Arthur's Blog: My Week at the Oxford Experience Ended With an Emotional Round of Latin Toasts and Warm Goodbyes

Except for one last breakfast on Saturday morning in the cavernous Henry Potter dining hall, Friday is the final climactic day of your Oxford Experience, as it was this week of mine. My classmates, my wife and myself, and our awesome Oxford don, met one last time from 9 to 1 in our apartment classroom to consider the Bloomsbury set of immense literary significance ("Virginia Woolf and her Circle" was the subject I had chosen) and to applaud our Don for her superb presentation.
We had a feast of opportunities for the rest of the day. We spent the afternoon dipping into two of the multi-story Oxford bookstores, and toured the paintings and ancient relics of the Ashmoleon Museum, before dressing in our most formal attire (jacket and tie for men, cocktail dress for women) to attend a final champagne reception in the magnificent gardens adjacent to the Christ Church cathedral. Oxford is the only university in the world to enjoy an actual cathedral, where many summer students attended the daily "evensong" services late each afternoon. Everyone had their cellphone cameras out to record the occasion and to take farewell pictures of our individual groups.
Friday evening ended with a four-course, gourmet-level, banquet dinner (duck breast was the main plate, washed down with wine and followed by port and brandy), at which the Oxford Experience chairman delivered a toast in Latin and then introduced other speakers. We were seated according to our classes, presented our don with a gift for which we had each chipped in several pounds, and then had emotional leave-takings before finally returning to our rooms. It was quite a day.
I had for years labored under the impression that the "Oxford Experience" was a bit of entertainment consisting of lectures delivered to the entire student body in large auditoriums. It was everything but. Classes are limited to 12 students, and you have a choice, each week, of eleven different subject matters ranging (as I have earlier pointed out) from "The Brain and Its Senses," to the "Life of Cardinal Wolsey," to "The History of the BBC" The courses change each week, and some students -- they are persons of all ages from around the world -- sign up for several successive weeks. Even more of them return to the Oxford Experience year after year, and regard the activity as the highlight of their summer. My wife and I met people from Australia, Paris, Nashville, the Cotswolds, California, and even Key West (an especially engaging couple). Each was a vital individual in love with learning.
Courses have already been chosen for the summer of 2013 (late June to early August), and they are undoubtedly listed -- or soon will be -- in the website for the Oxford Experience. Our don will be back teaching various aspects of Jane Austen, and other distinguished faculty will be presenting impassioned lectures on British and world history, British and world politics, different fields of science, and one particular course on spies of the world.
I can't sufficiently emphasize that this is an overwhelming experience that will remain in your memory for a lifetime, and I can't think of a better way to spend a summer week. It is stimulating from an intellectual standpoint, and is additionally pleasurable because of this unequalled opportunity to spend time in an awesome city and an historic college that has been attended by many great men and women of the world. When you take your meals under a portrait of W.H. Auden, and of Lewis Carroll, in a structure built in the time of Henry VIII, you feel deeply privileged.