Lunch that day taught me a hard lesson that echoed one I had learned long before in Sunday school. It was the lesson of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, which I had conveniently forgotten until that lunch when I was forced to enter my own little tower. Remember the story?
In the beginning, “the whole world had one language and a common speech” (Genesis 11:1). Then our ancestors decided they wanted to make a name for themselves by building a tower that would reach heaven. But before they could get there, God went down to them. He said, “ ‘Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth” (verses 7–8). It was a curse upon those trying to play God, and it was a curse I felt the consequences of that day by the river.
One of my future friends said something and everyone laughed. Everyone but me. I half smiled, trying to interpret the joke. It was no use. It was in another language I did not speak and felt I would never learn. I listened to everyone else talk for the remainder of our meal and said little myself. I watched and tried to interpret, understand, and decode the cultural scene unfolding before me, as if I were on one side of the glass and they on the other. Feeling sorry for myself and frustrated with my decision to leave a perfectly good country where things made sense to move to one where no one spoke correctly, I looked away from the table and focused on the water.
The calm river and quaint trail beside it with the sweeping branches. The abnormally perfect weather with the sun brightening different corners of our table. The beauty of it was lost in my confusion with these people I wanted, and needed, to be my friends.
Two years prior, in my study-abroad days, I had spent time on another Oxford river, the River Cherwell. Then I walked the river side by side with old friends who were American and just as in awe as I was of this city. In a spontaneous rush to do something memorable and daring on our final days in Oxford that winter, we ran from our dormitory houses toward the Cherwell wearing sweats with swimsuits underneath. All the way talking in breathless sentences about how cold the water was going to be, how the onlookers would stare at us. We didn’t care. We were twenty years old and had survived a semester overseas away from our families and friends and everything familiar. We would honor the experience, cement it into our souls by jumping off a low bridge in the middle of a park near our house, into the water, in the middle of December.
I had never submerged myself in water so cold. When my body hit the river, I thought I had died. My limbs felt paralyzed. I was so consumed with the temperature I didn’t know which way was up or which direction to swim. I forgot how to kick my legs or move my arms and just sort of stayed underwater for a minute, helpless. As soon as I decided I was indeed dead and had not survived the fall, my head bobbed above the surface. I heard the yells of my fellow classmates, who had not believed we would follow through, and I followed the sound of their voices to shore.
They helped pull me out, dragging me over the grassy edge as I shook, and someone covered me with a towel. Insanity pulled us into the river that day, and we smiled proudly for the cameras.
This time by the river felt different. I sat with strangers who were so polite and English and to whom the river was regular life. They didn’t need to jump into it to feel some sort of rush. I walked my old, rusty bicycle home from lunch that day defeated by it all. What must they have thought of me? This American who asked so many questions about so many things and didn’t laugh at their jokes.
I didn’t know where the adventurous spirit was that had hurled me into the river a couple of years before. Sure, I had made it to Oxford again, but I felt so much more afraid this time and very, very alone. I watched the others from behind my side of the glass, waving and yelling for them to notice me, but when they did and finally turned to look, it was with expressions of pity.
It was not so much the lack of people as it was this cultural glass wall that created a deep sense of loneliness in me. I thought I had felt lonely before. I had felt like I had no friends before. My entire eighth-grade year, for example. But this type of loneliness was different. There was an added layer to it.
As Americans, we know that our culture is influential, so when we travel abroad, we expect to be understood by the natives. This wasn’t happening at the pub. Just because we had all watched Friends growing up didn’t mean we were alike. It was the best and worst part about living in a new country, this culturally inflicted loneliness.
A Couple of Anecdotes of Culturally Inflicted Loneliness:
• I had ridden a bike to and from class in college, but I had never navigated actual city streets on one, and I had certainly never ridden one on the other side of the road, so I was a little shaky riding a bike in Oxford at first. My first bike, the old, rusty blue one, had a basket attached to the front. I thought I looked very cute riding a bike like this, and all the other girls had baskets on their bikes too, so I felt like I fit in.
I noticed people would put all kinds of things in their baskets: books, groceries, purses, their kids. So on my way to class one night, instead of slinging my bag over my shoulder, I placed it in my basket. It felt so nice and free to ride without any weight on my back. I was loving my basket, and I was feeling very Oxfordian and British. I saw a curb coming up ahead that I needed to hop to stay on the bike path. It wasn’t a big curb; it was the flat part of the curb, raised about an inch off the ground. Flat as it was, the second I hit it, my book bag rattled in my basket, which made the basket shift left, which made my front wheel shift left, which made me shift left, all the way until I hit the ground. Before I realized what was happening, my bike, my bag, and I were scattered across the sidewalk. As I collected myself and my ego and began to stand up, I heard a group of kids yelling from across the street. At first I thought they were concerned, asking if I was okay. They weren’t. They were singing in unison to the tune of nana-nana-boo-boo, “You fell off your bi-ike! You fell off your bi-ike!”
• One time I went to dinner at this guy’s apartment. He and his roommates were Oxford Oxford people, and they had invited three other Oxford Oxford people and then me and one of my roommates. I would soon move in with two British girls, but at first in Oxford, I lived with two other Americans who were in town for a few months on work visas.
The entire night was confusion. Mostly I remember one girl talking about her fiancé and how they got engaged.
“Well, you know he is Cambridge and I’m Oxford, but he went to Eton—”
“Where Prince William and Prince Harry went to high school?” I interjected, excited to share my knowledge of the royal family.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “Anyways, after we had just had this dreadful fight on a train one afternoon and as we were walking off the platform, he surprised me and asked me to marry him! He gave me his Eton ring—”
“His Eton ring?” I asked.
“Yes, you know, the Eton ring. All Eton graduates have them.”
I looked at my roommate. She shrugged her shoulders. Why was he giving her his class ring as an engagement ring? If he went to Cambridge, why doesn’t he have some fancy job so he can afford a real ring?
No one else seemed to question this or wonder if their engagement was legitimate. For the rest of the night, the conversation sounded more like a class discussion one would have at Cambridge rather than regular people talking over dinner. It made me wish I had read more as a child and watched less Saved by the Bell.
At first, I had no appreciation for it, the feeling that I would forever and hopelessly be an outsider in England. I sat in the loneliness. Between my discouraging and desperate attempts to fit in, I spent a lot of time by myself. Nobody gets me here…I can’t understand my professor’s Irish accent…I don’t know how to find anything in these supermarkets…The kids all make fun of me…I don’t even know what an Eton ring is.
I was hesitant to make friends in England because of my feeling of being an outsider, so I thought maybe I could find comfort and companionship i
n Oxford with the city itself. This had worked for me when I lived in Oxford before. That semester in college I was going through my very first breakup. I was sadder than I had ever been, and I was lonely. Even though I was surrounded by American friends, some days I felt isolated and alone in my sadness and confusion. I went for long solitary walks with my headphones on, listening to Coldplay and feeling very melodramatic and sorry for myself. I hid in the city’s alleys and parks. Bundled in a scarf and hat, I wandered all over. The city helped me forget. I would study the cobblestones and the old churches, older than any I’d seen back home. They told my hurting twenty-year-old heart important things about time. About the withstanding of it, the resilience of beauty.
That fall, all the leaves in Oxford went to die in this one little alley that lay between a charming residential street and Woodstock Road, which leads to the city center. I muddied the leaves with my feet, but they retained their colors. Bright red, bright orange, bright yellow. Even the leaves were resilient in this place.
It’s important to find safety during a lonely or sad or hard time. I grew up believing God is our hiding place, and I believe he manifests this physically when we need it most. You stumble upon a portion of park or a riverbank and immediately you love it there. Something about it says this is your spot. It is safe and made for you. It’s his hiding place but in physical form. How wonderful for him to provide such shelter, not just to sleep and eat in, but to be sad in, to hurt in, to wonder in. We need it. The aesthetics, the familiarity. We have to be reminded we are resilient creatures who have weathered much worse. These places do that for us.
I remembered that alley and the healing power of Oxford’s streets during this second fall in England, when I was feeling a different type of pain and a different type of loneliness. I took walks with my headphones on, just as I had two years before. I returned to that little alley. I hoped if all else failed with actual people, the city and its buildings could be my friends.
I walked slowly and noticed the beautiful bits of Oxford, where the stone walls are thick, high, and unfathomably old. These structures seemed even more beautiful because of their suffering: bullet holes; corners disintegrated by wear, weather, and time. This city has been around since AD 912, meaning it has seen wars and every terrible thing a city can see in more than a thousand years. I knew those high walls had protected their citizens well for a long, long time.
On the other side of one wall on the north side of town, behind a gate, was University Parks, a park that stretched a mile wide and long and hid the River Cherwell in its eastern corner. If you knew where you were going, you could find a path just on the other side of the river that took you down the longest and most enchanting walk to a completely different part of the city, to a large grassy hill called South Park, where clusters of Brookes students sat and from a distance looked just like me and my college friends at home.
For a brief time, the city offered me its strong walls, resilient leaves, and ancient buildings, and they comforted me. Oxford hid me. It said I could wallow for a little while. I could disappear and walk for as many miles as I wanted, for it had miles to spare.
Soon though, I knew that exploring Oxford on my own was not going to be enough to cure my loneliness. Not this time. People can tolerate loneliness for only so long. “We are born helpless,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”* Maybe on Oxford’s streets and alleys I was near other people, maybe I brushed shoulders with them and made the occasional eye contact, but as Lewis wrote, we don’t simply need the proximity of other human bodies; we need people emotionally and intellectually as well. We need their attention. We need to have conversations with them and to feel at least an ounce of understanding in each other. It is without this that you can grow completely lonely surrounded by people in a city. It is without this that you can lose yourself if you’re not careful.
My go-to method of hyper church involvement was not making me feel a part of this country, and neither were my sulking, solitary walks around the city. Friends were not going to come to me. Acceptance was not going to arrive on my doorstep. After a while when I finally woke up and realized I had made fifty acquaintances in Oxford, most of them from church, and zero friends, I knew it was time to do something. A layer of safety and comfort needed to be shed. So I got brave, really brave for that moment in time, and invited people from class—heathen friends, mind you—over for dinner. A small gesture that took everything in me.
I invited a small handful of people I knew from my Literary Criticism class. I didn’t know them well, but we had had the occasional postclass chats and even a couple of coffees together. They were not “church” people. They did not believe what I did, but I thought maybe looking for friends outside my church embassy could be good for me. I invited Sophie, the very first person I met at Brookes, and her boyfriend. I invited Ben, who was from England, and I invited Mac, who was from Philadelphia, the only other American in our class.
It was cold that night, and I remember feeling grateful they had made the trek to my house despite the weather. Sophie taught me how to cook curry in my ill-equipped kitchen while the guys hovered around. We ate in my living room with plates on our laps and talked and laughed for a long time. Mac brought chestnuts he had purchased from a street vendor, and we toasted them in a sauté pan to have for dessert, while Ben unwrapped Cadbury chocolate bars to break off and share. Curry, chestnuts, chocolate. It was an odd meal, but in the middle of it, I started to feel like myself again. I felt all wrapped up in the smoky aroma of the chestnuts. I felt like I might survive this country after all, maybe, and that the people who appeared to be nothing like me were actually a lot like me, and I was a lot like them. Maybe.
Eventually, a little while after that dinner, my solitary walks began to more frequently include other people, friends like Sophie and Ben and friends I met at St. Aldate’s and elsewhere. I walked the city streets with someone beside me. I walked the path on the Thames while having a conversation. I noticed the beauty and the darkness of the water and the rustling in the trees and made comments about it to the people who were with me rather than taking the sights in alone. Companionship livened up an already beautiful landscape before me. It’s amazing how people can do that.
But I had to take that first step toward others. I had to be willing to allow my lonely walks to be interrupted by the presence of someone else. The leaves and the streets and the buildings that fall, though lovely, turned out to be lousy friends.
Sometimes I think this world is a long and spread out Tower of Babel. You don’t have to move to England in order to feel like a foreigner. It might feel like no one speaks your language in your own home, school, or workplace. The most familiar things in life can cause us to feel the loneliest at times. And loneliness is the absolute worst. But it can be effective at changing us for the better, forcing the layers off and allowing us to do brave things, appreciate relationships, and find friendships with people we didn’t think we could befriend.
Submitting to Babel allowed me to feel connected to those around me. Before the dinner party, I thought I had to understand all the right words and phrases and had to de-Americanize myself in order to have anyone over to my house or in order to make real friends in England. Once I realized I could never get to this place, at least not until I was reincarnated as an English person, I could accept my ignorance and lack of knowledge and simply have people over for dinner. The first of many nights I had people over for dinner.
* * *
* C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 2.
3
My Front Light
On a cold night in November, just before Thanksgiving, I walked into The Eagle and Child. You know this pub. The Inklings—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others—made it famous, and much homage is paid to them on the walls there. The Eagle and Child has sma
ll-paned glass windows that are very storybook-esque. Their glow lures in the passersby from the street, making them wonder what’s inside. Its ceilings are low and threaten tall people like me. There are brick fireplaces not in use, and it’s a bit maze-like in layout. Instead of one large room, there are several little rooms that lead in and out of each other—uncomfortable for those prone to claustrophobia but too charming to complain about.
I followed a long, dark wooden bar to the back, where my friend Gabriel and his party had set up camp.
My cycling buddy Gabriel was moving back home to France, and this was his going-away party. I had known Gabriel for only a few weeks, but a few weeks in Oxford, being the pressure cooker that it was, felt more like months, maybe even years. And so I considered Gabriel one of my good friends at the time.
We had adopted the routine of riding our bikes home from Sunday night church together. We lived in the same neighborhood, and I liked having a riding partner in the dark. I wondered who would cycle me home after Gabriel left.
I found everybody in the back room of the pub. I greeted Gabriel, who smiled big and excitedly. Gabriel had a running energy inside him, always threatening to escape. It made him light and springy, like Pooh’s friend Tigger but with brighter eyes and an accent. I began the process of removing my winter clothing—gloves, coat, scarf, hat—and looked around at the others gathered in the room. It was dark. I squinted trying to make out everyone’s faces.
Strangers, I could tell. Each one.
Gabriel and I didn’t have many mutual friends, probably because we had only been friends since September. As this realization settled in, I began to feel silly for attending his going-away party. Going-aways are the type of party you attend when you really know someone, not when you’ve gone on a few bike rides together.
English Lessons Page 3
