17 July 2020

Does Cambridge burn brightly into the day?

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge – anyhow above the roof of King’s College Chapel – there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast a brightness into the sky. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of King’s College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not only into the night, but into the day?

- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 1922

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