Lent

So Lent term is almost over, or possibly over already; they do time differently here, the week starts on a Thursday and ends whenever, and anyway we don't quite follow the undergraduate timetable. I've finished my second essay and it's not 6 a.m. the day it's due, which is a first for me. It's a much better essay than the first one, which is not saying that much, and the surprised relief with which my supervisor concurs with this assessment would be humbling if I hadn't already reached bottom. This term was better, I'm really enjoying it now, I can see the road from here, and those stone marker things that tell you how far you've run, and it's not unimaginably far away. The first term was so demoralising I didn't apply for a PhD - I wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell of funding anyway, it's based on the department's ranking, which is more or less based on the grade of your first essay - doesn't this sound familiar? - so I'll be home, at least for a year, and then, and then I really don't know. One tends to get enmeshed in things. I want to be home. I want to stay here. There was a talk last Thursday by John Pocock, a professor at Johns Hopkins I think, who did his doctorate here but didn't teach here, who more or less set the agenda for the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought. His thing is the history of historiography - he may have invented the field - the history of how societies understand themselves and in time, which is part of the history of political discourse, itself recursive and reflexive (if that's what I mean) - a historian's historian. I'm coming round to the idea that history, done right, is the hardest discipline of all the humanities, including the social sciences for the sake of argument. Pocock's topic is the history of Western society, the history of the grand narratives used to describe historical change from the ancients to the moderns, a history he summarises in two arcs: from libertas to imperium, and something about revelation which I didn't understand. The Enlightenment, which is where he stops, is the replacement of the sacred with commerce. Roughly. There was a talk just now, organised by the Jewish Society, by Steve Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein. As a talk it was entertaining and not much more; there are few truly interesting general things to say about religion by sympathetic atheists and non-religious Jews; their books are better. Their books are very good, from what little I've read of them, and Rebecca Goldstein makes me want to read Spinoza. The thing though, is their marriage. Did you not want that? A marriage of true minds? The scientist and the philosopher/novelist? Though he is a cognitive psychologist and she comes out of the analytic philosophy tradition, before she was converted by Spinoza, so they're not that far apart. What I have here is not the life of the mind, but it makes the life of the mind thinkable. I don't want it, I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough to really enjoy it. I want it. It's humbling to come up against my limits where they matter - limits don't matter in so many things, I'll never climb Everest, never learn to tango, never walk without stumbling over my own feet - but they matter here. Reading and writing and thinking, if you can't do these things properly, what can you do? I don't want the arguments one has in class or in the pub, or even the late-night conversations over wine or tea on the floor of someone's dorm room; I want the conversations I can't yet have, perhaps can't have. How much raw intelligence do you have, and how hard will you work for it, and what will you give up while you're finding out? More than ever I feel I'm running out of time, it's too late, this is the cost of the scholarship and it's too high now.