By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

I realize I do need to get myself into the twenty-first century. This week was spent in a college at Cambridge University, England. It is over 40 years that I was a student here. Some things have changed for the better, but not all. There is heat in the rooms, and they have a shower and bathroom. We had neither. To get to the baths then required a walk through four courtyards. But I do not remember that we bathed that frequently. Europeans then still marveled that Brazilians bathe so often. This fact was attributed to the influence of the indigenous peoples since the Portuguese were not known to be sweet-smelling. But I am sure Brazilians who visited the UK were horrified at the general lack of bodily cleanliness. That, I’m glad to say, has changed.

However, access to means of communications seems worse. The rooms have no phones, and the internet is not easily accessible. But letters then arrived regularly. No one now writes. I know I have only myself to blame for this situation, since I am the last person in the world without a cell phone and who travels without a laptop. But I assume I will find access to both fairly easily. In this respect, Brazil is infinitely more advanced than the UK. I had no difficulty whatsoever finding internet access in Belém, for instance.

So I have been (mercifully perhaps) totally disconnected for the past six days. I was immersed instead in the eighteenth century, and treated each evening to marvelous candlelit dinners of three courses and four wines with port and cheese to finish. All delivered by impeccable and deferential college servants. We were discussing reform policies of various enlightened despots, such as the Marquês de Pombal, but we were doing so within a setting where the Ancien Regíme clearly persisted unreformed.

The Puritans were strong in Cambridge in the seventeenth century, and had tried to get the colleges to spend their incomes on poor students and not on feasting. But they failed miserably, and went off to New England to found Harvard College and ban the celebration of Christmas in Boston.

Nevertheless Boston was becoming more Irish than English; more Catholic than Protestant; and Christmas was soon re-instated. But in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard did devote its income to the education of poor students. Cambridge, England, still prefers good wine.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.