In Oxford, the intrusions on my privacy were more acute; anyone could walk up to my door on Divinity Road and ring the doorbell or hammer his fist, or, as some British people are apt to do, bang the letter slot, though this is something often done by tradesmen or delivery people and always felt to me like the most intrusive act of all, since those strangers’ hands were effectively entering into my home, into my private domestic space. It eventually became so upsetting that I put up a small sign that said PLEASE RING THE BELL and after that the letter-slot banging became much less frequent. Nonetheless, on a great number of occasions the kinds of visitors I had were so alarming that it reached the point where, if I was not expecting someone, if they did not phone or text in advance of their arrival, I simply did not answer the door. Before taking this radical decision, I had had a number of unpleasant encounters on my doorstep. Some were benign: local councillors — or as we say in America, city council members — canvassing to see if residents had any concerns; sometimes political campaigners would come, other times people collecting for charities who would want me to sign up with my bank details to provide a monthly payment to their organization. None of these encounters troubled me unduly. On other occasions, however, I sensed a more malign purpose, or was faced with a man or woman, often working for a corporation, a public utility or broadband provider or something of the kind, who would not take no for an answer and begin to argue with me, wondering why I should not wish to switch my energy supplier when I was undoubtedly paying too much, or why I would not want to get faster broadband when it was being offered at this very special price, and when I told the individual that even if I did choose to change my energy supplier or switch my internet service provider I would not do so in person on my doorstep but over the phone or the internet, they often became incensed, as if I was impugning them, suggesting they were untrustworthy, which was in fact the case. I have always had difficulty in trusting strangers.
Then there were other more ambiguous encounters. Once a woman came to the door, a Polish woman, who claimed to be an art student, peddling her drawings of kittens and kitsch English country houses. I turned her down but she came back every day for a week until I told her that if she came again I would phone the police. I discovered later that she had also tormented my neighbors, even some of my colleagues who lived in other neighborhoods in Oxford. This was in the early days of large numbers of Poles moving to Britain. On another occasion, a day when I was feeling weak, or rather low, or perhaps just tired of living outside of America where things like this did not seem to happen, or at least never happened to me, a couple of Middle Eastern men rang the bell. I had failed to look through the peephole before opening the door and was taken aback when I saw them standing there, bearded and smiling. My first thought was that they were from the local mosque and had come on a community-relations campaign going door-to-door, but they explained they were gathering signatures and contributions to fight against the regime in Syria. I allowed them, standing there on my multicolored Victorian tile walkway, to tell me about the dictatorship and the many human rights abuses taking place in their country. Because, frankly, I was a little afraid of the men, I signed my name to their petition and wrote a check for twenty-five pounds, made out to an innocuous-sounding organization that had ‘Democratic’ or ‘Democracy’ in its name — I no longer remember precisely what it was. The check cleared within the week, though I had thought for a moment after the men left and I was standing in my front hall holding my checkbook and shaking unaccountably that perhaps I should cancel the check, but then worried that if they discovered it was no good these men might return, and who could say what measures they might take to get the twenty-five pounds I had given in apparent good faith. An unpleasant part of my mind insisted that Muslims or Arabs, or that section of the human population where the two groups intersect, are funny about money, or rather that they have a different sense of ethics relating to money than Christians or Jews, and that my failure to give money in good faith might have been regarded as some breach of Sharia law, though that system is not in place in Britain, but Britain was, by halfway through my time there, feeling like a more actively Islamic place than when I had first arrived. These men must have come to my door on Divinity Road after the bombings in London, and by that point I remembered having seen a poster at Modern Art Oxford depicting the city transformed into an Islamic paradise, with minarets and domes rising around the Oxford skyline and women in burqas and niqabs populating the cityscape, reclining on Persian carpets. That poster had inspired a kind of visceral anger in me that I could not entirely understand or explain to myself. At the time, I had few Muslim friends and little knowledge of the religion except the crude versions of it depicted in much of the western media during the early years of the War on Terror. I know now that there are as many kinds of Muslim as there are Christian or Jew or Buddhist or Hindu, and I would like to think that if the same thing happened today my response would be quite different, owing to the very good Muslim friends I have made, and the marvelous colleagues from the Middle East I have come to know and whose work I respect, not to mention the more intimate relationship I had (I still have? The question remains open, if only just) a few years later, a relationship that has altered my sense of Islam more profoundly than I might have thought possible. But at the time, the imagining of Oxford, a great seat of Christian tradition and learning, transformed into the outpost of some new caliphate seemed as grotesque to me as if one were to depict Mecca as the home of a holy roller Evangelical Christian church or a Midwestern shopping mall, and the intersection of that imagined remaking of Oxford with the men on my doorstep campaigning for Syria almost undid me.
All this was spinning in my thoughts as I sat in my New York apartment, turning over the pages of web addresses, which, though unremarkable at first, began to alarm me. I thought I recognized some of them, and not just in the obvious way that I would notice the root address for The New York Times or National Public Radio or The New Yorker or The Guardian or any number of other websites I frequent, but because I started to spot complete addresses for news stories that I knew I had read in recent days, and then I saw addresses that, frankly, made me begin to panic, not because my name appeared, but because they were addresses for two email inboxes, one in the NYU server, and the other from Google’s mail system. I reached for my laptop, logged into my Gmail account, and began entering addresses that were on the printout in front of me. Messages I had sent and received began to appear on the screen, and at this point my stomach dropped, I felt a chill pass through me, and my heart started hammering. This, I understood, these thousands of pages before me with who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses on them, was a printout of my own web history. How many days or weeks or months or years were represented by twenty-five hundred pages of addresses, or even by five thousand if the second box was not just a set of duplicates? (I checked and the pages appeared to be different.) How much of my life was before me, and who on earth might have sent it? What might they be trying to tell me, other than the obvious, which is to say that they could see exactly where I had been, and that someone has been monitoring my activity for quite some time? The fact of digital surveillance was not itself a surprise, but surely the government would not present the information gathered to the person surveilled? No, this was, I felt certain, the work of some private entity, perhaps someone with a grievance who was preparing to blackmail me. This — I knew, I suddenly felt, I could see very clearly — was all too real a possibility, for there were without question secrets from the past decade that might well be exposed by my activity online, which someone might use against me, either in an attempt to shame me publicly — this was possible, truly, though I feel certain I have never done anything that would be judged, in the end, as intrinsically evil — or, and this seemed less probable, to try to get me fired from my job, though why anyone would wish this I cannot say. I have held no grudges against my former colleagues at Columbia, I got on exceptionally well with my colleagues at Oxford, both in the College and the Faculty of History, and in the months since starting at NYU I have found all my colleagues professional and, frankly, charming.