Litnet

In Parys het ek met ontsag die katedraal Notre Dame besoek omdat ek in die voetspore van bv Petrus Comestor (oorlede in 1178) kon trap. Dieselfde gevoel kry ’n mens in selfs groter mate in Oxford as jy dink aan al die groot geeste wat eens daar gewoon en gewerk het. Dit gaan dus nie net om die indrukwekkende geboue en pragtige tuine nie, maar veral om wat die geleerdes die noössfeer noem, die geestelike dimensie van Oxford. Verder kan ’n mens jou kwalik ’n beter algemene akademiese boekwinkel as Blackwell, sedert 1879 in Broad Street, voorstel en dan is daar nog sy aparte gespesialiseerde boekwinkels vir bv musiek en die skone kunste, asook die boekwinkel van Oxford University Press. Cartwright skryf: "In Oxford you can read a book anywhere you like, without attracting attention" (bron hieronder, p 183).

Die natuurskoon van Oxford het meegebring dat dit dikwels ’n tuin genoem is. Die Amerikaner Rosa Ehrenreich het ’n boek oor Oxford geskryf, A Garden of Paper Flowers (1994). Volgens haar onderskei die universiteit hom veral vanweë "administrative inefficiency, inadequately resourced libraries, sub-standard teaching en fatuous snobberies" (Richard Tames, A Traveller’s History of Oxford, London: Phoenix Press, 2002, p 298). Ek wil my aandag hier egter beperk tot Justin Cartwright se boek, This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisted (London: Bloomsbury, 2008, 227p). Ter verduideliking van die boektitel haal hy Valentine Cunningham aan: "Once admitted to this secret garden, the initiated cannot leave" (p v).

Cartwright is in 1945 in Suid-Afrika gebore en het aan die Universiteit van die Witwatersrand en Trinity College, Oxford, studeer. Hy is die seun van ’n redakteur van die Rand Daily Mail en is plaaslik seker veral bekend vanweë sy boek, The Promise of Happiness (2005). Soos sy pa het hy hom vir die omverwerping van die "apartheidsregime" beywer. Hy vertel van ’n insident toe hy as ’n dronk Wits-student ’n kragpaal probeer saboteer het (p 19). Soos wat in so baie gevalle met politiek-verligtes gebeur, wil hy nie in die nuwe Suid-Afrika woon nie. Hy het hom in Londen gevestig.

As literator verwys hy na wat Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) gesê het: "Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience ... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation" (p 36; dit is deel van die noössfeer waarna ek in die eerste paragraaf hierbo verwys het). Cartwright: "It is in the act of writing that we attempt to moor ourselves in the unheeding universe. In my own writing life I find that I only know inchoately what I think until I have written it" (p 103). Dit herinner aan Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) se stelling: "Nothing has really happened until you have described it" (SêNet, 6.03.2012). Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) het verder gegaan: "Writing is not about something, it is that something" (p 115). Die doel bly dieselfde: "Propelling oneself to the centre of things" (p 115).

Cartwright was in die jare sestig ’n student in Oxford. Vir hom het daardie universiteit ’n simboliese betekenis en gaan dit ook om uitnemendheid en tradisie (p vii). Hy noem "the very high regard for Oxford in the world at large ... it is woven into the culture of the English-speaking world ... ’the Lourdes of Englishness’" (p 29, ook p 221). "Oxford appeared to be a distillation, an accumulation, of what is important in human endeavour" (p 29-30). Maar "science is not part of the Oxford myth" (p 194). "Oxford is a wordly place. Modern politics and journalism in Britain have, until recently, largely been fashioned in Oxford. So what is discussed at Oxford will find its way into the public domain quite quickly" (p 31-32). "Oxford has produced far more prime ministers, newspaper editors and literary critics than Cambridge" (p 53).

"One of the things about Oxford that outsiders find infuriating [is] that it teaches scepticism and self-deprecation not out of humility but out of a sense of superiority ... an identifiable Oxford tendency [is] to shy away from any form of bandwagon, social or academic" (p 7; maar vergelyk die voorlaaste paragraaf van my vorige skrywe, SêNet, 4 deser). By Oxford is daar "an indifference to modishness" wat volgens Cartwright nie "the same thing as being insensitive to it" is nie (p 151). Robertson Davies (1913-1995) het gesê: "The greatest gift Oxford gives its sons is a genial irreverence towards learning. And from this irreverence, love may spring" (p 7). Ja, nie "learning" nie; eerder "education" (SêNet, 7.12.2011). Wanneer Cartwright skryf "at Oxford the idea that learning is an end in itself still persists" (p 45), verwys hy egter na studie wat nie op beroepsvoorbereiding ingestel is nie. "But the idea that the Classics equipped the best brains for anything life could throw at them ... is more or less dead and buried" (p 45). Religie is ook nie meer prominent nie. "Religion could no longer dictate to science the legitimate areas of discussion nor dictate what the ultimate truths were" (p 137). Daar is in Oxford weerstand teen verandering te midde van verandering. "The truth is that Oxford has changed almost beyond recognition, if not outwardly, but in many significant ways" (p 222).

Van Oxford se geboue sê Cartwright: "They are, as in Venice, a kind of art that transcends craft because it speaks directly to the human spirit" (p 13). John Ruskin (1819-1900) het bv geglo "that all art must have a spiritual dimension" (p 69). Cartwright: "I see that Oxford, for all its ancient and fraying stone, for all its processions of grey-haired men and women, for all its millions of books, is in essence a city of youth: the books, the dons, the buildings are sets and props against which youth parades itself" (p 14). "The happiness of youth is blitheness, the sheer physical joy of being young and beautiful" (p 131). Geen wonder nie dat Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973, SêNet, 21.09.2011) gou agtergekom het dat sy ’n fout gemaak het toe sy probeer het om haar in haar latere lewe weer in Oxford te vestig. Cartwright verwys na haar wanneer hy skryf: "The effects of growing old in Oxford ... can be more pronounced than elsewhere ... while the scenery had not been moved, the actors had gone" (p 170).

Met verwysing na die linguistiese tradisie in die wysbegeerte na die Tweede Wêreldoorlog skryf Cartwright: "Oxford philosophy is more often about the sense of words and the meaning of claims and statements than about the life-enhancing properties of philosophy" (p 17-18). Hy noem dat Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) graag biskop John Butler (1731-1800) aangehaal het: "Things and actions are what they are ... why should we desire to be deceived?" (p 18). "True knowledge" is dus "the knowledge of why we are what we are" (p 129). Cartwright: "This ... is the ethos of Oxford: there is no overarching theory, there is no God, there is no life after death, there are no moral precepts that exist outside society or history and there is no libretto or script for life. Instead we live life as we can and make of it what we can, and we behave decently and ethically because that is the sensible, and indeed the only, way to live" (p 18-19).

Wat volgens Berlin in die politiek nodig is, is "the free and open play of ideas in conflict, toleration, free discussion, respect for the opinion of others" (p 21). Dan sê Cartwright iets wat toon dat hy nie (meer) die ANC sonder meer ondersteun nie: "The present government of South Africa has no instinctive feeling for these ideas" (p 21). Hierdie openheid is nodig weens die beperkte vermoëns van die mens. "In 1933 Berlin quoted Kant in a letter to the novelist Elizabeth Bowen to the effect that: ’Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’ ... there can be no perfect society" (p 38).

Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) het aan Oxford-studente gesê: "Nothing will be of any use to you except this, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot" (p 74). Ook: "I have a great prejudice against all those who do not succeed in the world" (p 75). Dit sluit seker "benadeeldes" in. Cartwright: "I have never had that nagging feeling ... that Oxford’s and Cambridge’s relative magnificence and excellence are achieved in some way at the expense of the less privileged" (p 78). "In order to achieve the possibility of intimate understanding, we need some shared culture" (p 106). Is dit dalk die rede waarom Cartwright meer tuis in Engeland as in Suid-Afrika voel? "A literate culture has the possibility of understanding other people’s thoughts and ideas" (p 107). Dit volg dat vir half- en ongeletterdes sodanige poging moeiliker moet wees. "Cultural diversity ... is not always and for ever something to celebrate" (p 145).

Johannes Comestor