Time and Again

Once upon a Doorstep....was a Room with a View (upper left)

Walking down the street the other day, I  passed this doorway -- 7 Bedford Place.  Looking up and thinking back, I calculated that it was exactly 30 years ago as a graduate student in London I stayed at this place.  What tranquil hours I spent absorbed in my books in the room, upper left.

Tall Georgian Windows at 7 Bedford Pl.

Beyond reading my books, I was writing in my journal to help crystallize my fuzzy ideas, researching, and writing papers on English history, art, architecture, literature, theatre....  Much time was spent over William Blake, and when an afternoon grew drowsy, I had only to step down the street toward Bloomsbury Square, round the corner to the British Museum, and there find -- among a million other objects of soul-inspiring interest -- originals of Blake's art.  Very handy, that, when writing on the relations between Blake's spiritual vision, his art, and his poetry.  But there were other writers, among them one who worked in Bloomsbury at Faber, whose door was just across Russell Square -- T. S. Eliot:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
.     .     .     .     .
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Indeed, there was time enough.  I value those idyllic days and hours even though I have come to realize that all along I had been preparing my answers to face the questions that I myself, as well as others, dropped on my plate over these past 30 years.

Bear with a little nostalgia?  There was Kurt -- a student/worker at Number 7: when he got free from work late at night, he and I would dash to Holborn tube station, head through two other underground lines to St. Paul's, rush round the back of St. Paul's through the churchyard, across roads dotted with traffic, to the Samuel Pepys' -- a pub in an old, Dickensian-age warehouse on the river -- arriving just in time for a pint or two of Bass Ale on the balcony and some talk over the glimmering lights on the Thames before the pub closed up for the night.

And there was the evening when Peter O'Toole played Professor Higgins to Jackie Smith-Wood's Eliza at the Shaftesbury Theatre.  A young woman-acquaintance joined me, and we delighted in the production -- a liquefied O'Toole nearly slopped himself off the edge of the stage, but was of course still brilliantly acting!

                             (Guardian)                                                (Getty)

(myfavoritepeterotoole.tumblr.com)

And the great John Thaw was playing Eliza's father long before he played Morse.  After the play, I well remember, there was meaningful conversation over pasta in Sicilian Avenue.

Another night there were two salesmen, Mr. Glasgow and Mr. Exeter -- and then a woman who, swaying to the cosmic forces, arrived at the Swan in Cosmo Place to lead us to an overwhelming answer...[Link].

And there was a pigeon (in London?!) who wandered from the balcony into my room through the floor-to-ceiling window while I was writing.  How long he'd been there, who knows?  Upon hearing a noise, I turned, spied him, and invited him to leave.  Deft was his turn and stately his gait as he sauntered out onto the balcony to look back but once and then fly off -- apparently a statue nearby hadn't quite enough poop on its head already.

And the Tube cars still had wooden slats on the floors.

Wooden Floor Slats on the Piccadilly Line (1984)

That was a time.  And again?

When, years later, I brought my students to London -- once, here, to 7 Bedford Place -- I hoped they might try to find their own London, begin finding a face to meet the faces that they'd meet -- if they hadn't already begun.  My hopes were they'd begin to ask and to answer questions for and of themselves, to see what's on the plate.  The poets offer some clues.  The painters offer some as well.  The theatre offers some help.  Studying history offers some direction.  Not least, the pub can offer some help -- if you've both good company and conversation.  Honesty about questions and answers is of the greatest help.

I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog that much of what London was in 1984 is gone -- but much more of it, I'm realizing, is still intact.  A great deal of it remains the same despite being some centuries old -- like Number 7.

It certainly remains, both as it was in 1984 and as it is now, deeply set within me.