Saturday, January 30, 2010
Barricades
What goes through my mind, every now and again, is the Joan Didion piece about being a child of the 50s, though that's not, I don't think, the way she put it - about making a private peace, a little town, a house by the beach, rather than cutting oneself into history; about not going to the barricades. (It was "The Morning After the Sixties", or a title much like.)
That and Lyra and the aleiometer in Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy - not by grace but by learning.
That and Lyra and the aleiometer in Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy - not by grace but by learning.
Cambridge
So I'm in Cambridge, or perhaps at Cambridge, more accurately; I should be here until June; I'm reading for an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History. I may have mentioned this.
Cambridge is too familiar in many ways, and extremely strange in others. Too familiar not so much in its architecture - geography? (the best part of Cambridge, though I miss the great public set-pieces of Oxford - Radcliffe Square; the sweep of Broad Street, with the Clarendon and the Sheldonian on one side; the University Parks; Cambridge is too college-dominated) but in oh the awkwardness and tentativeness of undergraduate life. There are people I would have loved to meet, or to be able to meet, six, seven years ago; conversations I wanted to have; a kind of student life I wanted to have; but not any more, or not quite in the same way, or not with the mentality of a twenty-three-year-old. This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with age; I find myself reverting to my undergraduate self in an older shell, as if the experience and confidence of the last six years, such as they were, have all but evaporated. And extremely strange in that - oh but it's hard now. Harder than it used to be, for all kinds of reasons - I'm not used to academic reading and writing; or to working hard, for that matter; the standard's higher; I'm just not good enough; it's real now. This is what academic research is, or should be, or what it needs. Which is a deep, abiding and compulsive love of one's research, if only because that might be its only reward. (In the arts, at least. The sciences have the consolation of utility.) And whatever else I came here for, it was for a room of my own - a way of finding the energy and compulsion and desire that I thought I had, or wanted, or was nostalgic for. Some jobs, I think, are callings; not all are; this is probably one of them.
So. What next?
Cambridge is too familiar in many ways, and extremely strange in others. Too familiar not so much in its architecture - geography? (the best part of Cambridge, though I miss the great public set-pieces of Oxford - Radcliffe Square; the sweep of Broad Street, with the Clarendon and the Sheldonian on one side; the University Parks; Cambridge is too college-dominated) but in oh the awkwardness and tentativeness of undergraduate life. There are people I would have loved to meet, or to be able to meet, six, seven years ago; conversations I wanted to have; a kind of student life I wanted to have; but not any more, or not quite in the same way, or not with the mentality of a twenty-three-year-old. This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with age; I find myself reverting to my undergraduate self in an older shell, as if the experience and confidence of the last six years, such as they were, have all but evaporated. And extremely strange in that - oh but it's hard now. Harder than it used to be, for all kinds of reasons - I'm not used to academic reading and writing; or to working hard, for that matter; the standard's higher; I'm just not good enough; it's real now. This is what academic research is, or should be, or what it needs. Which is a deep, abiding and compulsive love of one's research, if only because that might be its only reward. (In the arts, at least. The sciences have the consolation of utility.) And whatever else I came here for, it was for a room of my own - a way of finding the energy and compulsion and desire that I thought I had, or wanted, or was nostalgic for. Some jobs, I think, are callings; not all are; this is probably one of them.
So. What next?
Friday, January 29, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Marginalia
First writer: Abandon faith all those who enter here! Start at page 17!
Second: All ye who enter here, I think, sweetie.
Third: Who gives a flying fuck?
(The book in question: J. C. D. Clark's English Society 1660-1832)
Second: All ye who enter here, I think, sweetie.
Third: Who gives a flying fuck?
(The book in question: J. C. D. Clark's English Society 1660-1832)
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Sunday, January 03, 2010
[Interlude 2]
David Tennant on BBC Radio 4: said that the West Wing was the best drama series after Doctor Who.
[interlude]
One of the best footnotes I've seen: "[Josiah Tucker] was one of those insignificant Englishmen of whom the history of political thought so largely consists. This remark is dedicated with irritated affection to Judith N. Shklar." (From Pocock, "Mobility of property", in Virtue, Commerce, and History.)