The Irish Scarf You Never Had.
The 12th-Century College You Never Went To.

You go "up" to Oxford.

When you graduate, you come back "down."

Down into the world.

Since the 12th century, Oxford graduates have been coming back "down" into the world to rule.

To apply a little history to this morning's mess.

To push, cajole, tip the balance…without gloating.

Disdaining pettiness, and revenge.

Planting trees that don't mature in your own lifetime.

Seeing, in solitude, a pattern perhaps no one else saw.

Many have actually pulled it off. Without pomposity.

They have skipped being famous…and become consequential.

Who knows what else you might have done, might still do, might at this very moment be doing...

...if, at age 19, at the threshold of life, you had wandered through history (convinced that you were the first ever to do so), cycled along through an early English morning mist, a green American undergraduate at Oxford, wearing your necessary 7-foot-long Oxford scarf (long enough to go twice around your neck and still enough left over to trail behind you in the wind)...

Is it too late? It isn't. But it's time.

Get one. Put pressure on yourself.

See how you're going to turn out.

(Besides, winter is upon us.)

Oxford undergraduate scarf (No. 2591). 17 inches wide. 7 feet long. Distinguished, soft, thick, Irish wool tweed. Colors: about two dozen different browns, blues, sepias, umbers, oatmeals and even an odd red here and there. Ireland.

A scarf with some history, and a future, to it.