Cambridge is a kind of anti-House-of-Leaves1—larger on the outside than the inside. Viewed on a map, from above, it is all open courtyards and expansive playing fields, but at street level the city reveals itself as maze of winding alleys and narrow bridges. The center of Cambridge, where the oldest colleges sit, is a warren of secret spaces and walled-off greens; public streets make up just a tiny part of its total area. Untraversable portions of the map exist only as patches of bright growth glimpsed through narrow archways and snatches of raucous conversation among gown-clad dons that float (the conversations, not the dons) through open windows. Even within college grounds, much space is impassable. Some lawns may be crossed only by fellows, or on certain days of the year, or by students who have received certain grades and are wearing bowties of a certain color.
I spent the last four years on a campus whose every detail had been specified in advance by an authoritative Architect to whose general color scheme and layout even the most contrarian modern designers have hewed. Cambridge is very obviously grown rather than planned; Gothic, Romanesque and Brutalist structures of all shapes and shades rub shoulders in the same college and sometimes in the same building. Into facades alternately steel-clad and half-timbered are crammed wine merchants, vendors of upmarket yoga wear, centuries-old clothiers with storybook names like “Ede and Ravenscroft”, dance clubs, bookstores, cheese shops. Overpriced sausage and döner carts prey on gullible foreigners during the day and drunk students at night.
Names advertise that the tenuous confederation called the University of Cambridge has persisted and will persist long after any of its buildings or faculties: we have Old Addenbrooke’s (once a hospital, now a business school); the Old Press; the New Museums (more than a century old, and home to the Old Cavendish and Old Computer Laboratories, each of whose occupants have moved to a New location in West Cambridge).
The mile and a half from my door to the center of town is a gauntlet of angry motorists, rash cyclists, cobblestones and incautious pedestrians. I have already grown to loathe the tourists, who seem to prefer loitering mid-street in inane conversation 2 to actually touring the university. On rainy evenings I am a peril on rickety wheels, whizzing across the slick surface of King’s Parade with my bell continuously dinging. The return to College is better: Townspeople go to bed early and one can enjoy, for a few minutes, the uninterrupted flow of freezing air across bare knuckles.
Or should that be anti-Tardis? I’ve neither seen the television series nor read the novel. ↩
Standing in the center of the intersection in front of the Corpus Clock: “是钟吗？” “不是钟。” “是钟，是钟啊！” “是一个动物钟。” ↩