As classes begin, I have an excerpt from a novel — not even the whole thing — for your digestion. It is a passage from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a wartime novel about an aristocratic family and an ambitious young man who joins their circle. Here is how Waugh describes the narrator’s time at Oxford, where he makes first contact with that family:
“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”
This novel is about friendship, love and tragedy. As any reader of the novel knows, the garden that Waugh places in the city’s heart is religious faith, one which the protagonist celebrates throughout his career as an “architectural painter” and through his love for the Marchmain family.
Both loves typify the possibilities of a spiritually infused higher culture. Like many novels, Brideshead is about the yearning for a truly moral order that is glimpsed so darkly even in our own evening entertainments: bedroom comedies about eternal marriages and their dissolution, news-hour tragedies about the fall of excellent men and women, and even whodunits that force us to ask the most difficult questions about punishment and reward.
This summer, while in conversation over dinner with a Catholic colleague, he told me that he sometimes rereads the beginning — just the beginning — of Brideshead. He reads it with grave guilt, because he is reading just to enjoy the temporal treasures of love and friendship, without reading through to the spiritual payoff. Without advocating that the guilty be led to guilty delights, why not dwell upon the early part of that novel? What is the meaning of the university, whether it is Oxford or Ohio, outside the search for knowledge of that garden; knowledge that is gained by asking questions. What is the character of this garden? What are its GPS coordinates? Is it locked and is it licit or illicit to jump the fence? What if, waiting within, were all the treasures of intellectual cultivation, ready to be put to use? What price, then, hesitation?
As long as The Princeton Review has Ohio University ranked among the top party schools nationally, the faculty and administration have a responsibility to offer alternatives to a very conventional acculturation into the “youth” culture that many students came here with the ambition and the talent, frankly, to outgrow. In Athens, of all places, there should be that “low door in the wall” about which Waugh so eloquently wrote: The door that wins arguments, or leads to public goods such as prestige, or affords self-knowledge, or true friendship. If truth be told, I think that Waugh should more clearly have argued that the garden not overlooked by any window is the university itself.
The first adult, intellectual steps one takes are through that low door, obscure and not easy of access. They are taken at the risk that your peers, friends, or even family will laugh at you for admitting that you don’t have all the answers, and at the risk that you will seem ridiculous because you’re eager to put your received views to the test. Self-examination will seem ridiculous precisely to those from whom you received those ideas, and, in short, it will be a confusing time. But don’t fret — the modern university is not Kafka’s Castle, with doors leading only to doors and then more doors. It may sometimes look that way, but as every reader of Dan Brown knows (often in spite of Dan Brown himself), if something is very valuable, wouldn’t it be very cleverly hidden from view?
Christopher Barker is the incoming Thomas W. Smith postdoctoral fellow at the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions.
