Time's Nature
...escape the circle and undo the spell...
Dear Reader,
Adventures come in all sizes and shapes. Some appear grand; traveling the world, accepting an intimidating job, or moving somewhere new. Some adventures are quiet, barely noticeable to the outside observer, such as reading a book, changing your habits, or challenging your perspective on a situation, a relationship, or yourself.
In my opinion, adventures have to do with stepping into the unknown. Thus, this short story is a fitting launch to this newsletter: an adventure in story and image.
While I will be experimenting in a variety of mediums, the following piece is slower-paced and falls firmly into the genre of Literary Fiction. If you enjoy it, please pass the letter along to the community of readers.
Let the adventure begin,
S. C. Durbois
~Time’s Nature~
Rebecca released a breath as the service came to a close. Gothic stone spires rose above her like great wheat-colored trees, arching into a carved latticework of branches far above. At one end of the nave, over the golden framed altar painted with icons, was a rose window. It was too far away for Rebecca to see the designs clearly, but the blue and red patterns in each petal were pleasant enough from a distance. They had the dreamy quality of a Marc Chagall painting.
People rose from the ancient wooden pews on either side of her, filing out into the center mosaic aisles to go about their Sundays. She kept her seat, head swimming. The Eucharist had prodded her stomach to wake and make itself known. The sip of communion wine on top of it didn’t help her dehydrated brain. It was summer, and perhaps the sunniest summer England had ever seen. Since she arrived, there had been maybe three rainy days, which was not the England she grew up reading about and watching in movies. She wasn’t complaining though, just counting herself lucky.
Rebecca looked around Christ Church Cathedral, trying to take in the beauty despite the persistent growling in her gut. She had come to Oxford with the vague idea of seeing the place where the people she admired and respected had cut their quills and developed their craft as storytellers. What was it about Oxford that attracted such creative and academic geniuses like J. K. Rowling, Lewis Carrol, C. S. Lewis, and others? The first few weeks had been enthralling, overwhelming if she was being honest. It was hard to take it all in, as if she were a sponge afloat on an ocean, incapable of taking in any more of the saltwater and was now sinking to the bottom.
Three weeks ago, shortly after arriving in Oxford, she stood in the courtyard of her host college, looking up at the library directly opposite her dorm. It loomed over her, somehow all the more crushing for how unremarkable the exterior looked. It was filled with books; books the brilliant had written and the brilliant had studied, both students and teachers. It was too much—too much to take in. She simply could not absorb all the information, all the learning Oxford had to offer. She couldn’t understand how the greats had become themselves, and as much as she wanted to throw herself into the task of reading and finding out, she was overwhelmed by the understanding that she would only be there a couple more weeks. True comprehension took years, a lifetime.
A deer, carved out of the stone above the library entrance, had looked down at her. The childlike simplicity of the feature regarded her with encouragement, as if to say I’m not so complicated as you think, just come in, just start. She had looked back at it, her mouth a flat line.
Tourists dawdled as they left the nave, taking photos. Sundays were odd. Taking a sabbath, a break from classes to just rest sounded lovely in theory, but what was she supposed to do with all that empty time? She had a story due by Friday, and after weeks of trying to pull ideas together, she had nothing good, no real stories. How did all those famous writers do it? If she went back and sat in her dorm, the stress of the unfinished story would drive her insane. Her stomach bit again. Her blood sugar dropped.
First order of business: lunch. Rebecca got to her feet and exited the church slowly, taking it all in as she left. She braced herself to scope out a café, but she should have known it wouldn’t be difficult. She was in England after all. Directly across the street from Christ Church College, Café Loco was printed in slim white font across dark blue awnings. It was classy, but not in a way to make her feel like she needed a Gucci purse to go inside. Closer to the elegance of a scrapbook: quaint, lacey, a bit indie, but still sophisticated.
She entered, asked for a menu, and looked over the prices. Being a college student abroad, treating herself out was something of a luxury. But the prices were in her range, so she allowed herself to relax and look around, waiting to be seated. The long back wall was painted with gestural lines in a pallet of purples, blues, and olive greens. The longer she looked, the more shapes and designs merged into an illustration. She looked around more closely at the details of the shop, taking in the choice accents, a suspicion beginning to form. Across the back wall, the mad hatter and his friends enjoyed a strange and leisurely tea party.
The waitress told her she could take any seat she wanted and she would be right over with the menu. Being Sunday afternoon, many of the tables were already filled, though a few in the middle of the cafe were open and clean. Rebecca hesitated: these were right in the middle of the traffic flow and the noise. She wanted something more private.
All the tables around the edges of the room were taken. No wait, there was one table free. It was tucked out of sight to the right of the entrance, surrounded by white paneled windows, saturated with sunlight from the street, with an uninterrupted view of Christ Church College and its neighboring meadow.
Hardly believing her good fortune, Rebecca took her seat before any new guests got any funny ideas. Rebecca scanned the menu, excitement transmuting her hunger into something more positive. After ordering tea with cakes, she sat back and looked out, soaking up the warmth of the sun and the view. She felt herself beginning to rest now that she didn’t need to shove along with the rest of the eager tourists.
There was so much of Oxford to see, and the desire to go and explore swelled in her mind. She really did have a lot of work to do. Perhaps she could split the difference, get her books and go find another café, but would that be a waste of a Sunday? Caught between conflicting tides, a memory came swimming to the surface, something a woman from back home (where they served grape juice for communion instead of wine) had said to her:
Rebecca, I know you, you’re going to ruin this experience for yourself with work. You’re in school, yes, but really… this is a vacation. Enjoy it.
Rebecca grinned; the last part had been an order. Right, okay, this is a vacation, I’m in Oxford, the land of visionaries. Time to explore.
She pulled out a paper map folded and creased in places from navigating these streets the last few weeks in her spare moments. But looking over all the little lines and names, she suddenly felt crushed: there were so many places to go, to investigate. She would need weeks to walk down every street, months to visit every place, and years to fully understand the heart of this town.
She had an afternoon. Exhaustion ached in her bones.
Then she spied a postcard she bought a few days earlier. She had tucked it into the paper map because it was a simplified version of the layout of Oxford. A handful of notable icons drawn in larger detail made Oxford look like the fantasy land of a children’s storybook. There were a few lines of verse in the opposing corners:
Sweet city of the dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening,
lovely at all times shelies.
Matthew Arnold
~
Know ye her secret none can utter?
Hers of the book, the triple crown?
Still on the spire the pigeons flutter;
Still by the gateway flits the gown;
Still on the street, from corbel & gutter:
faces of stone look down.
“Q.”
~
Her waitress arrived with her teapot, cup, a small pitcher of milk, and a plate full of cakes. She set it all on the table with a business-like urgency only the British (and perhaps the Irish) understand the event of tea demands. In awe at the beauty of it all, she poured her tea, mixed in the milk, and took a long drink. Her eyes closed as contentment stole over her. The warmth spread across her chest, easing the pressure in her mind, and stroking her mouth with a quality of rich flavor she had not found in the states. She took another sip and then tasted each cake, feeling herself wake up as the caffeine food hit her system.
Rebecca reread the prose on the postcard. She took an odd comfort in the verses; so even poet academics who lived and studied here could not explain the secrets of this place, this city of tooled spires which felt grown out of some fantasy. They had captured in a few lines the impossible mystery and confounding beauty of the place she’d wanted to visit since she was a little girl. This was the place she’d read of, where the dreams of imagination came true; where wardrobes led to winter forests; where young girls went on strange and brilliant adventures; and where magic was possible.
She looked out the window, savoring the taste of cake and the warmth of the tea, thinking.
All right then, adventure is stepping into the unknown.
Rebecca finished her breakfast and paid. She then turned off her phone, crossed St. Aldates street, through the iron gates, and past the curated garden beds into Christ Church meadow.
Being the height of summer, the park was vivid green and the trees were heavy with leaves, providing cover for the many tourists out. Rebecca walked forward, surprised at the wide-open space after the persistent company of stone buildings lined up next to each other like a collage of impressive architectural feats. The gardens drew her eye, laid out in a precise order that was its own beauty. A cultivated wilderness kept safely behind a tan pebbled walkway created the natural border between the park, and the gabled roofs sheltering windows and carved turrets of the city beyond. The space felt almost too bare, and not the most promising start to her adventure. Shouldn’t she be getting lost in a back alleyway somewhere?
The noise of crowds grew louder as she walked towards the trees. There was cheering, and through the branches she glimpsed flashes of blue, people lining the shores. There must be some kind of punting race on the River Cherwell. She took a left instead of investigating and walked along until she came to Rose Lane. The path emptied into a street with a towering poplar tree but was otherwise unremarkable. She frowned. Why was it called Rose Lane?
A wooden fence interspersed with dense trees blocked from sight whatever was on the other side. A sign indicated these were the gardens, but the doors were locked. She kept looking, and eventually found one that was open. Slipping through the gate, she found herself surrounded by manicured trees creating walls like a maze. She walked forward, her trepidation growing. She was just about to turn around, nervous someone would catch her out and accuse her of trespassing, when she passed a corner and froze at the sight.
In the center of a private garden room, laid out in neat rows, bushes as high as her waist brimmed with roses. They were organized by color. The white ones reflected the unmuted sun so brightly she couldn’t look at them for long. There were pink ones of varying shades from dusk to vivid strawberry, as well as deep wine-red. The heat of the sun radiated along her skin as the pebbles crunched beneath her feet. She looked at the postcard and then the paper map. There was nothing, no indication that this little rose garden, sliced from heaven and dropped snuggly between these trees, was here and open to the public. So then, even if she followed the map perfectly there were things she would miss if she didn’t look carefully at where she was.
She meandered through the garden and then continued down Rose Lane, scanning the street. As much as the garden filled her with wonder, Rebecca was conscious of the time. If the adventure, the plot twist, could hurry up and happen, then she could go back and get some reading done, maybe take another go at her short story.
Following the lane, she came out onto High Street and was promptly confronted by a smooth edifice of interlocking stone, framed windows with curved and pointed agrees, and gothic carvings around Latinate words above the door frames. Two sculpted monks guarded the portico. Rebecca watched as students came out of it. A nearby sign identified the castle-like building as Magdalen College.
She probably wasn’t allowed back there. She wasn’t a student of that school, but for the moment, she was a student at Oxford through her summer program. She walked across the street and slipped through the doorway with feigned confidence in case anyone was watching: of course, she belonged here.
The passage led into a broad courtyard with a green in the center, lined with a tan walkway. Yellow-white hydrangea floated like foam in a sea of verdant leaves bordering the gothic buildings. Whether these were dormitories or classrooms she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t want to push her luck with how far she could explore the facilities. Instead, Rebecca turned right into a corridor that appeared to lead towards some sort of a park or forest. She continued to follow the path until finally she passed through a huge pair of wrought iron gates drawn apart.
A forest opened before her. It was huge. The path progressed forward, but would she even still be in Oxford if she kept walking? She might get lost. She looked back the way she had come, wondering if it was time to call her adventure to a close. She was technically on top of all her assignments, but her story was due by the end of the week and she’d struggled to come up with anything. Writing something decent would take time.
Rebecca sighed, turned back, and a large stone circle mounted to the stone wall caught her eye. She would have ignored it except she recognized the name at the bottom. She paused and then walked over to read the inscription.
What the Bird Said Early this Year
~
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.
C.S. Lewis
~
She looked down the gravel path disappearing into the forest.
The well-worn track…
Movement in the field caught her eye. Long brown bodies galloped over the grass. Deer, she realized, spying the does and several large stags with massive antlers.
An image flashed through her mind: the simple grey stone deer…
Just come in, just start.
Looking down at her from the entrance to the library, beckoning her to get lost; explore…
Faces of stone look down… Know ye her secret none can utter?
Longing surged in her to know those secrete, or at least to try. Suddenly she wanted nothing more, nothing so much in all her life, than to escape the circle and undo the spell.
Quick, quick, quick quick!
She rushed down the walk.
The trees were huge, much thicker around the trunk than she was used to. The forest had the feeling of a great hall, like a throne room, wych elms lining the path like great pillars, creating a bower arching over her. The farther she walked the more the wood opened up. The path was well established, winding deeper and deeper.
She began to lose track of herself, her breathing slowing with her pace. The curtain of green enclosed around her, muting the noise of the city and granting shade from the day. Nothing. Nothing mattered except right here and now. The urgency fell away. She watched the wind blow the leaves, rippling off the surface of the nearby pond. Her chest expanded. Branches opened up, leading to a field filled with silk ribbons of grass, small purple heads nodding in the sky’s breath.
The path curved into the woods with a mind of its own, deeper and deeper. The independence of the trees melted away as verdure organized around an intelligible pattern. Human hand became more obvious in well-trimmed shrubbery planted close together. Rebecca’s eyes brightened and she walked forward, curious to see where the path would lead. English wood fell behind as she entered a corridor. A maze? The hedging created a wall several feet taller than her, showing just the blue sky beyond.
She kept walking and walking and was just starting to wonder if she should turn around, worrying that she was getting herself lost, when she rounded a corner and stepped into a room. She blinked in surprise, her brain working to adjust. No, it wasn’t a room, the sky was wide open above her, but the tall green walls ran away from her in a straight line, turning at perfect corners and going on until they met the back wall with two more right corners. She was in a long chamber with only one entrance.
In the middle, a pool sat immediately center. It was exactly proportional, framed by the grass like a matted picture. In the middle of the pool water overflowed down the concentric circles of a stone fountain, rippling across the clear surface.
The precise measurements and symmetry, in the middle of a wild grove left to its own devices for the last century, startled her. There wasn’t even a plaque or sign, and she knew the British, with their long history, loved their signs. It took her a minute to be certain that this strange forest room really was there on purpose, by the intentional will of a human, and not just dropped there out of the sky by whimsy.
Any moment now, the queen of hearts would jump out of the hedges, demanding “off with her head!” The feeling was so strong, Rebecca actually looked around, grinning despite herself. Foolish, she knew, but she felt certain Carroll must have found himself lost in a garden like this at some point.
She walked around a few times, still expecting something—there must be something special about this place. Something must happen. Nothing happened. She gave the room one last look, soaking in the unassuming pleasure of a place with no signs to guide you there, before strolling out.
Further up and further in, she continued until finally deciding it was time to head back. She looked around. The path was gone. When had she wandered off it? She picked a direction she thought was right and walked for fifteen minutes straight, but now she felt even more lost than before. The forest started to blend together. There was no point in panicking; that would only make it take longer to find the path.
Fear coiled inside her but she stopped herself and started listening. Maybe she would hear someone and could ask for directions. Nothing but the ordinary sounds of the forest: wind brushing through the leaves, birds cooing and calling to each other in their own harmonies, even the chirp of the crickets. No people. No, wait, there.
She turned around and began to wander towards the sound. Several minutes later she stumbled out of the woods on the side of a riverbank. She looked down the canal. The boats had passed. She watched them, forlorn; she may be out of the woods, but she saw no clear way back, and re-entering the forest did not feel terribly promising at this point. The sun was descending though still high, but how long would it take her to find her way out as she wandered?
“You lost?”
Rebecca looked down the river the other direction. A man standing on the back of a punt was gliding towards her, propelling himself along with an iron pole he pushed off the riverbed. This must be the Cherwell. She pasted a smile onto her face, all the self-awareness the forest had peeled from her coming crashing back.
“I’m fine thanks,” she said with a wave. She turned back to the woods, feigning more confidence than she felt.
“You sure?” he asked. He slowed the vessel, angling it toward the shore.
“Yep,” she nodded. She braced herself to back inside. Taking boat rides with strange men by herself in a foreign country was definitely not on the agenda today. Her mother would kill her.
“Wait, I recognize you,” he said. Rebecca glanced at him, wondering if she was going to needed to make a rude and swift exit. “From the college. You’re part of the summer program,” he said. She looked at him closer.
Silver glinted off his left ring finger from where the sun caught it, his hands wrapped around the pole. He did look familiar, and his accent was American, not British.
“You sure you’re not lost?” he asked. She hesitated.
“Yeah, alright, I’m lost.”
“Hop in, the Magdalen College Boat House isn’t too far ahead.”
He grounded the boat ashore and she stepped onto the long deck, taking a low seat in the hull. He pushed off and they glided along.
“I’m Peter by the way.”
“Rebecca.”
“Having a nice walk?” he asked, polite.
She shook her head. “It was a stupid idea, shouldn’t have gone by myself. I should have just stayed at the college and studied,” she said. Peter didn’t respond, so she tried to explain.
“I never know what to do with Sundays. How are you supposed to rest when you know you’ve got a ton of work hanging over you? What?” she asked when he chuckled.
“Sunday, it’s backwards day; everything goes upside down,” he shrugged.
“What do you mean?”
Peter paused to think, pushing them along at a slow steady pace.
“Have you ever noticed how, on Sunday, the more you push to get work done, the less energy you have to do it?”
Rebecca thought about the exhaustion overwhelming her in Café Loco when she considered going back to her dorm to study.
“But that’s normal, not backwards,” she pointed out.
“I’ll bet you get more tired on Sunday than any other day,” Peter hedged. She kept her face blank, unwilling to agree, so he continued. “It’s because you’ve just finished a long work week, and there’s nothing left to give. It’s the law of diminishing returns; and if you keep going, you deplete yourself of even the germ of energy required to get you going on Monday. It’s like how farmers leave a field fallow for a year.”
“So, then what are you supposed to do on Sundays?”
“The opposite of what you would normally do: whatever you want.”
Rebecca stared at him for a moment. “I still don’t see how that’s supposed to help you get work done. Won’t you just fall behind?”
Peter shook his head. “The opposite. Look,” he said, seeing her frustration growing, “Sundays are like punts; you’re not in a motorboat anymore, you can’t just point and go. No power engine or forward steering.”
Peter pulled up the pole and then let it slide through his fingers till it hit the ground. With both hands he pushed off, angling the pole to the left. The low boat turned to the right, gliding smoothly across the water.
“Whichever direction you want to go, do the opposite. You want to get work done? Take the day off: give yourself a break. You’ll get more done when you come back.”
He navigated the riverbank with practiced movements. The surface of the water stayed smooth, only the smallest glassy ripples echoing from the nose of the boat. She watched his movements more closely: whichever direction he wanted to go, to avoid another punt or pass a river bend, he steered the opposite direction. There was an unhurried rhythm to it.
“Want to try?”
She was about to say no, no thank you, not wanting to make a fool of herself, but the words stuck in her throat.
“Yes.”
She eased herself up, careful not to rock the boat, but it was built wide, solidly balanced in the water. He passed her the rod. She gripped tight, but it wasn’t unmanageably heavy. Peter stepped past her and took her place in the center. He stretched and made himself comfortable, reclining with his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. The punt drifted. She tried to mimic the posture she had seen, legs braced apart to give a firm stance as he pushed off the bottom. She let the pole lower through her hands, nervous she might drop it. What would they do if she did?
“You know what I think would be stupid?” he asked. She saw he was grinning, eyes still closed. “Staying inside on a day like today when you could be out getting lost in Oxford.”
It took her a few strokes to get the feel of it, and then they were heading too close to the shore. She tilted the rod as she’d watch Peter do, and the boat did as she asked, heading in exactly the opposite direction. Water and trees slid past them, soft as a dream, and Rebecca fell into a cadence, learning to listen to the boat and respond accordingly. It surprised her when they passed around the next corner and instead of an uninterrupted bank of trees, she saw an arching stone bridge and a boathouse painted yellow in the late afternoon sunlight. The busy noise of The High, pedestrians and cars passing over the bridge, intruded on their calm.
“Nice job,” Peter said. She guided the boat to shore. When they bumped up against the dock, Peter held out a hand for the pole. She gave it to him, and then he took her other hand helping her as she stepped out of the boat. She glanced back with a startled ‘thank you.’
“Sure thing. Have a nice day,” he waved, already turning back to settle his account with the boathouse porter.
Rebecca wandered back, heading in the general direction of her college, but not quickly. She let the roads and side streets take her where the whim struck.
She walked beneath a bridge arching between two buildings. It was modeled on a bridge in Venice that prisoners walked over on the way to their last earthly judgment.
She passed a building with faces carved out of stone, a theater where women were first allowed to collect their Oxford degrees beside men less than a century ago.
This led her to a circular building filled with books housed beneath a domed roof. It was situated in the middle of a wide-open courtyard with enormous gaps between the cobblestones.
Navigating these, she meandered down a corridor in-between a church and two gold-painted fawns carved out of corbels which held up the wooden arch of a door.
Just past these, after the lantern post, was the main street she looked for, where the three martyrs were burned.
Her feet began to slow even though the night was drawing on; she wasn’t ready to go back yet. Not at all. She saw a pub with a sign painted in bright colors; a great bird with wings stretched in flight, playing the part of the stork. She smiled. Now, here was a place where stories were told.
She stepped inside, took a table at the back, and ordered her dinner. Settling in to wait, the first lines of a story, flashes of scenes, bubbled to the surface of her consciousness. Backwards day indeed. She pulled out her notebook and pen. After a moment of thought, she began.
This year, this year the summer came true…
