I’m sitting staring at this flask and I’m worrying that this subject is not in a good place. If the problem is this deep, this is hardly the time for tea, let alone soup. This seminar is miles beyond me and I’m getting this feeling that this will be a bad breakup. The charm is wearing off and I start asking questions like: “where did the time go” and “did I change or did they” and wondering what film I got questions like that from. At one point I wanted to be an academic, now I’m sitting in one of the oldest universities in the UK trying to remember the name of that pirate website.

I do one of those degrees. Its experts always name it a human high point but seem to have taken that too seriously at some point. Those of us trying to get in on the joke tell our friends and family, always met with the best smile any horrified person can manage. The face of looking at pure innocence and knowing it hasn’t got a chance but we’re surrounded by good people who haven’t the heart. My doubts grow independently these days. The absurd charm or sincere passion you remember doesn’t cover up the cracks anymore. The conventions and “proper modes of inquiry” used to irritate me but that was at 9am when nothing didn’t. But at some point the panic got under the skin and managed to make it to the 3pm seminars too.

Dutifully I’ve continued to read my way through the canon, searing it onto my consciousness for academic reasons. This enormous collection of people in which we throw around the word eccentric like a fireman trying to put out a blaze. I think about them less as names and more like people I assume they were at some point. Poetically, I find humanity, objectively, I find ravers, ramblers and addicts. The kind of people that defined ages, the kind of people I’m sure talked to themselves in pubs. Some were good, some wrong but meant well and some were wrong and bad just for good measure. All of them the terrifying product of their time and some must have been tough sells even for those too.

And yet, every one of them was able to do something beyond themselves. Managed to produce beautiful things, staggering moments of lucid thought. Some ability to look beyond the society that I’m sure kept a close eye on them. I cannot manage to reconcile this group of far too human people to these seconds of radical cleanliness. People managing real flames for as long as they could.

And now it’s Wednesday. The semantics of this presentation might not be the introduction but might be the whole powerpoint. I’m thinking about this course. Soon they’ll get into the meat of the subject: finding your particular “ism” and spending a lifetime working with the same rhythm as you would a crossword. And yet every person I meet here is a unique intelligence in their own right but at some point we started taking our metaphors too literally. Someone speaks to me and I say I don’t mind if the window is open or closed because I’m not sure it’s going to save this situation. 

I’ll finish this degree and then I think I’ll leave universities for some time at least. And I don’t think I’ll worry about the next degree for a while or create any delusions about a “future career”. I can’t tell if my graduation will be the silver lining my CV needed. Maybe I should have volunteered for more “opportunities” from other departments and questioned my life on another Thursday afternoon. But for now I’m going to leave Durham and my degree. Maybe I was never looking for a living, a set of mannerisms or a gentle hobby instead of a job. And maybe something not just to fill my life. Maybe something closer to life itself. Maybe I won’t be just a graduate. Maybe I’ll try to just get down on paper how it feels to be wherever I end up.

But right now I’m watching a squirrel from my window and I think I have an essay due next week.

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