England

England is both a geographical destination and the focus of the narrator’s growing attachment to Isobel Martin. After distance and distraction fail to loosen his longing, the thought of returning to England draws him toward a brief, unannounced glimpse of her in Cambridge.

England as a Direction of Longing

The narrator travels widely for work, visiting Paris, Boston, Rome, São Paolo, Berlin, Madrid, and Tokyo in an effort to fill his mind with human faces and forget Isobel. The strategy has the opposite effect: contemplating humanity as a whole makes his attachment to her more particular. He compares the change to thirsting for a raindrop while thinking about a cloud.

He then stops traveling and returns to Stanford, where he tries to lose himself in nature. Yet the sadness he experiences there acquires its own pull, drawing him east toward England. He tells himself that he wants only to see Isobel and Gulliver once more, from a distance, and to make sure they are safe. England thus becomes the destination of a desire he presents as cautious witnessing rather than reunion.

The Return to Cambridge

By coincidence, about two weeks after this longing takes hold, the narrator is invited to Cambridge to participate in lectures on the relationship between mathematics and technology. He accepts the invitation, which gives him a reason to travel to England without openly treating the journey as a return to Isobel.

After the lectures, he walks toward Isobel’s college. Across the street, he sees her walking alone; she does not see him. The encounter is sharply unequal in scale: it is momentous to him and insignificant to her. As he watches, rain begins, unnoticed at first. His attention narrows to Isobel, and the long absence has made him yearn not for a dramatic declaration but for ordinary life together: sharing the small account of how their days have gone.

England in Isobel’s Writing

England is also present in the narrator’s memory through Isobel’s book, The Dark Ages. In a campus bookstore, he stands reading her words aloud, lingering over her account of the violence surrounding the massacre of Danish settlers in 1002 and the reprisals that culminated in Danish rule of England in 1013. He presses the page to his face, imagining it as her skin. The passage joins England’s history to his private longing: the country is not merely where Isobel lives, but a place encountered through her words before he travels back to see her.