Let us go then, you and me
Into the swirling abyss of Trinity…
Hello,
It will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I placed it into abeyance for nearly three weeks, nor will it come as a surprise that this entry is going to be self-indulgently long, melancholy and introspective as a result.
My Easter Vacation barely deserves recalling. It comprised, mostly, pretending to revise, attempting to write poetry and trying to avoid injury (ies) for long enough to run a respectable 5K time. The first of these proved to be an unequivocal success; it would be strictly incorrect to say that I procrastinated – I spent inordinate stretches of time at my desk with books open in front of me – but my revision practices went as follows: open book at nine o’clock extremely motivated; read for fifteen minutes rather rapaciously; stare into space for five minutes ostensibly ‘thinking about what I’d read’; return to book five minutes later to realise that I’d forgotten what I’d already read; repeat for two hours; take a break, safe in the knowledge that two hours worth of revision had been done. The second was an unequivocal failure: to borrow a rather neat phrase from Humbert Humbert – the college intellectual, not the European peripatetic ephebophile – I have achieved ‘nothing of aesthetic significance’ this Vacation, unless one counts completing a jigsaw of the Taj Mahal – which, quite frankly, I don’t intend to. The third was a partial success – I ran 19:10 at Gunnersbury a fortnight before coming back up, which is a relative success. By relative, I do mean ‘I managed to actually run 5000m without either my back, shins, ankle or plantar fasciae giving out’. Thus, my Easter Vacation past uneventfully, quietly and desultorily, which will lead me into the main body of this post in a moment. I saw the odd friend – including ex-girlfriend, which was, quite frankly, the most uneventful occurrence in an especially mundane break, slept less than I should have done to recuperate, and tried to avoid thinking about the impending catastrophe that Preliminaries will be.
The next issue is my commitment to this blog. Fear not – it has not decreased or died a slow death; I merely wanted to clear my head and trust to my ability to write coherently prior to beginning anything else, and, to rectify weeks of neglect, I plan to update every day this week. Of course, Collections and two hitherto unwritten essays may make this a little difficult to achieve, but I shall do my best. Today’s post is going to be unavoidably, as already stated, introspective, but I intend that to be cathartic; I find myself intensely dull currently but believe that one of the most effective means of cathartic release is to write. After this, I intend to move outside myself, and with good reason; this term is going to be intensely dull – revision, running, and sleeping – and I find it incredibly difficult to believe that my life at Oxford, or my ruminations on myself, can sustain interest. Thus: today’s post, a series of reflections and miscellaneous personal thoughts. Later today – given that we have now passed midnight – a review of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. Tuesday – a long-planned piece on the inanity that pervades football commentary and punditry nowadays, and the dire linguistic consequences. Wednesday – if I have done enough reading to not come across as an ignorant boor, a few reflections on Baroness Thatcher’s death. Thursday – (if I am not panicking about the impending Collection, and if the b0ok is finished – a review of Hitch-22. Friday – a review of the three races I did this Easter for any runners who read this blog. After that, I may just spew miscellaneous thoughts about nothing, or go silent for a day or two while I recuperate.
It so happens that The Rachel Papers helped draw together a lot of the unstructured thoughts I was having over the Vacation. Two things become pertinent here: firstly, my misanthropy and melancholy over the Vacation, leading in part to me deactivating my Facebook. Second, it was mentioned to me that I am entering my final month of my teenage years. When I go through a period of prolonged melancholy, I like to try and uncover the reasons why. However, I encountered numerous problems in doing so. First and foremost, I was not even sure that it was melancholy. It was more a sense of all-pervasive listlessness: an existentialist-esque lethargy that sort of defied classification. It certainly wasn’t the tempestuous turmoil of December/January. Nor was it a type of depression that causes one to refrain from doing anything. To paraphrase: I certainly didn’t ‘forego all custom of exercise’, but I had, certainly, ‘lost all my mirth’, and I wherefore I knew – and know – not. And there’s the rub. What causes one to go from – (relatively) garrulous, vibrant, and imbued with an insatiable desire for even the minutiae of a day – to immeasurably apathetic? I considered that it might be a prolonged hangover from Christmas, but dismissed that notion with the riposte that not even I am that…
(Here is one of those points where I find all possible adjectives inadequate. ‘Nostalgic‘ would be generally accurate but not pertinent in this context; ‘intransigent‘ doesn’t quite have an adequate semantic range; ‘pessimistic’ would also be incorrect, because my emotions admitted neither pessimism or optimism. It is at times like these where I wish I knew a suitable word from a foreign tongue, and it is also at times like these where I fully understand Goethe’s maxim that a man who knows no foreign language knows nothing of his own.)
In any case, illumination was shed – to an extent – upon reading The Rachel Papers. I shall provide a brief summary of the plot for those of you who have not read it: Charles Highway, a precocious young man, is on the verge of adulthood. However, for Highway, it is not turning eighteen or turning twenty-one that promises adulthood and all of its delights: it is turning twenty. The book, therefore, carries characteristics of a Bildungsroman, and charts Highway’s attempts to take stock of his childhood – manifesting itself in literary form, through innumerable papers and notebooks on his life, and a Letter to his Father that becomes a speech. There, the analogy ends, because Highway’s attempts to seek fulfillment from his teenage years involve trying to seduce an Older Woman and little else; let us proceed with what I have noted already.
It is an imperfect analogy, but one that provided me with possible reasons for my feelings. After all, I could be subconsciously feeling how I felt due to the impending transition from the ‘red-skin interlude of the boy’ to the ‘man’, but I find this an imperfect solution. For, as Evelyn Waugh notes, it is easy to imbue one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence, but I claim neither for my childhood, and, equally, I stopped feeling like a teenager – if feeling like a teenager suggests an exhilarating sense of freedom and vistas of unchartered possibility – around the age of sixteen. Thus, I have had plenty of time to realise and prepare myself for the fact that adulthood is imminent, and that this means not increased freedom, but merely a release into a ‘larger holding pen’.
And nor is there a sense, as the Park Enders and Oceanites that I know might suggest, that I feel like my teenage years were unfulfilled. I realised very quickly that tea and Scrabble were preferable – for me – to tequila and Sambuca, and I could not be further from regretting that state of affairs. Another speedily-rejected notion was that I feel like I have achieved nothing with my teenage years. I managed – with some fortune, no doubt, and after two attempts – to get to the university I desired; I had – belatedly – a successful school career; I made two small but highly agreeable groups of friends; managed at least one (perfunctory) relationship (I say this sardonically), and managed a number of small, but none the less pleasing, sporting successes. Nothing ground-breaking, and nothing to shout to the rafters about, but certainly nothing to be unfulfilled as a result of.
Perhaps there is something self-contained about my feelings. Perhaps it is merely frustration that I am, once again, feeling this way, thus yielding more frustration, which in turn leads to a cyclical state in which I berate myself for feeling listless, only to feel more listless and vapid; thus, my feelings do not result due to any external correlate. This seems more likely. For one particularly strong thought was that I was too young for these feelings; I ran through a lot of trite, hackneyed nonsense in my head: should I not have all the exuberance of youth currently? Are not the undesirable vicissitudes of life – the barely-met bills, the tedious job, the lost ambition, the nights spent in stony silence over the newspaper with a wife one has fallen out of love with – years or even a decade away? That, however, was replaced by a lesser-quoted piece of wisdom rather promptly: that I was too old for these feelings. Again, this had more weight behind it. I mean – angst? Seriously? Is not this trite melancholia, this vacuous cynicism, the preserve of the pitiably doe-eyed mid-teens – the spotty, soporifically ‘intellectual’ Adrian Mole; the conventionally moody Holden Caulfield; the laughably pretentious Teen Tony Webster? Deciding that all political systems are corrupt and humanity is doomed anyway and that life is therefore pointless while listening to All By Myself in the rain – I hope the satire is obvious here – might be acceptable for a sixteen-year-old, but one would hope that by nineteen a greater equanimity had been acquired.
It’s now a quarter-past two and I find myself getting nowhere (whilst becoming increasingly exhausted), so now might be a good time to wrap up. And, I haven’t really reached any conclusions, but that was perhaps to be expected. Most likely it is a combination of all of the possible issues discussed above, and in any case, this post was more about rumination than conclusion. At least it means that all of the self-indulgent tripe posted on here can end, and I can try and proceed with writing something interesting – or, ‘of aesthetic significance’. It’s almost cathartic.
Regards,
Jack
jacknmoran 