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“That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.” They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.
JORDAN COLLEGE WAS the grandest and richest of all the colleges in Oxford. It was probably the largest, too, though no one knew for certain. The buildings, which were grouped around three irregular quadrangles, dated from every period from the early Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at every spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur. Some part was always about to fall down,
It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one direction and to London in the other, and never leave Jordan land.
As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had dæmons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them. Lyra imagined the Chaplain speaking loftily, listening to the star-dæmons’ remarks, and then nodding judiciously or shaking his head in regret. But what might be passing between them, she couldn’t conceive.
In fact, of course, Lyra and her peers were engaged in deadly warfare. First, the children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another. But this enmity was swept aside when the town children attacked a colleger: then all the colleges banded together and went into battle against the townies. This rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying.
“There’s as much College below ground as there is above it. I’m surprised you haven’t found that out.
“Are you a female Scholar?” said Lyra. She regarded female Scholars with a proper Jordan disdain: there were such people but, poor things, they could never be taken more seriously than animals dressed up and acting a play.
She had seen a great deal of beauty in her short life, but it was Jordan College beauty, Oxford beauty – grand and stony and masculine. In Jordan College, much was magnificent, but nothing was pretty.
And on Port Meadow at the full moon there’s a werewolf that comes out from the old nunnery at Godstow.
“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,” said the witch, “or die of despair.
men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once.
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.
But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.
