two excerpts (winter rereading)

From the window, courtyard behind Holywell Street, 2004

I.
At the end of Cornmarket Street, near the Lloyd's Bank, comes a confluence of four roads, making an irregular sort of cross which one could possibly see from an aircraft. There is no centre in Oxford, only different points of reference, from each of which the conception of the city is altered slightly. Thus one never feels completely rooted, and ascending three floors in a building of the New Bodleian Library gives one, before entering the reading-room, a view of Holywell Street from above. One senses, from that window, how distinct and well marked out each section of the city is, each partially unknown to the other, each partially undiscovered to its own inhabitants--for, from above, Holywell Street, with its repetitive up-and-down movements of cyclists and pedestrians, the faint white fringe of its pavement, and the houses on either side appearing quite oddly rearranged from this angle, seems, in the disturbing perspective gained by height and distance, a place that will never become familiar or old. The orderly, disappearing line of traffic, the activity on the roads, harmonious and self-dispersing, the unreality of the scene and one's relationship with is unreality, are exposed and encompassed by this view from a third-story window, which reveals absences between one lane and another, one house and another, untenanted, unexplainable spaces, and that absence over all of these, on eye-level with the window, so that the places one has walked through or passed daily lose their known features. It takes something as small and unsuspected as this, a change of view and altitude, to bring one's foreignness to one's self, the feeling of being separated from the routines that one thought attached one to the city, of being secretly in transit. Similarly, at the junction of four roads at the end of Cornmarket Street, the minor change in gradient of one of the roads, St Aldate's, the way it dips downward, so that the line at its end is known to be a false line, a border concealing and sheltering a second and more distant border at that end of the city, marks, in the midst of everything, an unnoticed but real departure. In a city so little known, so full of such instants, such escapes, events, and the memory of events become temporary stays; Shehnaz, Mandira's room, the walks taken together, a meeting with Sharma, reassure one that one has not been in Oxford alone, that one has shared it with others, till the solitary experience of being in transit returns, and friends and acquaintances are borne away by this city, which renews itself, and becomes, once more, strange to itself. It is the city that remains, a kind of meeting place, modern and without identity, but deceptively archaic, that unobtrusively but restlessly realigns its roundabouts and lanes and landmarks, so that it never becomes one's own, or anyone else's.

II.
....the street, with its daily, inconsequential academic excitement and drama, has become indissoluble from the inner life of our early meetings, and Oxford, its climate and architecture, seems not so much as a setting as a part of the heart of our friendship.

-Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag.