CU Abroad – Aron Zaltz

Sorry for the delay since my last post. I’ve been getting settled in, and at this moment being fully so, its my pleasure to present you with some vignettes of my life over here.

I. English Breakfasts- Excessively High in Saturated Fat, or Humankind’s Crowning Culinary Achievement?

I would argue the latter. Whilst (that diction was deliberate…this word finds its way into conversation quite frequently) many would object to the traditional English “fry up” on medical grounds, I will defend the virtues of the divinely inspired combination of eggs, pea meal bacon, cumberland sausage, black pudding, baked tomatoes, stewed mushrooms, hash browns, and fried bread to my last artery clogged heartbeat. Starting each morning with this superb repast, I find myself inclined to seize my day with an energy that somehow eludes me when miserable and malnourished on the continental alternative. Indeed, the closest one gets to this particularly magnificent opportunity for gluttony outside of this wonderful island is the Denny’s grand slam. Considering that I am more of a foreigner in the USA than I am in the UK, (since, after all, I am a citizen of the commonwealth, and as such, will be voting in the upcoming parliamentary election), I found the Denny’s grand slam an integral part of my cultural immersion in the Great U S and A. However, it is a bland and mediocre substitute when one realizes with great jubilation that, for example, the many forms of porcine life one consumes as part of this meal usually come from local farms, and are then prepared in their various forms (ie blood pudding, etc) according to local, traditional, and very ancient recipes. 

II. Punting- Epic Fail

Punting is the very fine art of propelling yourself in a flat bottomed boat along a river using a pole. It figures quite prominently in the idyllic conceptions of Cambridge so abundant in the media of the English speaking world, such as films about Sylvia Plath. One rents a “punt” or flat bottomed wooden boat, is presented with a pole, and given an afternoon to either gracefully travel the length of the Cam as it winds itself through this historic University town, or to bump into canal wall after canal wall in frustration, depending on one’s skill level. I assume my readership has by now surmised that I belong to the latter category. There were several T-bone collisions between my punt and those of Japanese tourists being punted about by professional punt chauffeurs. I felt somewhat like a pinball in a pinball machine, taking advantage of the fact that bumping into a wall at a certain angle could potentially send me in the direction I wanted to go in. Overall, while I found my attempt at punting extremely frustrating and would have much rather spent the afternoon exploring on foot, I am certainly pleased to have experienced this quintessentially Cantabrigian** tradition for myself, even if I would have found crawling about on all fours more rewarding. 

**Cantabrigian is the adjectival equivalent of Cornellian….Cantabrigian is derived from the latin for Cambridge: Cantabrigiensis, and in referring to students here, Cantabrigian is, in the informal usage, shortened to Cantab. 

III- Formal Hall or Why I Like To Galavant Around Wearing Robes

Formal Hall is bar none the greatest civilizing influence imaginable among the stresses of University Life. At any academically intensive university, students are likely to be stressed to outrageously high levels. Often this stress manifests itself in antisocial behavior, ranging from spending days at a time in the Uris Library “Cocktail Lounge”, to outright nervous breakdowns. How often do we skip a sit down meal in favor of running off somewhere? How often do we pass friends hurrying across a quad with barely time to say hello and how are you!

What does formal Hall have to do with all this? Well, Formal Hall is a dinner, at my college, on Tuesdays and Fridays, when the entirety of the faculty and student body of a college sit down together for two hours to enjoy a three course meal with wine. Guests are welcome, from other colleges, other universities, or anywhere at all, but members of the college make sure to proudly wear an academic robe that has been a part of the distinctive formal clothing of Cantabs for centuries. At least, the same manufacturer has been supplier to the University since 1689 (Ede and Ravenscroft). 

The meal is intended as a social occasion, whose structure and ceremony impress upon every student its essential part in the character of University Life. On Fridays, the faculty sits at a high table, but on Tuesdays, graduates, undergraduates, faculty, and guests all mingle, providing a really superb opportunity to socialize with people you might never otherwise see. It creates a fantastic sense of community among the members of the college at every level. No matter how my day has gone, I go into it looking forward to the opportunity to remember, for a moment, that being where I am is a pleasure and a privilege, and after three courses and some wine, I know it through and through!

IV- Dieu et Mon Droit… Mais pourquoi en Francais? A Love Letter to the Cornell French Society

Dieu et Mon Droit is the motto of the English Crown, who, having chartered most of Cambridge’s colleges, have probably been responsible for the ubiquity of this charming little phrase (is my humor dry and English yet) in the stonework here. 

What does it mean, then, for any non-Francophones? God and my Right. Now, since I am an English student, expert in the exegetical art of getting tautological blood from a metaphorical stone, be so patient as to allow me to “close read”, if you will.  God and my right refers to the Divine Right of Kings, a cheeky little concept from St. Paul’s rather dogmatic declaration that “the powers that be are ordained by God”. Basically what this means, for any Engineers out there (I love taking jabs at non-humanities students, in those rare moments when my knowledge actually overlaps with the so called “real world”), is the legitimization of power itself. The idea is that those who possess it do so because God decided they should, and therefore by extension, however they wield their power, they do so according to God’s will. It’s their right. 

Well, great idea (if you’re in power)….at least until you’re Charles I on the execution block, your rather unfortunate circumstance of being there endorsed by the theological and political pamphleteering of my favorite Cambridge graduate, one John Milton, and given the literal stamp of approval of everyone’s favorite Cambridge dropout, Oliver Cromwell. 

But what’s with the French? 

The answer is, that the English monarchy, for much of its history, wasn’t particularly English. It was French. When WIlliam the Conqueror, a Norman, seized the Kingship of England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the ruling class of England was….French! Of course, they weren’t really that French….because Norman is merely a corruption of Norse-man….William was descended from the Scandanavians who settled large parts of Normandy. However, regardless of all this, the legacy of this hodge-podge was that throughout the middle ages, and for long enough afterwards, French was the language of the English ruling class. 

But if the English ruling class were so….French! then why were England and France at war for centuries? (And what does this have to do with rights?)

The answer is in the phrase itself. Because William was a Norman Duke before he was King of England, his descendants over centuries of English royal families laid claim to lands in France. Their power was a right given by God, and as this power was power over their lands, that power extended to these claims in France (endorsed, of course, by the Almighty). The English (and I am no historian) only relinquished these claims as late as the 18th century! 

What nastiness the subtleties of a double entendre can cause……

Ready for formal hall

Punting....

Humankind's Crowning Culinary Achievment

God and My Right

Saturday Afternoon

My flight touched down safely but I have crash landed onto another planet: Planet Cambridge. In 1209, two Oxford scholars, probably due to some departmental infighting, were convicted of murder, and were subsequently publicly hanged with the consent of the King. After this spectacle, Oxford University, at that time the only university in the English speaking world, went into voluntary suspension. One of the locations to which itinerant scholars migrated was an ancient town called Cambridge. The town is on the river Cam, and has alot of bridges. (Oxen were forded at Oxford. Literature departments had yet to be founded). 

The University’s motto: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra. From here, light and sacred draughts. How can I begin to describe the particular, peculiar, heartstoppingly inspiring magnificence with which I have been intoxicated since coming to this place? 

The ancient streets (incidentally, some still featuring open sewers into which, for about three quarters of the university’s history, all household waste products would have been disposed) speak of eight centuries of scholars who passed through them, some on their way into the wider world, some, never to leave. Their faces are carved into the living stone above the ancient wood of doorways locked to the outside world, peering out at we students, we modern curiosities.

The gates of the colleges beckon you into their history, and so, always reverent, always conscious of this precarious sense of communion, you enter. And you, wondering what stories are held by the stones blackened with age, let them whisper. Maybe it is of a young Oliver Cromwell roaming these cobbled streets, never having dreamt he would wade through slaughter to a throne. Or you picture a fresh faced John Milton, called “the lady of Christ’s College”, because he studied here while still a boy, prepubescent, perhaps already forming from his humiliation that indomitable intellectual resolve, a prophet’s tongue, and capturing for himself the muse’s voice… 

They murmur to you, the stones, carved into stern human faces, lions, roses and latin mottos, that you are so small and yet so blessed to be sharing in the secret life of this place, whose heartbeat no tourist will ever be able to capture in a photograph, or send home on a postcard, and that a year will scarcely be enough to get my grasping hands around. 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I try to savor the days before they pass me by, I realize that I’m experiencing Toronto in a way I never have before. In short, it’s empty. I’m used to coming back for the summer and at breaks to a city overflowing with friends and acquaintances from high school, as if every pub and patio were its own reunion. Now, well into the month of September, the weather is beautiful enough that it could still be summer, but I’m conspicuously aware not only of the fact that this is the first September since I was 3 years old when I wasn’t enrolled in some kind of school, but also of the absence of so many people who make home feel like home. The first aspect feels liberating, the second…surreal. 

What am I doing then? Alot of reading, actually. The substance of school, if not the structure. There’s nothing quite like proceeding at your own intellectual pace through anything that catches your fancy under what remains of the summer sun, sans responsibilities, now that my office internship is long since done. The other day I got around to reading Voltaire’s Candide (which I’ve always wanted to do…and loved it, laughing out loud, barely able to digest all that caustic wit in one gulp), and then entertained myself with several hours of wikipedia surfing. If I were in school, I’d never get around to these things, but it’s amazing how stimulating it is to just explore, uncoerced, when the only imperative is your own internal compulsion. 

When my visa came for Cambridge I could scarcely believe it. I had spent the vast majority of my summer with a black cloud over the back of my mind, fearing that my arrival at the airport would be met with some taciturn security officer telling me  that I couldn’t get on the plane because of some bureaucratic tightrope I’d failed to walk. In fact, I had more than one nightmare over the course of the summer where my fate was somewhere in the questionable territory between Tom Hanks’ in the film The Terminal and Harold and Kumar’s in Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay. While the process of applying for a visa under the British government’s new security regulations has been absolutely miserable, now that it’s over, the excitement of being off to Cambridge is overwhelming. I oscillate between being out of my mind with glee at the prospect of actually setting off, and scarcely being able to believe that after all these months of paperwork (aided, quite generously, by the lovely staff at the Cornell Abroad office), that everything has finally come together, and I’m ready to go.

It is at this point that I admit that I have no idea what to expect when I arrive in England. Frankly, the only thing that I can actually anticipate experiencing, as opposed to merely speculating, is my first crisp, frothing sip of craft brewed English stout with which I will refresh myself upon landing on the “blessed plot”. Beyond that, the adventures intellectual and otherwise on which I am about to embark remain in the subjunctive, just outside of the realm of the tangible, freely inhabiting the space of the possible. Fueled by blood sausage and Yorkshire pudding, who knows where I’ll romp off to, on the island, on the continent, in the vastness of the life of the mind? 

Not knowing is all the fun.