Outsiders—such as I was, a brief year ago—might think of the university as a haven, a protected place. We have our own squadron of police, here, ostensibly, to ward off gangsters but really, I think, on patrol against time. Or if it isn’t the police, something must keep it back. Outside, things come and go; trains slide from one end of the day to the other; there are traffic jams, elections. Inside, only the unchanging quandrangle; an earlier century of buildings and neckties; the same sag in the same upholstered chair. I read the first editions of books, things with frontispieces, pages that have outlasted their publishers.

All this is misleading. The university does perform a remarkable feat of timing but it is not a case of arrest. It is a case, in fact, of never stopping, which gives the illusion of a thing holding still. There is a time-warp, but it screws the other way, accelerating the weeks and months rather than stalling them. Coming here I had an idea of ducking into some large apothecary, a place of fascinating mold, whose only rhythm was the papery slide of drawers. I would fill up some jars of my own and watch them pickle. But I’ve walked, instead, into a centrifuge, where things whip around so fast I do not snatch many words from the air the first time around.

So I wait for it all to loop around again—which it does—and I suppose that is one solution to this miraculously charged configuration: stay put, it’ll come again. But it is not the safest solution, because the idea for us subparticles in the centrifuge is not actually to keep spinning, but only to spin around enough times to sail up and out. Because the risk is becoming a perpetual wind-up, of the kind that Henry James used to chew and chew.

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