Et in Arcadia ego: Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

 I drank soda water and smoked and freted

until light began to break 

 and the rustle of a rising breeze 

turned me back to my bed.  
Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited

 

April 2022: the weather remains oddly cold, dreary.  Where, oh where is our Spring?

Nature's chill sends me back to my relationship with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I am now Charles Ryder at the beginning of the novel, dealing with middle age--some regrets, some peace at where I am.

I came to the novel through the heralded 1981 Granada TV adaptation, which was the most lyrical, visually stunning program anyone had ever seen produced for TV.

The novel was one of many that my father picked up for me in the church thriftstore he and my mother visited every week, quietly building an impressive library for me until I was ready to partake.

The beauty of Brideshead is that it gives several of the ages of man a touchstone: I was in college when Sebastian & Charles seduced a TV generation. It was a thrill to be so young and read so young, to feel an affinity for the elan of their Oxford even in the quads of Rutgers.  Now I feel the weight and lightness of Charles's middle age, loving/understanding with a middle-age depth that the sanctuary light at the end does make all the difference.  (It's a nice touch that the first American edition of the novel was printed with a "sanctuary light" red cover. )

 ******

I first wrote this post several years ago when I had a very visceral reaction to a freakishly cold August. Same now for April 2022.

Thoughts of Brideshead flooded my thinking, along with long forgotten, but very stirring memories of my own visit to Oxford during my college years.

Midautumn has descended into the beauty of April. No, no, I’m not ready. I long for the warmth of air and brightness of the spring sun.

The relentless chill to rain will not last, they say.

This unnatural coldness has a strange affect on memory, summoning long unvisited thoughts. As I put on yet another sweater, Oxford 30 years ago fill my consciousness.

It’s Eights Weeks, and visitors are teeming everywhere. I’m with friends of friends at Wadham College boathouse to watch the races, followed by an "End of the Empire" dance.

We see a musical Alice in Wonderland performed in the Christ Church Cathedral Gardens. It is a magical, site-specific event: the Dean of Christ Church in Dodgson's day was Dr. Liddell & it was his daughters that Carroll wrote for. The Dean's Garden is next to the Cathedral Garden. The chestnut tree in the Dean's Garden is the one in which the Cheshire Cat sat, and Alice's little green door joins the two gardens. I feel like I have gone beyond the looking glass.

We attend a sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral, the exquisite lines of Victoria Missa O Quam Gloriosum soaring up to Heaven. It was my fist experience of an English choir, and I did not know the tradition of boy sopranos. I kept looking for the women who were singing such extraordinary notes.

Then over to the Turf for lunch. In memory there is much sunshine and warmth and beauty.

These real experience of Oxford entwine in my heart with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

In the coldness of August I feel his epithet for book 1: Et in Arcadia ego: the haunting Latin phrase on the tomb in Poussin’s pastoral painting, considered to be uttered by Death, “I am also in Arcadia.” I quietly despair the mirror Ryder is for me "I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hopper."

The cold days in a New York August--a memento mori in the summer of a life. Yet. I am glad to be reminded of mortality, and Waugh, but thrilled that the warmth and sun of the season are coming back. It’s not over, there is eternally more. Something Captain Charles Ryder himself "found this morning, burning anew amid the old stones." I quickened my pace to the subway . . .

 Mapeel     4/26/2022     current events, literature, Travel