Ghostbusting

Thought you were done with me, eh? Think again fools. I've been a bit too busy to update the past few weeks, but here I am, sneaking back to share some stories. I want to start writing about this beginning-of-the-end phase with two trips I took the first week of May.

The first trip was to a familiar place, Wroxton Abbey, a college where I studied Shakespeare last summer with a group from Saint Michael's. I had been talking to my friend Sean about the possibility of going back, and we agreed it would be foolish if I didn't take the short trip over to Wroxton while I'm still so close.

Wroxton is a small village in Oxfordshire, close to the larger town of Banbury. This might seem an apt opportunity to rehash the usual verb associated with English villages, "nestled," or with English counties, "in the heart of..." Not exactly true in this context. Long roads separate the villages of this region, and the village itself is in North Oxfordshire, not exactly the heart. I like this idea, that Wroxton is resisting the language of its location.

Anyway, I arrived at the college and had lunch with the dean, Nicholas Baldwin, whom our group came to know well last summer. After lunch and a short tour through the house, I set off to walk the grounds for a few hours.

If you haven't assumed this yet, I should say loud and clear that I have never walked more in my life than I have this semester. Daily averages have tended to be in the 10-12 mile range since January. I probably walked about that much in Wroxton. The abbey and village are contained spaces, though there is a public footpath that rambles through the woods for some time. Walking by the same houses and fields by different ways made me feel a bit intrusive, as if locals might have noticed this stranger ambling about for hours might be problematic.

Here's what the walk looked like:

One thing I remember quite vividly from those two weeks at Wroxton last summer was the unpredictability and inevitability of the rain there. On my Wroxton-redux walk, the same frustration occurred to me, as the rain would pour for thirty seconds, then disappear for an hour and return for a minute, ad infinitum.

I have learned many lessons from walking this semester, though one seemed most apparent to me on the grounds of Wroxton: it is the lesson of looking for patterns. An example: I walked by bluebells, I had never seen them there before, or did not remember them being in that place. Having followed a different path for a few minutes, I had forgotten where the bluebells were. I walked across a grassy bridge, turned the corner, passed over a knoll, and took a new path; when I looked to my feet I found them again. They were the very same bluebells, somehow appearing to me in a different patch of dirt than before. So this is it: things start to make sense as a whole when I wander.

It might not be a very tangible lesson, though I believe it is important. Being alone in the woods, albeit the contained and maintained college grounds, I wondered about communication in nature. It is inevitable that having last heard human voices a few hours prior, I would become curious about what the trees might be saying as they squealed and creaked.

And from these thoughts, I turned to my memories of the place, all bound up within myself. That occurrence of remembering memories proceeded much simpler. An example:

Me and Sean, Wroxton, May 2014

Wroxton, May 2015

So as I walked alone in the abundant presence of nature, I became preoccupied with the idea of absence. How could I not think of absence, in a familiar space with no familiar companions with me? This might all sound very melancholic; despite all that, it was a wondrous day of reunion. I think on that day I recognized a revelation attributed to the writer John Berger, that "The field that you are standing before seems to have the same proportions as your own life" (from "Field," 1971).

Later that week, I set off for the South Downs, a glorious national park in the county Sussex, south of London on the coast. I had one short visit to make on my way through, at Monks House, the former home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, now a museum maintained by the National Trust. I think I've cited VW a few times here before; she's a favorite of mine, in part because I spent my last summer researching and writing about her novels for a fellowship grant.

My walk from Southease station to the village of Rodmell was full of excitement. I went along a dirt road through Southease village, passing over a bridge that looked familiar to me...

From VW's photograph album

I had looked at an online archive of the Woolfs' photograph albums through Harvard University's library before my visit to Monks House, and searched for places and images I could try to find on my way through. I knew she had walked over this bridge many times before to get to Southease station, and that her biographers have speculated that she floated beneath it when she drowned herself in the River Ouse. I never quite believed that a person could will herself to drown with stones in her pockets. Again, inevitably I thought of this as I walked along the river, over large stones lined along the basin.

On the trail to Rodmell, I considered how this landscape might have affected her creative process, specifically with some of the novels I have read of hers that she wrote at Monks House (namely, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years). She loved London, and though she was removed from the city against her will - for the sake of her health - the pastoral lifestyle of her Victorian  predecessors - Hardy, Trollope, Thackeray - fostered some of her greatest writing.

The footpath that led me to the village offered some incredible visions (as Woolf might have said) of the South Downs.

At Monks House, I found myself disappointed with the general scheme of the place. It was overcrowded with very pretentious conversations between very old English pensioners - which is to be expected. Most of the house is restricted to visitors. In fact, only three rooms of the house are open for public viewing. Even in the garden and beside her writing cottage, I couldn't be contemplative or thoughtful.

VW's grave

From the Woolfs' album

From the Woolfs' album 

VW in the garden at Monks House

VW in the garden at Monks House, with her dog 

The living room, VW's desk in the far corner

It would be difficult to choose a quote of hers to place here. All in all, the visit was not what I hoped it would be; however, having spent a lot of time with her writing, I know that reading is the most authentic form of communication I have with this writer, whom I know has had an enormous effect on how I understand the world. When I left the property, I returned to a recurring thought from other historically-themed trips I've taken; that we cannot relive history no matter our intentions or methods for attempting to do so.

I had a while left before my train back, so I explored the village a bit more. A churchyard is just behind the Woolfs' garden, so I poked around for a while.

A tomb with a view

I spent the rest of my time following the trails that wend around the South Downs. The sky was sunny and a comfortable wind blew over the hills. While I walked back to Southease, I remembered a picture of her in the woods around Monks House.

As I trudged through thickets of nettles and ivy, I had to think about why I came to the area and why I am fascinated by Woolf's life. Woolf's writing does have a spectral quality to it, the senses of mystery and unknowing taking shape in the minds of characters. The arduous task of reading her books might be lightened by the idea of "Ghostbusting," the role of the reader as detective in the great ghost story of history. Doesn't she look a bit like a ghost in this picture?

I don't think there is much joy to be found in trying to relive someone else's life - not for me, anyway. The joy is not so much in replicating, but rather in finding a unique experience of one's own along the way. The trip to Sussex was most joyful in the midst of those trails over the hills of the South Downs. Similarly, I recognized my joy at Wroxton when I discovered and encountered new spaces, things, ideas - while the moments during which I could only think of the past made me sad. Maybe I was drawn to these two places by an intuitive drive to find ghosts, and what I did actually find is still just as ambiguous to me.