madeline may write

There is nothing like Pathetique on a cloudy morning in Oxford. Grey skies, wind gently rustling the locust outside my window, bird-crowned spires, and bells tolling somewhere nearby.

Ah, the bells. “They ring so often,” I’ve heard some complain. “They don’t even play, like, a real tune. I could do that.” But no, the bells are lovely. On Saturday, I sat at my window and listened, mesmerized, as they called off the hours. On Sunday, the merry jangle of one church—reminiscent of celebration, of weddings—kept us company the whole day long. And this morning, the mournful clang of the bells is a soft accompaniment to Tchaikovsky’s baffling and anguished symphony. Bells. Pathetique. Oxford. Morning.

The truth is, I love it here. England. I love the studied, ancient gray of the buildings. I love the cloudy skies. I love the contrasts, the juxtapositions. I don’t find myself flying frantically from museum to tourist site to photo-op; I find myself wandering slowly, pensively, the streets of my choosing. No-name streets and alleyways. Inconsequential buildings. Some historical, some mundane, some too perfect to be anything but fantastical. I love these cities. Bath most, but Oxford, too.

Imagine: standing in Christchurch Cathedral on a Sunday morning, bathed in the mournful and haunting sound of a boys’ choir singing Psalm 49. Imagine: punting downriver in the company of girls in sundresses and dapper young men with pipes. Imagine: strolling through a rose garden straight out of Alice in Wonderland, wishing only for a paintbrush and a deck of cards. Imagine: a world where you can be as grave, cheerful, dignified, silly, logical or imaginative as you like and still—still, in spite of it all—feel perfectly at home.

And it’s beautiful, and awe-inspiring, to boot. Spires. Grassy quadrangles. God help me. I get to go to school here?

(And then, defiant to the end, Tchaikovsky hits us with the crushing fourth movement, a Finale to break my heart. Pathetique. Pathos. Emotion. The only artistic moment I can find to equal this devastation is in Paradise Lost: that first utterance after the Fall. “No more,” Milton writes, and we despair. Man is Fallen, all is lost. Two words. “No more.”)