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Learning in War-Time, 2001

by Albert Louis Zambone

I.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade;
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night

· W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

At 2:00 p.m. here in Oxford, England, on September 11, 2001, I was fighting off sleep at my desk in the Bodleian Library. Eventually I decided to surrender my studies and run some errands in the open air. At least that way, I thought virtuously, I could make some use of the day.

On High Street, beneath the shadow of the University Church of St. Mary, I bumped into one of the seventy American exchange students for whom I am responsible. "Hey, Al," she said, "did you hear? Some plane ran into the World Trade Center."

How to say what passes through your mind? Surely she must be mistaken, she's just a cheerful kid, what does she know. Dear God, no, not at long last, not what I've always feared. Oh, I remember planes just missing the Trade Center before, back in the early '80s; probably just a sensationalistic British news report, they're simply shameless over here.

"Oh, it's probably some mistake," I said. "Let's go have a cup of tea."

Tea was duly had. No thoughts were given to the World Trade Center. Afterwards I think I had almost forgotten what Annie had said to me on High Street. I walked back towards our building, and there, in front of the TV store, was a crowd. I knew in an instant it was all true, and even worse. Two square cigarettes, smoldering vertically in the most beautiful skyline in the world.

Back to the hall in central Oxford where I live and work, walking quickly now. I go in, up the steps, into the office. Two of my colleagues, both British, are here. They look at me with sympathy and with horror, the way I realize in an instant I have always looked at one whose beloved has just died of cancer.

"Yes," I say before they can edge up to the question in their roundabout English way, "I heard about the World Trade Center."

"Well," Mark says, looking down at his desk, "someone apparently ran a plane into the Pentagon as well."

I literally begin to choke, my hand balled into a fist goes up to my mouth, and yet I nonetheless notice with irritation that he (like every other Briton) pronounces it "Penta-gun."

"My dear God," I say, "I have friends in the Pentagon." And I race upstairs to a phone.

II.

A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves...into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war.

· C. S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time"

W. H. Auden was in America on September 1, 1939, as many of his contemporaries noted with considerable disgust. C. S. Lewis was in Oxford, and soon was doing patrols with the Home Guard, waiting for German airplanes that didn't yet come. The pastor of the University Church of St. Mary, worried about what the attitude of undergraduates might be to the onset of what was certain to be a cataclysmic war which would, quite likely, put an end to the brief dawn following the barbaric night of 1914 to 1918. Lewis, as both a teacher at Magdalene College and a wounded veteran of the trenches, would be the perfect person, the pastor thought, to speak to the fears of the academic multitude.

With the burden of those expectations Lewis climbed up to the high, overhanging pulpit in the University Church on October 22, 1939 to give the lecture that is now known as "Learning in War-Time."

Lewis begins by subverting your expectations here, as in any great piece of rhetoric. You wonder how we can study while people are dying? he asks in the very first paragraph of his address. But surely every Christian must ask at all times and in all places, Lewis ruthlessly points out, "how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to Heaven or to hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed to them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology."

I thought of this essay as I climbed up the steps of St. Michael's Hall to my room; as I tried unsuccessfully to reach my sister in Washington, D.C., and my parents in southern New Jersey; as I made endless pots of coffee and watched the news; as I answered the calls of students, and said, "Yes, I'm still going to lecture on 'How to Study' tonight." To one of them I said, glibly, "Life goes on," and felt instantly ashamed.

For if there was one thing I was sure of at that moment, and one thing that an endless procession of commentators and the blur of headlines was telling me, it is that the world had changed; that nothing would be the same; that everything is now different.

III.

War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.... All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered on this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered.

· C. S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time"

In the full power of my emotions, I agree that everything has changed; but when I marry my emotions to my reason, and to the wisdom of others who lived in times like this, I realize that nothing could be farther from the truth. Life indeed does go on, but for profound reasons which my glibness did not touch. "The war creates no absolutely new situation," Lewis rebukes me, "it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it."

So my students sat in front of me, and lacking any words of my own I read them ones written by someone wiser than myself, the first page or two of "Learning in War-Time." Then we prayed silently, and I concluded, "Amen: Let it be so, our God."

No tears from me, yet. Not until I got to the point in my spiel on "How to Read a Book, Write a Paper, and Study for an Exam" (an evolving classic), when I mentioned how irritated I was after two years of listening to students say something particularly inflammatory, and then quickly conclude by saying, "Well, that's just my opinion."

"Don't you ever say that to me," I heard someone start to choke out, and realized it was I myself, "and don't let me ever hear that you said that to a teacher or anyone else here, for that matter. That is not the end of the discussion. It is the beginning. That is the point from which you muster your logic, your evidence, and you begin to make an argument. When you say, 'That's just my opinion,' you internalize it so that it is part of you, so that it is beyond the domain of reason, so that only force can reach it. You have opened the way to violence. You have to cling to logic, cling to dialectic, cling to rhetoric." By this time I realized what I was talking about; if I wasn't crying, then I was at the very least teary-eyed.

Did they understand what I was talking about? Those who have ears, let them hear.

IV.

[T]he rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward.

· J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings

Life does go on. Wednesday we went, seventy-three students and faculty, to tour Warwick Castle and take in Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In Warwick I gravitated slowly, inexorably, to the town church, a beautiful Gothic building arched towards heaven.

Inside I wander around, backpack slung casually over one shoulder. To a discerning curator in an English church this can mean only one thing. "Are you an American?" she asks.

"Yes," I say. Civis Respublica Americanorum sum, a citizen of no small country.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, her eyes downcast.

"Thank you," I murmur, the tears beginning to rise.

I find myself in the chapel "reserved for private prayers." I sit in one of the spindly chairs which are the only seats in most of England's churches, and then I fall to my knees, my body draped over the chair in front of me. What to pray? What are the words?

Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom...

I cannot go on. I choke, I begin to weep. I begin again.

Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we...

I cannot say it. But I must say it. The words of the Lord are true for all generations. I must say them. They undermine me, they cast down my proud tower; they reshape me, they remake me for him.

I begin again, and now I am sobbing deeply, asthmatically, wrestling with the chair in front of me, its legs scratching and rapping the floor as it heaves to the rhythm of my sobs.

...forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Why have you not? Why have you delivered us into evil? How is this not being delivered into evil?

Never have the Psalms made so much sense. How foolish to cut out the bits that used to offend us, the parts that horrified us. Now we understand how God's people can call upon him, writhe tormented in his house, appealing for his love while calling down vengeance and destruction upon their enemies. We have shrouded ourselves in warm, misty euphemisms, which allowed cynicism and romanticism, deadly twins, to flourish before the altar. Now they lie dead.

For thine is the kingdom, for thine is the power, for thine is the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Oh, that I had the wings of the dove; I would fly away across the wide waters, over the deeps; I would wander far off into the wilderness, and there be in my nest. 

Albert Louis Zambone, a contributing editor for FollowingChrist.org, lives in Oxford, England, where is he is a D.Phil. candidate in modern history at the University of Oxford.

This essay originally appeared in slightly different form at Re:generation Online, in their online issue focused on 9/11.

© 2001-2002 by Albert Louis Zambone.