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?