The Birdsong and The Sky
Two saviors of truth and beauty
I will always remember two things about our time living in Oxford: the birdsong and the sky.
One morning, when I met my supervisor in the front halls of Harris-Manchester College, I asked him if the construction out front bothered him.
“No,” he replied. “The colleges are built in such a way as to shield the outside sounds from the inner quad area. They keep the noise of the outside world out so that you can hear the birdsong on the inside.”
My supervisor would always walk from his office to the foyer to fetch me. We would exit the back of the foyer and walk into the quad, along a narrow sidewalk, turn left, and then to another hall of the college. This hall was password protected. We’d enter in, walk two flights of stairs, and then into his study that was walled floor to ceiling in books.
He always offered me his “comfy” chair, as he put it, and he’d sit at his desk upon which sat a massive computer monitor, a professional podcast microphone, and an old coffee cup lined with the remains of coffee. It was rather gross, but he kept it on his desk to remind him of what coffee contained and what went into his body when he drank it. I only ever saw him drink Irish Tea.
Inside his office the quiet was palpable. Just our voices, ringing out over the books strewn everywhere on the coffee table and shelves. A wood-burning stove sat behind me but was never lit.
We’d chat for forty-five minutes and he’d see me back to the foyer, shake my hand, and wish me well in my research. I would almost always hear the birdsong as we walked the quad into the foyer.
Once I exited the foyer the sounds of construction and undergraduates filled the air. The contrast in sound was flagrant.
Over the course of the two years we lived in Oxford, I would either walk the three miles from the library to our house on the top of Cumnor Hill or walk the countryside that rolled behind our house and into the moors.
Always there was birdsong.
Quite surprisingly the birds sang at night—a Nightingale. The song was unique, beautiful. It echoed down our street.
I felt as though I was always stepping on the notes of birdsong.
The sky changed constantly.
It is a myth that England is grey and bleak and sad. One soon discovers how and why Coleridge and Wordsworth became so enraptured in the English countryside and the sky itself for it possesses an unexplainable luminosity.
Perhaps it is the Northernness of England. Or the island nature to always be interpreting the winds through clouds and light. The numinous sky lured me on more than one occasion out into the countryside for a ramble.
I think of Peter Davidson’s reminder of how twilight wields a kind of magical power that woos our hearts and arouses the “vague yearning for the place we haven’t come to yet, or the place that we have left without hope of return.”[i]
England lies just above the 50th parallel so it is not one of the “territories of true darkness,” but still the sky looks different here—at least from the places I’ve lived on America’s east coast. It’s a sea-driven sky and northern in its temperament; a whispy tempestuousness that rouses and thrills.
The clouds, even billowing ones at dusk, possess a life unlike any I’ve seen. A pleasing melancholy resides in the European twilight, says Davidson; it’s the way the light works on the people and the land, I suppose.
We become like the land in which we live.[ii] Time and geography work on us, changing our moods, perceptions, and dispositions. The land touches our imaginations; it thrills, allures, and captivates.
I mention these two indelible characteristics of the land because of how profoundly the sacredness of the space, the place, the landscape played a part in our experience as a family—literally and physically.
My oldest daughter remembers the day we found The Bear and The Ragged Staff pub as we were caught in our first flash English storm. Soaking wet, we hurried into a pub only a mile from our house and had hot chocolate, a pint, and some toast, and sat by the autumn fire and talked. It’s imprinted on her mind and heart.
One day our whole family was caught in the deluge at a bus stop (since we did not own a car). We waited in torrential rain for the 4B bus, only to be splashed over and over again by the passing cars. When we finally boarded the bus, the girls were so excited, but they were also excited to be totally wet and cold and the adventure of it all.
We took walks as a family down the “thinking lane” as I called it. It was a footpath that led to an old farmhouse overlooking the reservoir. Pheasant would fly out and scare us and the daffodils blanketed the lane to the farmhouse in the spring.
To see beauty, and to hear its cadence, we must open the eyes of flesh and heart.
John Ruskin said life was not about pace. Rather, it demanded the ability to truly see.
If my time in Oxford did anything to me, it taught me to pause and, more importantly, to see. I walked everywhere. I took in the countryside. I read outside. I wrote, and read, and watched, and wrote some more. The frantic pace we didn’t even realize we cultivated in Atlanta (our previous home) was quickly halted.
We spent more time together as a family, on walks, in pubs, in church, in town, on the bus, in the garden.
Objects like birdsong and the lightness of the sky became characters in my life, rather than just tokens of the day I might or might not notice.
Josef Pieper says that our ability to see, as humans, is in sharp decline; so much so that he asks:
“How can man be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim? The real question is: How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality?”
Man’s inner richness is at stake. We lack the ability to see—to take the time to see; to relinquish the pace that keeps us from seeing the particulars of reality, and thus even reality itself.
Aristotle said that beauty cannot exist in spectacle. It emerges from the particularity and individuality of parts. Coleridge defined beauty as multeity in unity; all the parts unifying for the beautiful whole (“On Poesy or Art”).
Our world rages with spectacle. So much so, that we’ve become blind to the wonder of life’s particular parts, like the birdsong and the sky.
Our pace annihilates this wonder-filled aspect of reality. The ability to see is essential to man’s ability to accurately make sense of reality, this is the definition of truth: that which affirms and corresponds to reality.
This, to me, reveals a precious link between truth and beauty. Without the ability to see, both stand threatened.
If I cannot behold sawdust flinging from the bill of the Pileated Woodpecker in my backwoods, then I risk developing a deficiency in my ability to grasp a full picture of reality, diminishing truth; of the forest, of birds, of my neighborhood, of the environment, of God.
To-Do List
Slow down over the holiday season.
Discover two noteworthy aspects about your surrounding landscape that fascinate you.
Find a nearby path to walk at twilight. (Bring a headlamp)
Talk with family and friends about their source of joy and share yours.
Stop watching television for one month.
Notes
[i] Peter Davidson, The Last of the Light: About Twilight (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 9.
[ii] Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1999), 115-145. This statement might sound “poetic” but in fact it is true. Or at least it’s suggested by Muir in his wonderful chapter titled “Landscapes of the Mind,” in which he discusses, among other things, how two landscapes exist; the one we’re standing on, beneath our feet, and the one we end up creating in our minds; it’s our perception of the landscape that comes to us in our memories. That perception and memory give meaning to the landscape. It’s a remembered context; it possesses a familiarity that we sometimes feel in other places too. Why? Because perhaps we sense the same thing which is brought on by similar forms in the landscape—that might be the hills or streets or mountains or the way the landscape interacts with the light of the land. Light is also a contributor to landscape as it not only paints what we see, but it indicates weather too and brings our senses into the context and memory.
Post Script
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