““There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
While I’ve started this weekly dispatch with a quote on unfavourable conditions, in reality, this week was spent at one of the most favourable, conducive places to work, to think and to plant bulbs in one’s intellectual garden. I had planned a week-long summer course in narrative writing at Oxford and this was the heady week of learning, making new friends and looking at the world with fresh eyes.
Sunday was the first class at Oxford and I got introduced to Natalie Goldberg’s Rules of Freewriting. I’ve known Natalie’s work through reading her book The Great Failure so I knew her name and had read her work, but this exercise was a structure for liberation.
While for my drawing practice, I have now started to carve out time and a space (dining table mostly) but writing as a practice hasn’t received the same affection. My mindset was that writing would need blocks of atleast 4-5 hours to produce something of significance and anything less than that time isn’t even worthwhile attempting. Wrong.
I was proved wrong on the very first day of the course. One needs 5 minutes to fill up a page. Only 5 minutes. For a craft that feels intimidating, knowing that 5 minutes added up can make for substantial filling of the diary is an ecstatic thought.
Natalie Goldberg’s rules of free writing that we followed. That’s my tutor, Susannah.
2. On Monday, our tutor took us to Covered Market - a historic market (started in the year 1774) with permanent stalls and shops in a large covered structure in central Oxford. This was my second visit to the market with the first a rushed one. Covered Market trip was one of the most productive lessons for me in learning how to quickly zone into my different senses - of sight, of smell, of taste and hearing and capture my thoughts very quickly on paper - to serve as material for a more fleshed out version later.
While going back to Rewley House, Susannah took the class to her own college where she studied as an undergraduate - St. Peter’s. Oxford’s colleges usually are flanked by an ornate facade and a beautiful well-manicured quadrangles or quads the moment you step inside. The rest of the college building is surrounded by this quad and once you step foot into the quad, the din of the lane outside settles into a quietude that’s extremely conducive to quiet reading or writing. As tourists aren’t allowed to visit colleges, this was a special treat.
3. On Tuesday, after class, I spent about two hours in the Rewley house library writing my essay that was due the next day. Being in a quiet library overlooking the courtyard and writing freehand with no restriction on time was tapping into a new feeling for me. I have been binge watching Ruby Granger’s videos on her time spent at Oxford and a little part of my dream came true that day.
In the evening, we went to Christ Church’s Evensong sung by the cathedral choir and with that, stepped foot in the premises of Christ College - now celebrating its 500th year of existence
4. On Thursday, after turning in my class essay, I went to Blackwells with Paras. Started in 1879, this is the largest academic bookstore in UK and I quickly got overwhelmed. Readers can check in the pictures and see why. The overwhelm also had to do with the fact that for the entire week, I was on daily painkillers nursing a very bad frozen shoulder. Most activities outside class were done begrudgingly and to defer the time lying down in bed and suffering.
5. Friday was the last day of class and we had a full day scheduled. There was class followed by tutorials on our submitted pieces wrapped with a gala dinner in the Rewley House dining hall. I just had an hour to spare to pop into the Ashmolean Museum right next to Rewley and boy was I glad I did that! For the next one hour, I photographed vases after vases of ancient Greek, Egyptian, Roman and Indian origin like a woman possessed. After a constructive tutorial, I went back to the hotel, rested up my frozen shoulder and came back for dinner. Photograph below is my class for the week.
In the front holding the fan is Susannah. Behind Susannah from left to right is me, Suzanne, Gabriele. Behind us from left to right is Li Wen, Lisa, and Gwyneth followed by Ruth and Amanda on the top
6. One of the most important highlights of this week for me was getting introduced to the work of diarists across time. This was our reading list through the week:
The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (my favourite & class favourite too)
Theft By Finding, Diaries Vol 1 by David Sedaris
Atiya Fyzee’s Zamana e Tehsil
Not so often, one compresses a lot of life in a short time and descriptions and ruminations of that time cannot be bound to simple matter-of-fact reporting. However, I did not want to miss out on this ritual. There’s a lot of writing I did during this week and I’ll share some of it perhaps in later posts.