Donald Scherschligt: Fair England

I think there’s something a little bit insane about choosing to see theater, or art museums, or films when one has massive amounts of reading to do and two research papers (yes, two!) to write in only a couple of weeks.

    It’s that point in the semester everyone dreads, where the work starts piling up, the assignments put off for weeks start coming down to the wire, and everyone holes up in coffee shops and hogs the power outlets so that they can finish homework in time. And here I am, seeing four plays in three days, plus a couple films, plus going to art museums. I have just as much work, I remind myself. In the back of my head, the part of me that worries about deadlines is panicking and shouting at me.

    But yesterday, I went to the Tate Britain and got lost amidst the works of JMW Turner. He’s my favorite painter. I’m no art scholar, but I stared at his landscape, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy” for quite a while. Turner takes the title, and the lines of poetry that accompany it, from Byron’s epic poem:

… and now, fair Italy!
Thou are the garden of the world…
Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced
With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.’

    In addition to not being a particularly good art scholar, I am not particularly skilled at analyzing poetry, either. However, Byron, having seen Italy’s fall in recent years, still found beauty in that mess. Where Byron puts words to that idea, Turner puts images.

    I emerged from the museum refreshed and relaxed and with my priorities in line once more. Though it’s easy to become overwhelmed at this point in our trip, it’s far more important, I think, to fight those feelings and remember why we came to England: the country has so much it can teach us, not by sitting in a classroom, but by going out and experiencing the place.

 

Every day, I have tried to go somewhere new, and somewhere familiar: I have tried becoming a regular at a coffee shop in town, while also exploring new bookstores, museum exhibits, and thrift shops. I know my favorite sights to go by down in central London, but I also seek out new neighborhoods and enjoy just walking along the streets or through the parks, discovering what new thing the city has to offer me each day.

    Reading this again, I make it sound much easier on paper. It is hard work to get out into the city. A growing part of me wants to stay in the familiar American comfort of Starbucks. I don’t always get to do what I want during the day while also balancing homework. I still try. Byron got it wrong, I think: fair England is the garden of the world, and I want to wander through it as much as possible before I leave.