Remembering the Olde Cheese

 

I’m thinking back on the last time I travelled with students in London.  We were in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, an old pub (a bit touristy, but an old pub) with an interesting literary history.  Dickens supposedly wrote there, and the story goes that Oliver Goldsmith and James Boswell frequented the place. (But then, what place didn’t they frequent, one wonders.)  Anyway, in the pub was a group of seven or eight male orderlies from the nearby hospital.  They were talking a break after work. Big, burly, middle-aged men in their scrubs.  They could tell we were Americans, of course, and so they struck up a conversation.  When they found out we were studying literature they began to question us.  “What are you reading?” and more to the point “what do you know?” What they wanted to know, really, was what could we recite.  One of them stood up with his pint in hand and began reciting Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  The students were stunned.  Another man began on Milton’s “Lycidas” and another did some Wordsworth, of course.  Then they turned to us.  “What have you got.”  I was able to recite some T. S. Eliot, but it was rough going. These working-class men knew their poetry, and we did not.  It was an interesting lesson and part of the reason for travel.   In my African-American Literature class this term we are reading James Baldwin.  In his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, 

he writes: “A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition – of intellectual activity, of letters – and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends.  But this tradition does not exist in America” (6-7).  Baldwin suggests that we feel differently about writers and writing in America.  We think differently about the arts and about vocations.  He leaves the U.S.A. for Paris at one point in his career to learn about himself.  He learns as much about his own country as he does about himself.  He says “The writer is meeting in Europe people who are not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different from his own. They may love or hate or admire or fear or envy this country [the U.S.A.] – they see it, in any case, from another point of view, and this forces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken for granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable” (9). I think that is one of the great values of study abroad.  We can learn much about other cultures, but we can learn just as much about our own culture, and indeed, about ourselves. I can’t wait to learn more about myself this time across the pond. Studying abroad is a transformational and enlightening experience.