Tom M. Wilson

John Fowles died 5 November 2005, a bit over a year and a half ago.  John had lived here, at Belmont House in the small coastal town of Lyme Regis on the south-west coast of England, for around four decades.  He would have seen the light on those cliffs in the distance on many evenings as he sat in his upstairs study and wrote.

Last Wednesday afternoon I arrived in Lyme, the first time I’d been there since John’s death.  I was visiting Sarah Fowles.  As we walked down the hill to look at the recently built ‘John Fowles Path’, a memorial to John’s life here, the high and fading sound of English sea gulls and the gentle wash of the sea below came freshly to my ears.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few years studying John’s writings, and reading his personal journals.  Many of John’s ideas about nature and his attitudes towards the natural world have had a considerable influence on me.  Seeing Sarah again and returning to John’s home was an important experience.

John studied French at New College, Oxford, during the late 1940s.  Charles Drazin, editor of John’s journals, wrote an obituary in the New College journal, seen above, for the man.  Yes, that also happens to be the Oxford college I ended up in last weekend.  A friend of mine is taking up a job teaching French at this same college next year.  The lightning bolt of hazard strikes twice in a row.

This is the front of Belmont House in Lyme Regis.  It has been given to the Landmark Trust and it was strange to see the pink dolphins frozen in stone and the light pink facade, and know that John and Sarah no longer reside within.

I walked around the back of the house the next morning.  The three acre garden is still there, with the area of lawn at the top.  And then I saw what you see above:  yellow flowers growing over the stone sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of growing plants.  The profusion of yellow blooms touched me, it was as though life continued over the still figure of John’s stone goddess in a vidication of his faith in nature.  The man is gone, but the beauty of nature, embodied by the plants that John loved, return anew this year, immortal in the present.

I don’t have time to write now, so just a few words.

My friend Danny’s Bethnelgreen Rd. apartment. Outside London is raining, despite it being summer time. London really doesn’t excite me. Grey skies, expensive public transport, bored faces and slumped shoulders in the hot and over-crowded tube, Indians selling tacky merchandise on the pavement of Bethnelgreen Rd., uninspiring and shoddy architectural styles lining the streets… I’m glad I don’t pay the $250 Australian a week for a room in an apartment here. London is not on the list of charismatic places I’ve been on this trip around the world. Why do Australians flock here?

Now the good things about this city I’ve seen. This is the front door of Maggs Rare Books, a very fine bookshop. I love good front doors.

This is my friend Danny browsing in a photography bookshop in Bloomsbury.

And here are some of the old books at Maggs. Time travellers, full of learning.

Right now I’m off to Lyme Regis in the south-west.

Today I saw this gargolye at New College, Oxford. Its veiled features got me thinking about the way in which universities are not always awake and alert to the reality of an era of environmental crisis.

During the Second World War our governments put much of the professorial brain power within the universities to work on research that was relevant to the war effort. This redirection in the core mission of the university was temporary, and after the war things returned to normal. In 2007 we are faced with a window of ten or so years within which to restrain our carbon economy, or face the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and the permanent extinction of around half the species of life on planet earth. I would suggest that such a situation would be well termed a crisis. I would suggest that such a situation asks for, among other things, the channeling of the intellectual efforts of our university research sector into dealing with this threat. It is true that research into ’sustainability’ issues is a major research priority in many countries, particularly Britain thanks to the Labour government. However, has the academic world as a whole truly woken up to the magnitude of the climate crisis? Are universities being put on a ‘war-time’ footing? No. Look upwards. The man on the tower still hides his eyes behind his hands.

Do universities communicate with the public? Do they try to pass the fruits of their research into the public sphere?

The gold of these gates shines in the sun. The gates are firmly closed. Oxford’s wealthy coffers and tenured scholars are back there somewhere.

The gardens of New College are full of flowers at the moment. I do think that universities should centred around beautiful green spaces, as many of them are. Being in such environments is relaxing, and a state of biophilia-induced calm is a good base from which to engage in clear, concentrated mental activity. Mathew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’, an Oxford man I believe, is an appropriate pastoral for the practicing prof to emulate.

But how far away from the real world, how deeply inside the academic sanctuary, can academics afford to rest?