"I" Staircase, Trinity Hall, Cambridge
This weekend past, I returned to Cambridge with Ayumi, Julian and Justin for the first time in seven years. The occasion was a college reunion dinner, marking approximately 40 years of life since matriculation (1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 entrance years): about half of us (~50) from each annual cohort turned up to compare notes, reminisce, squeeze our sagging frames into formal evening wear, and report biographical highlights. It is worth noting that this was a self-selecting group: those with sufficient time, opportunity, income (it wasn't a cheap weekend break), self-regard and retained affection for their alma mater to trundle up; as bushy tailed and 'Hail fellow, well met', as age and misanthropy might allow.
Sic transit gloria iuvenum.
I didn't have a great time, nor yet was it a disastrous waste. This is hardly surprising, since the curse of middle age is profound ambivalence about almost every extra-familial event or situation: it is not the physical tautness of youth that I miss most, but the lightness and experiential tension that affords uninhibited joy or exuberance, unhappiness or sharp anger. With precious few exceptions, life leaves us with compensations and consolations for failing youth—rich compensations, if we are lucky—rather than treasures.
Thus it was to be expected that a forty-year anniversary would stir the pot, somehow. And, that comparison, the thief of joy, would steal some fonder memories, and rearrange others in more battered display cases. Still, I had not anticipated how poignant those few hours would be.
The event itself was composed of three stages: tea and biscuits on the Master's Lawn, to which guests were also invited -- though there were relatively few families there, only Ayumi and the children, and a couple of other families; a formal photograph and dinner 6:30pm-9pm; drinks in the bar afterwards. The only fixed seating arrangement was for dinner: the committee had done an admirable job of placing us next to at least some people that we had been friends with in our previous lives, some of whom we had stayed in touch with over the decades.
And there's the rub. We had most of us travelled to talk to those friends that we had kept in touch with anyway, in the interim. The great majority of the others were familiar strangers, fellow students that we hadn't liked much then, if truth were out, or even spoken to after Freshers' week and didn't feel the need or desire to like now. (One other compensation of age, for non-narcissists, is losing that desperation for acceptance; more negatively, not giving a damn.) And so, it turns out that the real value of the event was to talk, all too briefly, to the handful of people that we had been friends (or friends of friends) with before, with whom we had lost contact. At rough estimate, this group accounted for two percent of the assembled society. To talk to those four or five people—for less than 30 seconds, Andrew (!)—it was worthwhile, though hardly cost-effective.
At dinner, one of my longtime friends observed how lucky we had been then, to be able to come here as students, and to be here now, to have enjoyed sufficient good health and prosperity to be able to return some forty years later. Statistically, he is correct on both scores. First, then: in the year we matriculated, the first year the Tompkins table was developed, Trinity Hall was ranked highest, and remains one of the most competitive colleges in Cambridge in terms of acceptance rate (16.6% in 2023) — even if the odds for our respective subjects, Archaeology and Modern and Medieval languages, are now somewhat better, when compared to computer science or law. And now, all of us that are still here at 60+, and in good health and wealth, are almost incomparably fortunate. Yet, looking around the room, it was clear to me that we were not the only lucky ones: my friend and I might have suffered more than most from imposter syndrome, but all the rest of them—mostly less self-aware and some undoubtedly more entitled (in both senses—were equally lucky: no better minds, just better schooling, as another friend said.
And of this stock the British establishment is composed. I am reminded of an Indian friend and fellow PhD student from Kerala, whom I met in graduate school (in LA): when she first visited England as a young adult, she was astonished that people of such calibre had managed to run an empire. (We both felt the same way about typical USC undergraduates, who went on to run SoCal).
What struck me most forcefully, however, were the stories of the four old friends I caught up with, all of whom were now at the end of their professional careers, and now felt free to devote their time to the arts and music. One had been playing banjo clawhammer style for several years, and was treasurer of an association of American folk music enthusiasts, another had returned to piano performance, another two had started chamber music performances, and recently begun to play the viola. As you know, I too have started to play and sing a bit, something that I would never have dared to do at Cambridge. These friends are all happy and finding fulfillment and satisfaction in these activities. Yet none of them did the things they loved whilst at Cambridge. In all cases, for the same reason: they were intimidated by real musicians, more stunning actors, other young prodigies. "I played guitar up to grade 8, but when I arrived and went to the Guitar Society, I felt so bad, I stopped playing" "There was no way I could play piano, with X rehearsing in the next room." "One visit to a CUMS (Cambridge University Musical Society) meeting, and I put my violin in its case for the rest of my time". In my case was drama and theatre, rather than musical performance: at school, I had directed and acted in house and school plays for five years, and would have loved to be involved in university drama; but I came up to Trinity Hall in the term after Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery, another Tit Hall man, graduated from Cambridge, and the three were still to be seen occasionally in the JCR that autumn. My academic hubris, which must have been overweaning since I applied to a Law college to study Part II law, was in inverse proportion to my acting confidence: coming from the sticks, it was hard enough to perform the daily life of an undergraduate student, let alone to emulate one of the "beautiful people" (English and Fine Art students). A first-year German society play aside, I haven't acted since.
And so we have finally made it, even if I had to transition from theatre to obscure live bars in Japan. But, far from promoting our dreams, for many of us at least, Cambridge arrested our artistic progress, sending us down a forty year rabbit hole of successful mediocrity. Whilst I do not regret a moment of the brief flash of glamour, colour and English establishment play that was my time in Cambridge, I can't help feel that at a less highly regarded university--which is to say, anywhere else on earth--I might have been able to achieve much more, 'could've been a contender'. One can be inspired by greatness, one can also be paralyzed.
'I dreamed/Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.'
Bob Dylan My Back Pages
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