A stone gate barred the entrance to Trinity College. Cut into the gate

was a small wooden door. I stepped through it. A porter in a black
overcoat and bowler hat showed me around the college, leading me
through Great Court, the largest of the courtyards. We walked through
a stone passageway and into a covered corridor whose stone was the
color of ripe wheat.

“This is the north cloister,” the porter said. “It is here that Newton
stomped his foot to measure the echo, calculating the speed of sound
for the first time.”

We returned to the Great Gate. My room was directly opposite it, up
three flights of stairs. After the porter left I stood, bookended by my
suitcases, and stared out my little window at the mythic stone gate and
its otherworldly battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered:
ancient, beautiful. I was different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was
a member of the university. My name was painted on the door.
According to the paperwork, I belonged here.

I dressed in dark colors for my first lecture, hoping I wouldn’t stand
out, but even so I didn’t think I looked like the other students. I
certainly didn’t sound like them, and not just because they were
British. Their speech had a lilting cadence that made me think of
singing more than speaking. To my ears they sounded refined,
educated; I had a tendency to mumble, and when nervous, to stutter.

I chose a seat around the large square table and listened as the two
students nearest me discussed the lecture topic, which was Isaiah
Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. The student next to me said he’d
studied Isaiah Berlin at Oxford; the other said he’d already heard this
lecturer’s remarks on Berlin when he was an undergraduate at
Cambridge. I had never heard of Isaiah Berlin.