold, late autumn, and even more so galloping pell-mell over the Somerset countryside, through beech woods and across farmlands. I had forgotten what it felt like to be that open to wind and rain and beauty, and I could feel life seeping back into crevices of my body and mind that I had completely written off as dead or dormant.
It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews—nothing, I suppose, ever could for me—but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back my belief in love.
I had come at last to some sort of terms with David’s death. Visiting his grave in Dorset one cold, sunny day, I was taken aback by the loveliness of the churchyard in which he was buried. I had not remembered very much of it from the funeral, and certainly not its tranquillity and beauty. The deathly quietness was a certain kind of consolation, I suppose, but not necessarily the kind one would seek. I put a bouquet of long-stemmed violets on his grave and sat, tracing the letters of his name in the granite, remembering our times together in England and Washington and Los Angeles. It seemed a very long time ago, but I could see him still, tall and handsome, standing, arms crossed