Reflections

I love this photograph of the Cam and King’s College taken on the Backs in Cambridge. Lucy took it on an afternoon we spent exploring both the shops and the colleges of my favorite English city. We had encountered a friendly porter at Trinity College who had given us a history of undergraduates from Sir Isaac Newton to Prince Charles, and who filled us in on the details of the famous Chariots of Fire footrace. It’s amazing to think of all the Nobel Prize winners, all the great scientists, writers and politicians who have sauntered casually on the grassy quadrangles of Cambridge and to wonder which of the current crop of students will achieve distinction.

One of the delights of discovering the ageless project is the reflective quality of the writers. Younger writers lead busy, interesting but frenetic lives and the journalers with birthdates in the twenties and thirties have lived through these periods and can sort out the wheat from the chaff. I have greatly enjoyed reading Goldendaze-Ginnie, because she seems to have a similar blogging philosophy to me. Here’s her encounter with an ill-starred Cambridge student, a poet who, had she lived, would now be 74.