Public Events Galore at the University of Cambridge
Academic Culture as Social Effervescence
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A bench at Jesus Green park, Cambridge
Evocative of my favorite bench at that park
Superb for relaxation and inspiration.
Image source:
Socializing is a skill.
Not everyone has it and not to the same degree.
There have been times I have worked myself into a state where I am fed up with working but don't know anything else to do.
When one has spent a good part of one's life either inside books, writing, searching for information online or interacting in virtual space, meditating in solitary rooms or in forests, with animals moving freely around you thinking you are part of the landscape, as I have done, at times living for long periods without going outdoors, rationing my speech so that I don't talk in the morning before noon and in the evening after four pm, these being peak periods of creativity which should be left free for mental fermentation,at such times communicating by phone text with family members in the same house, such cluelessness about social activity is not surprising.
Hugh Harding, one of the best booksellers I have known in the various places I have lived as an adult- Lagos, Benin, Canterbury, London, Birmingham and Cambridge, sets up his stall weekly in this square that is the Cambridge market.
I announce with some sadness for me that he is going into semi- retirement, having made so much money he can afford to relax.
His son and daughter are partially filling the gap with their own weekly bookstalls in the same market.
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One can immerse oneself in ideas to the point where they become one's companions, as you seem to dwell among them, their presence titillating with the allure of unfolding vistas of entry into the cosmos, but their world, though thrilling with the inward fire that illuminates the mind, is not a human world.
The Greeks described the love of wisdom as 'philo-sophia' love of Sophia or Wisdom, Sophia being the beautiful, feminine personification of wisdom.
In various cultures, knowledge of the essence and order of being and of how to live in relation to this essence and order is depicted in feminine terms.
The Bible portrays wisdom as dancing before God at the beginning of time.
The organizational centre and active agent of the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge, an effort at organizing all possibilities of existence within a finite scheme of numerical combinations and associated verbal forms so as to act in relation to these possibilities, is known as Odu, a wife of Orunmila, the male intelligence of the system.
I assure you that those evocations of the feminine are not purely metaphorical.
A journey in search of this knowing at the essence of being may open one to the subtle, glowing whispers of a delicious beauty concealed with a blaze of light ever receding, just behind the corner, calling to you to come a little closer and she will reveal all as her covering is slowly allowed to fall open so you may perceive the pure presence beneath.
I hereby write in a manner not wholly figurative.
At this level, identity is all, the physical form is secondary, orgasmic power may emerge in encounters with knowledge at a level more potent than physical sexuality.
Moving in such an internally charged space that absorbs the universe into itself, the passing of time is nothing.
A decade may be marked primarily in terms of the gradual unfolding of the petals of the Ultimate as one seeks to grasp the flowering of the complete infinity of possibilities that is the ceaseless permutations of being.
One thus operates in a order of time different from that of the biological rhythms of one's body or the social frame of one's necessarily physical existence.
It takes courage to move from this world of abstract power and beauty to the embodied human world.
I have been compelled, not by design, but by unanticipated force of circumstance, to stop living wholly in that universe where constantly unfolding constellations of knowledge is everything.
Pembroke College chapel, Cambridge University.
Designed by famous English scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren.
Grand yet intimate, solemn yet inviting, splendid, majestic, yet maternal in its embrace.
Its soaring concavity inspires veneration.
One of my favourite meditation/relaxation prayer zones.
Image source:
"Go to pubs" has been one suggestion, pubs being central to socializing in England.
Seeking to socialize in busy places is not very motivational for me, though.
"Clubs are also good places to meet people" has been another suggestion.
Clubs thrive on high levels of sound and I love silence.
My friend Onesimus Ngundu, keeper of the manuscript room of the Bible Society at the Cambridge University library.
A magnificent space, holding editions of perhaps all Bibles in history,
from St. Jerome's first translation of the Bible into a European language, Latin, to William Tyndale's first rendition of the holy book into English,
for which effort Tyndale was executed by the Church, since such translation was forbidden at the time.
Image source :
I observed that academic lectures and libraries, which I had not been to much, preferring to invest in my own library, a nucleus of Compcros : Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems, a research centre and educational network I set up when I lived in Histon, near Cambridge, a centre I had once boasted had strategic books in particular disciplines which the Cambridge University library, one of the world's greatest libraries did not have, are wonderful contexts for interacting with people.
Intellectual discussions take place. Genteel manners are demonstrated. Knowledge is shared and cultivated without stress. Acquaintances and friendships blossom in contexts of mutual interest.
So, I began to attend public lectures and other occasions dutifully, almost every day, particularly at the University of Cambridge.
A wonderful experience I would like to share with you in a forthcoming series of essays.
Collage of interior and exterior views of one of my favourite places
the Cambridge University Library.
Spacious, yet allowing for privacy.
An endless cornucopia of a good number of the very best books in every field of knowledge.
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