contra mundum
“In Evelyn [Waugh]’s third term he changed to a more spacious set of rooms on the ground floor of the front quad. this left him vulnerable to people dropping in to dump their bags or to cadge a drink and a cigarette. He decorated the rooms with Lovat Fraser prints and kept a human skull in a bowl, which he decorated with flowers. One night a group of ‘young bloods’ came into the quad drunk and looking for trouble. One of them leaned into Evelyn’s window and was violently sick.”
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Paula Byrne’s Mad World
At least three quotes come to mind, the first two of them involving cousin Jasper.
- …Finally, just as he was going, he said, “One last point. Change your rooms.” They were large, with deeply recessed windows and painted, eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky as a freshman to get them. “I’ve seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,” said my cousin with deep gravity. “People start dropping in. They leave their gowns here and come and collect them before hall; you start giving them sherry. Before you know where you are, you’ve opened a free bar for all the undesirables of the college.”
- …”Or that peculiarly noisome object?” (A human skull lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia ego inscribed on its forehead.)
“Yes,” I said, glad to be clear of one charge. “I had to pay cash for the skull.” - It was shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining the college intellectuals to mulled ,claret; the fire was roaring, the air of my room heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open my windows and from the quad outside came the not uncommon sounds of bibulous laughter and unsteady steps. A voice said: “Hold up”; another, “Come on”; another, “Plenty of time . . . House . . . till Tom stops ringing”; and another, clearer than the rest, “D’you know I feel most unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute,” and there appeared at my window the face I knew to be Sebastian’s — but not as I had formerly seen it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.