Obituary

Chapter 1: Philosophers and Fools

My name is Cecilia Nepple. I’m a senior here at Mines studying chemical engineering. I am here to talk about my year at Oxford, my revelations, and what it could all mean for artists like me stifled by engineering education. I speak to you in the way I know best to communicate: creative writing. While I will be reading my work throughout this presentation, I have provided a picture slideshow so you can immerse yourself in the city. I speak of Oxford as an abstraction because in many ways it is more than a physical place. But I hope these photos will transport you there as Oxford will forever linger in my memory.

My story begins with the mausoleum of all hope and desire: time. And I traveled across the globe trying to conquer it. I fought my family, I fought the university, I fought the British government, and I even fought myself trying to conquer time to escape to Oxford, my city of dreaming spires. And now that the battle has been won, the field has revealed my own folly, an illusion of philosophers and fools. If I am the philosopher or fool I have yet to decide. But this is my story, and I’m here to share it with you.

Chapter 2: Stealing the Art from the Artist

Why Oxford? Seems a bit puffed up and pretentious. And you’d be absolutely correct. I went for my ego. My ego died when I came to Mines, and I escaped precisely because I needed to reclaim my self.

I never, ever wanted to be an engineer. I have always been an artist. I fell in love with storytelling, constructing the rise and fall of empires within my mind and unveiling those strange, unfathomable moments between people.

This scathing love affair began early. When I was 12, I wrote a 450-page novel. Was it of any merit? Absolutely not. But I wore the flash drive on a chain around my neck because my fictional worlds were as real as this one. And my characters kept me company on nights where our heat shut off and my mother sacrificed her plate so I could eat. These characters gave me hope when my school, a little shack on the side of the mountain, gave me a textbook, sat me in the hall, and told me to teach myself because the school could not afford to.

I wrote my way out of hell. And I wrote my way to where I am today.

The only hope I had for my higher education came in my writing. And the university that rewarded me the most, ironically, was the Colorado School of Mines. So I became an engineer. I was an artist without her art.

Engineering is ridiculously acute at decontextualization. It takes a problem, deconstructs it to its fundamental components, and optimizes them. This method of education is absolutely fantastic for industry, but it fails to account for reality. No problem we ever design shall be without context and consequences. Every engineering problem, I’d argue, is a people problem. And my major, chemical engineering, is particularly egregious in neglecting humanity.

When I learned that DuPont Chemicals put Teflon in the cigarettes it provided to its workers to study their cancer rates and made pregnant women clean their chemical vats to study the birth defects of their children all while explicitly knowing the danger of Teflon, I became physically ill. I’d been led to deconstruct this chemical into a scientific vacuum. Its utility mattered more than human lives. And my professors told me it wasn’t my responsibility to care. How could I not feel a little responsible, complicit, even in silencing these stories? The same people who died at DuPont come from dilapidated schoolhouses, renting textbooks from the library, with a desperate drive to escape poverty. Just like me.

Needless to say, Mines made me miserable. By my sophomore year, my sense of self had been utterly decimated, steam-rolled by brutal academics and apathetic professors. I don’t even think I can admit to myself how many times I contemplated suicide. My voice had been effectively silenced. I had no creative outlet. I didn’t have the time to write and create characters that could help me through my struggles. Hell, I didn’t even have time to read those created for me. Mines stole the art from the artist. And so, like any tortured soul, I plotted a grand escape.

Chapter 3: City of Dreaming Spires

How exactly did I manage my grand escape? Getting accepted into Oxford was the easy part. Convincing Mines of my pipe dream was the challenge. Mostly, it involved bullying the chemical engineering department. I sent them scathing emails, compiled over 80 pages of annotated syllabi, notes, homework, and exams, and demanded they accept the credit. I got my dreams of Oxford off the ground by brute force. No one could stop me. I was smarter, sharper, and more motivated than ever to prove to myself, to prove to everyone who doubted my ability to succeed.

So I packed my bags, dragged my mother and grandmother with me, and spent a nine hour flight in a drug-fueled haze because not even three Benadryl could quell my power. I had three thousand dollars in my pocket, a vendetta, and the entire world in front of me.

My first impression of Oxford was its strange amalgamation of past and present. The heart of city is concentrated about the original walls of a medieval village. The main square still commemorates the spot where two stakes were raised to burn witches. Between cramped storefronts, cobblestone alleys, and pubs so old you must duck to enter, lay the grand, gothic opulence of the colleges. Spires, buttresses, and stained glass adorn every library, laboratory, and chapel. Each of the thirty-six colleges are their own castle, a fortress with wrought iron gates built to withstand giants and porters dressed as knights to safeguard the knowledge hidden inside. Grand gardens and climbing ivies entrench the palaces in the ground, desperately trying to yank their ancient secrets back into the earth. The Bodleian Libraries contain everything from the Book of the Dead to the Magna Carta, all accessible to Oxford students if you’re willing to read a book chained to the wall. Yet it is all contained in a few square miles of city. I could traverse time from medieval Europe to modern day all within a few blocks. It is wondrously absurd.

To me, this timelessness represents absurdity, incongruities, and contradictions. Oxford is a "home of lost causes, and foresaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties."

Those were the words of Matthew Arnold, who enrolled and promptly dropped out of Oxford in the year of our Lord 1841. Arnold embodies Oxford, the energetic and elitist spirit of a university no more distinguishable from the town around it. Oxford isn't a place of learning. Intellectualism is everywhere, the spires of each college no more distinguishable from storefront nor street corner. The wealth of knowledge buried here one can only grasp yet never truly hold. It is a home for lost causes. Phantoms permeate its streets, desperate and perhaps as arrogant as I, thinking I could conquer this place and this time. Only now do I understand Oxford exists in the interspace, timeless, efferent, and above all, intangible.

During my time there, I fell in love with myself. There, I experienced the death of self. My experiences stripped me bare. Oxford presented countless challenges: chaotic, unkempt, and wholly unfulfilling. Yet I fell in love with the person I grew to become. It took a mugging, a car accident, getting ejected from a boat into the River Isis, being drugged on my birthday, and secretly moving halfway across the city to escape the roommates who drugged me to do it. And looking back, I don’t regret a single moment of it. There were highlights, too, of course. I received First Class Honours, placed in the 15th percentile at my college, won the novice rowing regatta, and found my passion.

My academic success can be attributed entirely to the decentralized education system. The University of Oxford allows for incredibly focused, individualized study. There are no classes, not really. My learning was my responsibility, art that I created entirely on my own. I would meet with my tutor once a week to present on the progress made. Imagine a weekly thesis defense, except you have no idea what's going on half the time and you’re presenting to someone who will always know infinitesimally more than you do. When I was interviewed by a British official regarding my tutorials, he remarked that they sounded like his “very own personification of hell.” Honestly, I was flattered.

Chapter 4: Skeletons in Hell

Getting to my tutorials proved more treacherous than the hell that awaited me when I got there. My bike rattled like bones ever since the car accident. It comprised of two perpetually deflated tires, a rickety frame covered in long scratches, and a skull-shaped bell that I bought to commemorate my brush with death. I painted the frame black with rotting goo, laughing at myself as I blotted out the name, Ceres, Roman goddess of life and the harvest, with my little effigy to Pluto. The rat-tat-tat accompanied me on every adventure. As I weaved my way through West Gate crowds, the rattling joined the cacophony, the honking of taxi cabs, and the silent lurch of electric buses. Its rhythm belt like the coxswains on the river, keeping pace with the boats as I raced along the Isis to the little brick house nestled at the end of Boat House Island. As the dreaming spires of great castles and cathedrals melted away to rolling green steppes, and I found no company but the gravel road and the Fae hiding in the underbrush. The rat-tat-tat spoke of my tresspass, alerted all around me. That death rattle staved off the creatures lurking just beyond the mist.

And so I’d listen to the creak of old bones, pedaling into the wilds to reach my biochemistry tutor. I’d meet him at John Radcliffe Hospital just beyond the city limits, the road much too steep for my skeleton bike. So I took to the trails carved into Port Meadow, ducking under spindly spiderwebs, racing through the thicket, and narrowly avoiding a fall into the rotting canal just to beat the doctor to his office. There are much too many spiders in England, and much too many times I brought them with me. But if I could arrive in time and avoid the arachnids, my tutor let me rearrange his skeleton. It was a crickety old teaching tool in the corner. Every time I’d try to touch it, my tutor demanded I name every major bone and muscle in the human body. And so I recited them, religiously, mouth eagerly closing upon the names of tendons and ligaments like communion tablets.

See, the doctor did not precisely teach biochemistry. He taught art. Every reaction, protein conformation, and intermolecular interaction amalgamated into dimensions of complexity that constituted life. And so, every one of these chemical singularities comprised a story, one that tells of pathogenesis, therapeutics, or absolutely nothing at all. No molecule could exist in a vacuum absent of its implication within a living system. Even the slightest atom out of place could have devastating effects, the difference between life and death. Every reaction carried a consequence, a responsibility to the greater living system. It was the very antithesis of engineering.

Medicine, my tutor argued, was the ultimate form of storytelling. Doctors listen to their patients’ stories, attempting to understand what chapter they’re on and the way that they tell it. Most importantly, they lend their expertise in chemistry, anatomy, and physiology to explicate that story. Bodily autonomy is another medium of self. And medicine attempts to bestow patients with tools to author it.

My tutor once broke the forearm of his poor skeleton, tossing the limb in my lap.

“How’d you reckon to fix it?” he asked.

“Glue, probably,” I reasoned. “Don’t wanna melt the plastic.”

“You’re terminally literal, Nepple.” It was his favorite insult.

“Fine. Stop the bleeding.”

“Wrong. He’s dead.”

“Since when?”

“Since I tore off his arm. You hesitated.”

“Well, you could have told me I just witnessed a murder.”

“Your patient certainly won’t. Your job is to provide a voice, be his advocate. And you let him bleed out all over my carpet.”

Needless to say, I fell in love with medicine.

My tutor’s final challenge: wander the dreaming spires and identify a health crisis among the homeless population. He selected the project after I revealed that I wish I felt more comfortable volunteering with them. I’d worked with the families of Skid Row in Los Angeles, and the first rule of Skid Row was that a young woman should never walk alone. So naturally, he made me walk alone and overcome my biases all in one week. Homelessness is a contradictory phenomenon in Britain. Its victims are not socially outcasted. There are encampments on every street corner and in every park. There are no spiked benches or averted gazes. And the community speaks to the homeless like neighbors, knowing their names and histories. Yet these people are still victims of social systems, alienated from medical care and lacking access to adequate food, water, and shelter. And when a mumps outbreak struck Oxford, these neighbors were the last considered for vaccination despite being at incredibly high risk of a virus spreading rapidly in the streets.

The rat-tat-tat of my bike became something of a weekly ritual along Turl Street. I’d drop by with supplies loaded into the basket at the back of my bike. The people I met there had the most incredible stories to tell. They knew all about Oxford’s history, the latest drama between the boat dwellers along the canal and the history of longstanding college feuds. One even knew the location where my rowing team hid the flag of our rival, Wadham College. With this I was particularly impressed as I thought we were rather clever burying it where we did in the wee hours of the morn. But a drunk American is famously loud, and I allegedly gave away our location.

With the community of Turl Street, I found the least impossible loyalty. I spent hours talking with them, learning why they mistrusted the British government and services being offered. Some even chose to remain on the streets. So I started started talking to the pharmacies nearby, gathering the names of nurses, pharmacists, and doctors willing to care for Turl Street. With some patience, we started a vaccination program that we soon expanded to the flu, measles, and other diseases. I can only hope that a fraction of that infrastructure remains with Covid-19. I had to leave Turl Street without saying goodbye. The rat-tat-tat of my bike joined the chorus of ghosts wandering the streets.

Chapter 5: Eulogies

I left the morning of March 15th. The evening before, I threw everything I could into three oversized suitcases. I dragged them down the cobblestone path one last time. One wheel busted, another spilled out all its contents as the seams split, but I made it to Gloucester Green coach station before the sun rose. The American president announced the UK would join the European travel ban less than 24 hours before it would go into effect. I left so many things behind. I left so many people behind. I left so many dreams, unfinished, behind.

I spent my final day before in a haze, aimlessly stumbling through the city in attempts to engrain every little detail in my memory. I dressed up in Oxford’s finest: a hand-me-down skirt from my grandmother, a sweater whose sleeves were much too small, busted up tights, and my stringy black college robe with flaps that functioned more like jellyfish tentacles. I think I biked the entire length of the city that day. It was dismally gray. I don’t think I’ve ever truly seen a summer day in Oxford, but it is rumored to be among the most beautiful in the world. I spent hours gazing up at the Radcliffe Camera, my favorite library, trying to discern the meaning of each marble effigy carved into its ceiling. I walked along the meadow once more, listening to the roar of the Isis drown out the calls and chop of rowing teams bracing its dark waters. I even bought cufflinks and a pair of shiny red Doc Martens.

It felt rather like a funeral procession. I'd been dressed for burial.

Yet every time I close my eyes, I am transported to that place. Oxford lingers behind my eyes, it permeates my dreams, and it fills me with intangible, unidentifiable loss. I am needlessly and unabashedly in love with it, and I lost it, like my art, to time.

From this story, I am left only to wonder the extent of my loss. I never processed the death of Oxford. Its phantoms live on through me, and I, too, have joined the chorus of the dead, leaving little imprints and whispers in its streets. I am stuck in a perpetual state of limbo, convinced I never truly left and am destined to return. But just as I am incapable of writing beginnings so I am miserable at goodbyes. I wish I could tell you this story has a cathartic end. Oxford left me with so many unanswered questions and unfulfilled feelings that I can only come to the conclusion that I have yet again failed to conquer time and derive any meaning from it. These reflections have only revealed to me my own folly. Perhaps I am both philosopher and fool. But I suppose, in the end, that is something only time can reveal. We are all but fools in love. And there’s no turning back from that.

If you'd like to learn more about my story, please check out my blog at cnepple.wixsite.com/home. You can easily find it by googling cnepple and wix!