So, I intended to write about food this week, because seriously, how can I go three entire blog posts without writing about food??

However, I find that I must put off a lengthy discussion of English cuisine for the future, because I have just had lunch with a couple friends from high school, and it has brought up so many feelings and memories that I have to write them all out.

High school was one of the most impactful times of my life. I was so, so lucky to be able to go to a small, very unique high school that had an amazing community. I learned so much about myself and about others and– well, I could go on about the wonderful experience I had, but what I want to talk about is how those connections I made back in high school are still impacting me now.

The first week I was here, I was studying in the Bodleian when a friend from high school, Simone, came up to me. I was shocked and thrilled to see her here– what were the chances that not only would we both end up in Oxford, but that we would actually run into each other our first week?

So, we made plans, and this afternoon I met up with Simone and another high school friend, Megan, at the Vaults and Gardens Cafe (around since 1320, nbd) just across from the Radcliffe Camera:

We had a delicious lunch (and I enjoyed a very nice pot of tea) and talked about our experiences so far in Oxford. Simone had a tutorial in which she not only managed to understand Hegel, but applied his dialectic to Obamacare and found all sorts of mind-blowing connections. Megan, who has been here a term longer than I have, has made friends with several British students, one of whom met up with us and, I found, is also studying Philosophy! We were able to discuss phenomenology and my current reading on Heidegger, as well as plans and dreams for the next few years down the road. As we left the café, Megan and I spoke about the feeling we get walking through the streets of Oxford, and the way that the new mingles with the old, making it impossible not to feel your own connection to the past.

After lunch, we walked to what has become one of my favorite spots: the Holywell Cemetery. It may sound morbid, but the cemetery is actually one of the most peaceful and lovely places I’ve seen in Oxford. It’s right next to St Catz, and I have found myself stopping in occasionally and sitting on the bench in the sun and taking time just to think, write, reflect, or to do a bit of reading.

Our conversation veered back to high school, and to the Faulkner class which Megan, Simone, and I all took. Since I just finished an essay on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, he’s been on my mind. One quote in particular seemed particularly appropriate today (it’s a bit long, but bear with me!):

“Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish” (Absalom, Absalom! pg. 100-101)

That passage is one that has stuck with me ever since reading it, because I find that image of the strings tying together different lives so apt. There is just this amazing sense of interconnectedness that I feel sometimes, when I realize how my lifeline has intertwined with those of others, and how even when they may no longer be in my life, I can still feel the tug of that connection. And although the speaker in this passage is afraid of how small her own part in everything is, and doesn’t understand how she can matter, it seems so clear how we all do– how if we are all connected by these strings, we are all influencing each other. And somehow, even years later, I can run into people that I used to know and feel… like myself. In fact, being away from the country I grew up in and getting entangled in these connections both new and old, I feel more myself than I have felt in a long time. I feel in love with the world, and with all of the amazing people who share this loom with me and interweave their own patterns with mine.

This coming week, I have many more activities planned. I am going to take aerial rope lessons at a local Circus Centre, I hope to try my hand at archery, my roommate and I are going on a blind double-date, and I’ve found a place to get back into figure drawing. I am falling for Oxford and the people I’m meeting here. And so to end this post, which I know has been rather long and rather heavy, here’s a song by Hozier (who I hope to see in London in June!) about falling in love each day: