Water, Paris, Oxford, Keats
Last winter, in early January, I found myself in Paris. Now I find myself living in Oxford. By chance I visited the Monet exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie: The Water Lilies. I almost didn’t go, having set my mind on the Bacon show at the Pompidou Centre, or just on walking about the city, which as ever was having its way with my heart.
Now, in Oxford, I find another city which, with its hawkishness (something shared with Paris), its money (the same) and its brutal divisions (more of the same), opens itself to me like a work of art. I love this honesty which is usually so absent in life. Far too often I have found kindness and care to simply be covers for the darkest kinds of folly and violence. It’s better to be able to sense it all, the whole kernel of a place, on one walk about. Or as with a person, on one encounter. Freud said not to forget first impressions, which is probably a good way of trusting them.
I have found too many places and people like Boris Johnson: a hearty scruffiness on top of an angry and frightened heap, a way with language that flashes only to give to an impoverished sense of surface-clinging.
In Oxford, as with that last trip to Paris, I notice something about water. This is one wet place. Everything seems to be under its influence: rainwater, the unendingness of mists and fogs, and rivers and canals that suggest those divisions I mentioned before.
The academics go about their work like agents of estates, literary or scientific ones. That’s not to say this is a place lacking writers or scientists. There may be a few. But Oxford’s a place that makes money, which is something an author rarely sees.
Keats’ tombstone reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. You may find him mentioned here, in Oxford.
