Raphael Just Keeps Getting Weirder and Weirder

The train trip is brief. London melts away and pieces begin to disappear. First to go are the over-crowded buildings. Then the cars thin until only the large warehouses are left to sit quietly on the outskirts of the city. After about fifteen minutes, even they fall away. All that is left is train track and sky; until a moment later, the yellow hits. Piercing neon yellow draped over rolling hills. Thick swaths of yellow surround the train. It is a yellow the color of hot dog mustard which looks gorgeous next to geometric squares of green grass. I needed to let London go and I am on a train to a place picked at random, out of the travel section of the newspaper.

Winchester is London antithesis: open spaces, birds chirping and, most notably, beautiful clean air. My lungs feel the difference immediately as I alight from the train, as if a rain has cleansed everything. The quality of the light is crystalline as well and already I feel free. I'm sure Winchester would be a photographer's dream.

An old cathedral stands in the heart of the town. It dates back to King Alfred's time, the 1200s. Even more impressive is the fact that sunk into the wall of the Great Meeting Hall is King Arthur's Round Table; something that purports to be Arthur's Round Table. The massive thing weighs one ton and looks like an enormous green and red dart target. In the center is painted a very large rose. This Arthurian relic is an impressive sight and I pay no heed to the man behind me who hisses that the table was recently carbon-dated to around 1600 making it too recent to be used by King Arthur. Such a fact does not bother me, I am content to be in the presence of the key player in a favorite story from boyhood. Nothing is going to deter my fantasy. The Japanese tourists are impressed with the Round Table as well.

Jane Austen died in Winchester and I am quick to search out the home. It is a pale blue house the color of one of her female characters' dresses. A slate-colored plaque announces this to be the house where Jane Austen died. The front door has a shabby cardboard sign announcing the house to be a private one, and people should go away.

Thursday of this past week the Oberlin group took a day trip to Kent to visit Sissinghurst, the home of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson. Vita was a writer and part of the famed Bloomsbury group whose other members included TS Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. Vita's lover was Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrote Orlando while living at Sissinghurst.

Vita and Harold's garden is a place of splendid isolation. Harold's geometric and precise plans are tempered by Vita's planting abandon. Roses and irises spill out over the clipped corners of the beds. Running down the spine of the garden are lines of trees on either side, sheered back in a very severe way. When the trees bud and bloom in the summer, they will create two precise walls of green as a sort of arbor. I found myself bowled over by the idea of it all.

Jane Austen is only one author who favored the quiet village of Winchester. The poet John Keats was also a great admirer. I roll my trousers up one afternoon and traipse through the water meadows, affectionately known as "Keats' Walk." Keats wrote a few poems while ambling through this very countyside. Surveying the scene, it is understandable where that impulse comes from.

I climb up to St. Katherine's Hill and stumble into an English maze, stumble because it only comes up to my ankle. The ground that makes up the maze is parched. Instead of tall hedgerows the maze is sunk into the ground; the negative of a maze. The maze is a large squiggle, as if a fiery Hebrew character scorched the earth two hundred years prior. I sit down to survey over the valley and the town. The Cathedral sits in the middle of town and things look pleasant. Off to my left the A4 highway cuts through the country making its way back to London. I sit quietly; legs folded underneath me, the grass indenting my legs as if they were pressing on a hammock made of mesh screen door. The grass blades leave squiggles on my legs. The rain begins to drip and I look back at the maze thinking about the little children of Winchester who played in it two hundred years before me.

"Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields watered by strange rivers."