All my time in the UK, I didn’t visit Abbey Road.
I did listen to it, though. Researching for one essay in particular, Side B of Abbey Road was my friend.
The program kept us busy reading thousands of words and writing more. (It’s the reason this post is a little late.) My tutors informed me that, somehow, I’d applied for the two courses with the most reading—not my strong suit when time is a factor. And I was the only student with no prior knowledge of the material.
🙃
I don’t want to be dramatic. It wasn’t that bad. I lived.
And thankfully, one novel was assigned for both courses, meaning I got to double dip toward the end. That novel was Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
Northanger Abbey is an interesting book. Part coming-of-age tale, part satire of the Gothic genre, part meta-commentary on the novel as a form. If that sounds ambitious, consider that it was the first of Austen’s novels to be written, mostly drafted in her youth. The book as we know it was released after Austen’s death, but it was born of her instinctive creativity prior to being a professional.
The ending of Northanger shares plenty with the conclusion of my short stint in Oxford, which shares still with The Beatles’ Abbey Road. That’s that spaces matter.
As Catherine, the main heroine, reaches home after her far-away quests, the narrator summarizes her arc in concise, emotive terms: “Three months had seen her all this; and now, how altered a being did she return!” Catherine’s riding down the road in a coach, and something has changed.
From her perspective, I wonder what it is.
It’s easy as readers to look on Catherine and say that she’s changed. We see her as the narrator does—from outside. But Catherine doesn’t see herself. To her, it may be as if the road itself seems new as she returns home. Perhaps the trees appear smaller, or she finds new color in their leaves.
We don’t see ourselves; our eyes view the world around us. Yes, we mentally grasp that we’re changing, but the best indication we have of ourselves is often in the reflection of our surroundings. We’ve seen Catherine live through the events at the abbey. She’s only seen the abbey, and there’s a big difference.
Classic coming-of-age stuff.
The Beatles didn’t run out of album names for their final release; Abbey Road, the studio where they wrote and recorded the album’s songs, was presumably the best description they could conjure for the songs created there. We don’t grasp the significance of Abbey Road to “You Never Give Me Your Money” because we’ve never been there (starting to kick myself for that). But to the band, the place was indistinguishable from the ideas it inspired.
Just last week, I came across an Instagram Reel of the band writing parts together (pre-dating Abbey Road). A top comment reads, “I love The Beatles but… it’s amazing they ever put out any albums based on how much time they spent just goofing off in the studio.”
As if goofing off in the studio isn’t precisely how music is made.
The significance of space is one reason I don’t think the internet will consume us completely. No matter the amount of disembodied media we intake, the physical still matters. As long as humans live in physical spaces, we will pull a sense of individuality and identity from our own unique surroundings.
It’s also a reason I love fiction as a vehicle. There are plenty of things you can say that are correct, but they mean little if they’re not made real. Fiction, even when it’s all pretend, puts ideas in a place. Theory is fine, but people respond to characters and narratives and settings.
Austen makes a great defense as to fiction’s abilities. In one prominent moment of Northanger, she directly inserts her voice as narrator, describing novels as:
“Work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language…”
Austen wrote in the early days of the novel, and it was considered an unserious form for reading and writing. Messages worth reading (by contemporary wisdom) were those abstracted, universal truths stated most directly. Austen clearly felt something different, that the embodying of insight in the lives of characters displayed a higher level of mastery.
Walking down the lane on our last night in Oxford, I joked that it wasn’t the same road I’d arrived on. The crosswalk I pulled my luggage across on that first sleepy morning seemed entirely foreign to the familiar one I now crossed.
Classic Catherine stuff.
Though it’s been only a month and not three, and I’m long passed any coming of age, it’s still by my relationship to my surroundings that I recognize change in myself. I think it’s true of us all.
“Reflections on life and place” is the tagline I gave this newsletter last April. Honestly, there was a ring to it, and I didn’t know what else to type.
But I increasingly find it fitting, because life only happens in a place. We as humans are not floating ideas or brains in jars; we are existence confined to a space. We are self-conscious, but we are not self-seeing.
And we have more to learn than we recognize from the lanes we walk and the places we find ourselves.