Speak, Memory--Ch. 13

"I do not know if anyone will ever go to Cambridge in search of the imprints which the teat-cleats on my soccer boots have left in the black mud before a gaping goal or follow the shadow of my cap across the quadrangle to my tutor's stairs; but I know that I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist's shrill as I passed beside the reverend walls." --Vladimir Nabokov, page 269

I just love the way that Nabokov describes his memories of his college years in this chapter. I'm not even at a "historical" campus and I feel the joy of participating in the rich tradition of a university right now. I've visited Oxford before, which is different from Cambridge, but very similar at the same time. The old, historical colleges of the UK are exquisite--not just in architecture, but in the rich past they embody. I visited Christ College, which is where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien went to school for a time, and I could feel their presence a little. Lewis Caroll also lived and studied at Oxford. There's something wonderful about being a writer in a place that great writers have been and lived and wrote--you are more in tune with them than the average tourist..."with more than a tourist's shrill" is how you really regard the places that they once stood or wrote or dreamed up a scene from one of your favorite stories. Nabokov does a great job of describing that experience for his reader, and the whole nostalgia of college.