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| Somerville Library Loggia with convalescing officers Somerville College, all rights reserved. |
I’ve been lecturing in the Exam Schools again this term, and keep noticing a series of black-and-white photos displayed in one of the main corridors, which show the great Victorian halls of that building transformed into dormitories, with soldiers propped up in bed, ministered to by nurses in white headgear. They date from the First World War, when the Exam Schools were requisitioned for use as the Southern General Hospital. By chance, an almost identical photograph jumped out at me last week from the current Somerville Magazine. This showed our Somerville
These Oxford examples of academic buildings used as wartime hospitals brought back uncomfortable memories of my first visits to Warsaw Warsaw
This transformation of libraries (or educational venues) into wartime hospitals is something I always find rather creepy, or troubling. There are of course practical reasons why it happens: airy halls make a perfect impromptu medical space. But I think it’s the unforgiving contrast between the calm, contemplative, hermetic air and essentially idealistic purposes of a library, and the noise and earthly grimness of a wartime or war-zone hospital, which makes the WWI Oxford photos and WWII Warsaw plaque so disturbing. The officers and civilians we see peeping out at us are a reminder of what happens when libraries and ideals fail; they are in a sense a reproach to the failure of learning.
I think that to imply that learning is what holds back the floods of bloody war is to (naively) idealise both it and learned people.
ReplyDeleteEducation/learning certainly does not preclude humans from falling out with each other - human nature is just too strong! Learning certainly helps break down barriers and increase our understanding of those around us and so does make the world a better place, but only in a limited sense.
Learning can also promote a sense of aloofness, elitism and a mentality that "we-are-better-than-them". Hardly qualities that promote peace on earth and goodwill to all men! We mustn't forget that many of the central protagonists of the wars you cited, and wars in general, would have considered themselves 'learned'.
Still, thank you for the interesting and reflective article. Please keep writing, even though the comments are a bit thin on the ground! Your pieces are (usually!) worthy of some excellent discussion.
I know its idealistic to juxtapose war and learning in this stark way, but I suppose to do this job one has to be a bit idealistic (maybe even naively so). Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the company of Renaissance humanists, who believed above all things that education would change their world for the better…
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