Artful: How to Navigate 1591.7 Centimeters
Oxford, May 2025
The common impression is that I live in an artful city—but I’ve never been particular about architecture.
Like many cities, mine is enamored with squares and circles. Each building is finely spaced, separated by paths of clay and concrete. The gold-brown brick of more spherical phenomena, be they libraries or ceremony theaters, catches the eye amongst the cement and the scribbly-black moldings like dollops of toffee dropped onto a newspaper.
When people consider spires graceful, I reckon that they’re moved simply by geometry. The pyramidal shape is accented by the pinnacle at each corner of the square base, by the four gabled windows that surround it. A spire’s grace is nothing but equilibrium.
These days, spires sit among overhangs of steel and glass. But this welcome towards newer buildings still feels tentative. The city remains dominated by the Gothic and Baroque. Everywhere: blind stone paneling, tracery in the windows. Pointed arches and ribbed vaults. The curved cheek of a gargoyle placates the steep slant of a belfry. Stone carvings percolate along the brickwork of cornices. The city keeps its histories carefully, nurturing every grudge and every old love. It persists to spoil the sky with its statues and pinnacles, its gables and turrets.
I’m not fooled by artfulness. (The set of stone-paved quadrangles next to where I live are, all things considered, very shabby.) I’m not attached to streets. When I walk out of the college, I prefer taking the street with the cobblestones where I’m less likely to run into you.
* * *
I’m not bothered with whether buildings are beautiful. It’s better if they are practical. During my first year at university, I lugged five suitcases up a spiral staircase whose walls were scarcely broader than the breadth of my shoulders. I had no friends with whom to share the burden. Finding the grubby bedroom at its destination felt dismal. The window with the blemished curtains barely let in the light.
The building where I live now is generous with its space. I am fond of its clean lines and open tiers. A sequence of bay windows, each touched with a frame of steel, complements the mortar and stone of its outer walls. They give shape to the structural bays, crafting a clarity of order.
I have loved every inch of my dorm room here. The silhouette pitched across the wall from the lazy slant of my guitar. The patch of floor where one of my best friends once made a nest of blankets for three nights. The bed with its set of springs biting into my back through the thin mattress. The walls have observed my indignities with pale, enamel indifference. I have maimed them: scratched unbecoming little messages with my scissors until the blade chipped away paint. I keep a bottle of incense by the sink with three wooden sticks in its mouth. I fix my posters above the bed, pressing the tip of every pin into polyester carefully as if each one bites into my heart.
These days, my window faces the eaves and chimneys of the Master’s Lodgings. If I look carefully, I can see the other building’s kitchen: a small bubble of light marred occasionally by moving silhouettes. I keep my curtains open in the evenings. It’s nice to know that a friend might be watching, out there in the dark.
* * *
The floor at my feet is donated by Arthur and Cecily Goodhart. It’s a funny thing, being remembered by a building.
Draw an invisible line down the middle of this building, like slicing open a cake. It’s a line that I try my best not to cross. You have your share of this floor, and I can have mine. 1591.7 centimeters is 626.65 inches, is 159.17 decimeters, is 15.917 meters, is 52.221 feet. It is smaller than the space between two sidewalks on a street in London. It is smaller than the span of my biggest lecture theater. 1591.7 centimeters takes less than fifteen seconds to cross. I can only measure what’s left of us through distance.
* * *
Distance, you see, is an art. Most people are good at it. They restrain friendship to a pat on the shoulder or an embrace for goodbye. They navigate personal space with deftness, skimming its borders without invasion. They nudge conversation away from the parapets of places that seem too personal. They know to never share too much.
Or maybe it’s less artful, more mandatory. We respect each other’s borders in the hope that we can avoid getting hurt. We protect our softer parts by sketching their perimeters in ink.
We are good with boundaries. We don’t peek inside other people’s doors. We pretend not to hear their noises. Below me, above me, I would find a bed in the exact same position where another soft, breathing body sleeps. My neighbors move gently around each other at the stove in the communal kitchen. I am privy to none of their secrets and they to none of mine. And yet I hear young people fumbling with each other’s clothes as the mattress creaks, the water rushing down the drain, a moan, a muffled song, I hear the kitchen cupboard go bang in the night. It’s unbearably intimate to live in a building full of people.
We brush shoulders. We squeeze past each other in the doorway. We narrowly avoid collision. 1591.7 centimeters should hardly be difficult. Most people know where one line ends and another begins. They know that a hug must only last the breadth of a second to make sure things are not awkward. That to touch the nape of someone’s neck is to cross a boundary.
Buildings take care and precision. They obey the laws of symmetry, the margins of space. I could never be an architect.
* * *
It takes six flights of stairs downwards to leave the building. Each flight has twelve steps. The staircase has large windows to welcome the sun, and morning light soaks its four floors from top to bottom like a glass being slowly filled with buttermilk.
My staircase is donated by Mary Lau in honor of her daughter, Catherine Yuen, who studied law here in 2012. Your staircase is donated by Somkiart Limsong, who studied PPE here from 1959 to 1962. I make sure we never use the same staircase.
I pass the plaque every morning on my way out. I run a few steps down past the bike racks. I breathe it in: the crispness, the sky, the grass in the sunny warmth, the black metal bars of the gate beneath my hand. The small, squared span of my world.
* * *
There are fourteen rooms on each floor of our building. Beds are separated by a single wall. Take away the bathroom mirror and we’d stare into each other’s eyes while we brush our teeth. Everyone lives so close together in this wretched college accommodation. We are each a little box of pain and happiness and envy, little worlds bottled up inside four walls, fitted snug against one another like crates packed onto a container ship.
My neighbor seems kind. He cleans the sink and always smiles at me shyly when we mix up our spoons in the same slot on the drying rack. Isn’t it an intimacy, being unable to distinguish between our own forks and the forks of a near stranger? We mumble good morning. We trade nods when we shuffle past each other at the kitchen door. I wish I spoke to him more. But it’s embarrassing, and a little daunting, when you have nothing in common except shared space.
* * *
Our building is situated next to a quadrangle—or a quad—where twin square-shaped courts of parapets and Gothic cornices are aligned on the same axis. We are not allowed to step on the lawn beyond the pavement’s edge. To tread on the grass, at midnight, is its own act of rebellion.
I like to lie on the grass beside the cobblestones where the bay windows of our building meet my gaze like sleeping faces. Your curtains are always drawn. A faint ringlet of light shimmers from its four edges. I am denied what no longer belongs to me.
Thirty-five days. Thirty. Twenty-eight. My graduation will come in a month. 168 nights a year. Three years spent in this cobblestoned little town. I see students get drunk on how easy it is—when you live amidst the university’s labyrinth—to believe that nothing else exists beyond the parameters of the city’s borders. I will be gone soon. Thirty-five days, and then twenty. What then? The day I leave, the day I can no longer be bound to you by the aching proximity of our mutual terrain. What then?
* * *
What’s the whole deal about architecture, anyways?
Every once in a while, I’d raise my head and begrudgingly admire how the buttressing protects the thrust of the pitched roof. I’d eye the curve of the small dome they call the eight-sided cupola. I’d respect the traceried spandrels, their seating surrounded by cusped arches and stained glass. Cloisters, cathedrals. Chapels and churches made ornate by pediments and sleek columns. I’ll admit now: I’m not taken in by all the fuss.
Buildings embody the tension between public and private space. The piers share the weight of the roof. Each set of columns is spaced in harmony, the sash windows in line with their vertical and horizontal counterparts. At their feet, we are anchored by logic and orientation, by the walls that keep us safe. Mathematics is as stubborn as stonework. There’s a neatness, a kind of solace to be found in symmetry.
Architecture is a language, I imagine an enthusiast trying to convince me, grabbing my hand across a tabletop of empty cups. It expresses a truth. To build a house is to bring a set of numbers into being. There can be nothing truer than the coherence of proportions, the crawling centimeters of even space, the logic in the slants and dimensions by which an edifice resists gravity.
Symmetry: a circle, a perfect square. A building with three rows of bay windows, ten in each row. We search for a fragile balance in the bare bones of glass and stone, somehow.
* * *
1591.7 centimeters is my cowardice too. It allows me to go on wanting you without dealing with the complications of actually having you.
* * *
In the kitchen. Past midnight, I pour the tea in my mug down the drain. You never come to this side of the building. Thank God. At the sink, behind the counter—I close my eyes when I hear the door open, waiting for the silence between footfalls. Please don’t come into this room, I think, when I’m inside it. I can just about bear the 1591.7 centimeters. Don’t torture me with eighty-five, or fifty-two, or twenty. I couldn’t bear to have you so near. I hold my breath.
This space between us—it makes me sick, don’t you know?
No distance, really, could ever pacify me. I’d be too busy being angry at every millimeter of space between your back and my ribcage. I’d be too busy being angry at my skin for being in the way, for being the reason why I couldn’t nestle myself all the way inside you and make a home.
* * *
My longest ruler measures 50 centimeters. It is thrice the length of my most whetted pencil, the width of my well-worn sketchbook. No matter how many squares or rectangles I draw, they can never hold up. Are you still angry with me?
* * *
Three corridors. A stairwell. A kitchen. We have slept 1591.7 centimeters away from each other every night for 168 days. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.
C. Zhang read English at University College, Oxford. She desires, above all, to keep loving what she loves.