Hello,
After the turbulent, straitened nature of the past few weeks, a brief moment of calm has finally arisen in my week, and it seemed like an opportune moment to try and update all of my readers – if any still exist – on how I have spent a considerable portion of my Hilary term. Naturally, this entry will focus on breadth rather than depth in its recollection of events, as, typically, a lot of pertinent things have occurred, and to give all of them the weight they deserve would lead to an entry that read as more of a novella than a blog post. Another problem is that I find my memory eluding me somewhat when I try and recall events in, say, 4th Week. Faithful readers of this blog will recall that I likened life at Oxford to a phantasmagoric blur, and this often makes it very difficult to distinguish clear details such as the time and place of fragmentary moments in the swirling eddy of one’s consciousness.
Regardless, the historian must attempt to make some sense of these fragments, otherwise it would be impossible for anything to be recorded at all, and so I shall simply have to proceed, conscious of the flaws in my recollections. This provides a convenient segue into my most interesting essay topic of the past few weeks: 5th Week, in which we did the dystopian novel. I had been eagerly anticipating this week for some time, due to the wonderful texts available for analysis and exegesis: The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange and Never Let Me Go, to name but a few. Due to time constraints, I only managed to write my essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was still a wonderfully rewarding week. I decided to analyse the novels through the prism of Julian Barnes’s quotation on the flaws of history: ‘History is that certainty produced when the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Of course, the partial, unreliable nature of history is hugely pertinent to both novels and it was a hugely interesting essay to write. A difficult planning stage was alleviated when a friend of mine, as of yet unnamed in this blog – let us call him Humbert Humbert, not because he has any questionable sexual predilections, or because he is a “shining example of moral leprosy” (well, not that I am aware of), but because he is the quintessential example of the European intellectual – gave me a fascinating book called The Paradox of History, by Nicola Chiaromonte. Time constraints meant that I only managed to get through the first two chapters, but those two chapters were enough to give my hitherto amorphous essay shape and direction. For Chiaromonte, the paradox of history is the paradox of politics; that both processes are predicated on meliorist, teleological assumptions that are constantly undermined by the fact that “things never turn out as they should”. This doctrine – the undermining of a telos in both literature and history – is key to the dystopian novel, and it was this realisation that was key to forming my essay. In the event, I spent most of 5th Week ill with a particularly bad case of flu, and was bed-bound for all of Monday, but my tutor still seemed very pleased with my essay, which, given the circumstances under which it was composed, is satisfactory if not pleasing.
It has been a very strange term for me academically. I find it hard to believe that I am doing badly; my tutors have said predominantly positive things about the work that I have produced, and I have not struggled to get work done, even when ill. Nor have I found understanding any topic particularly difficult, Yet, I cannot state with any conviction that I have made any progress at all. I have had no quantitative means of assessing my progress, so my notion that my work has been at a mid-to-high 2:1 level is merely an unsupported guess. Yet, I am equally certain that nothing of a 1st Class standard has been produced. As such, I am currently undergoing grave doubts that a first-class mark in Prelims is possible. I feel like I have made too little progress this term to feel with any confidence that my writing and interpretation has reached the necessary standards consistently, if at all. Again, this is only a surmise, but it is one that I feel is probably correct. Therefore, the challenging of the notion of a telos has not simply occurred in the novels I have read; I feel like this term, in every aspect of my life, my belief of a telos has come under question.
The same questioning can be applied to my running. I spent most of the first five weeks either injured or ill, so made absolutely no headway after my pleasing 18:24 just prior to coming up. Since then, I have attended sessions fairly regularly, but have not competed. In addition, multiple football matches between the middle of Sixth Week and the middle of Seventh have made doing any sessions at all nigh on impossible. Strangely, I even have to challenge my sense that a teleology in my running has been undermined this term. For in 5th Week, in the throes of my illness, I got utterly fed up with sitting inside and went down to the Iffley Road track, to run a 5K alone. I managed a time of 18:06, which is my best since last July, in the middle of summer, when Oxford was still a hazy abstraction and untrammelled hope for everything – running, life, academia, love – still seemed possible. This extremely pleasing performance is a mere twelve seconds off my best of 17:54, achieved in the midst of those heat-hazed idyllic months, and has me believing that, with a singular focus on running from the end of this week, my goal of 17:30 will be possible in Track Cuppers. In the interim, I need to spend the next three weeks training in earnest for the Richmond Half Marathon. (Apropos of nothing: I am reminded of an amusing comment that Humbert Humbert made upon seeing my old race numbers pinned to my wall: he asked whether the numbers represented a teleology. I responded ‘Not as much as I’d like.’ I hope that is proved wrong over the next few months.)
Since I’m focusing on sport, now seems an apposite time to turn the focus to football. This will have to be sped over, because since my last post I have played twelve matches, including five in four days between last Thursday and last Sunday, and seven in eight days. I shall speed over the highlights: we lost Cuppers to Lincoln on penalties. It was a highly disappointing performance. We did not do ourselves justice at all and allowed ourselves to fall into the trap of playing the archaic, basic, anarchic football that Lincoln wanted us to play. I played poorly in the match but scored my penalty. Given our two Blues players and superb German central midfielder leave at the end of this year, our best chance of winning Cuppers is probably gone: once again, my belief in a telos has been undermined. Other highlights: scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win over promotion challengers Balliol College; scoring two goals in a 3-2 win over rivals Queens, including the winning goal after a goal that I am hugely proud of – a run which took me past four players, before applying the finish; and scoring seven goals for the 3rd XI against Magdalen College in an 11-4 victory. That game was an utterly joyous affair, in which everything seemed to go right. Yes, it was only a 3rd XI game, and yes, Magdalen’s performance was pathetic, but seven goals is a personal record and – I am currently waiting for this to be ratified – may well be an OUAFC record for most goals in a single college game. My statistics for this season, thanks to a prolific recent period, reads thus: twenty-two games played, twenty-one goals scored, fifteen assists made. Nine of those goals have been for the 1st XI, in fourteen games. It could have been a little better, but I am still hugely satisfied with how this season has gone. Twenty-one goals puts me easily clear of the next Aularian top goalscorer, who has scored ten (and all for the 2nd XI). The next highest scorer in the 1st XI has five.
Before I leave the topic of football, I want to look at the other preponderant topic in this post: temperament. I have, with no small amount of disquiet, observed myself falling victim to the weaknesses in temperament that have not existed since I was fourteen or fifteen. On the pitch, I have found myself becoming increasingly ruffled and agitated by small things. For example, playing for the MCR, I became increasingly irked by defenders holding my shirt. Upon one shirt-pull too much, I, in the most ludicrously infantile manner, gave the defender a little elbow in the stomach to force him to let go. A minor, inconsequential incident, one might suggest? Well, no. For so long, I have managed to play football in a completely disinterested manner, attempting to rise above the juvenile fracas and friction that underlie most games I partake in. Little has been able to rile me on the pitch over the past three or four years; as a result, these otherwise negligible lapses in temperament are a little disconcerting. I wonder whether it is the manifestation of extraneous (to football, that is) frustrations exhibiting themselves in an environment conducive to these puerile displays of anger and irritability. Regardless, I am extremely disappointed that I have begun to let myself fall victim to these momentary compulsions, and restraining my occasionally capricious temperament is undoubtedly a goal for the next few months.
I do not desire to give readers the impression that all I do at Oxford is work, run and play football. I have done a number of other things in addition to these predominant activities. In 6th Week I attended a lecture entitled ‘A Cure for Ageing?’, held at the Sheldonian theatre. As a title it is reasonably self-explanatory; in the event, it proved to be just as much a discussion on semantics as it was biology. The two keynote speakers both believed in the efficacy of attempting to cure ‘ageing’; where they differed was in the approach to doing so. For they wanted to draw an important semantic distinction between ‘ageing’ and ‘age-related disease’. The former approach, propounded by Aubrey de Grey, endeavoured to cure ageing – that is, extend the human lifespan through improving of the mechanisms that, upon deteriorating, cause old age and death. The latter approach, expounded upon by a scientist whose name eludes me, aimed to cure age-related diseases – the typical diseases that are concomitant with ageing – and thus extend lifespan this way. Their opposing viewpoints were stimulating and interesting, but unfortunately the debate descended into juvenile ad hominems which acted to the detriment of the discussion. I also wanted to go to another Scientific Society debate, focusing on the causes of obesity, but work commitments precluded my doing so. Similarly, I greatly desired to attend a production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (a play I studied and admired at AS-Level), but again found myself without the time to do so.
Finally, there was one more hugely interesting event – to me, at least – that occurred over the past four weeks. I took part in Teddy Hall’s Writers and Artists’ Day, and was asked by my tutor to perform two pieces of work. The first, Fleur-de-Lys, will be familiar to anyone who has read this blog over the past eight or nine months. The second was the rap I wrote for Teddy Hall’s Got Talent, back in the halcyon days of November. In the end, it was a wonderful day; rapping in the Wolfson Hall to a group of Teddy Hall alumni and academics (including Stewart Lee, who I had the fortune of meeting in person in the college bar) was an experience I did not predict when applying to Oxford. Conversely, the experience of reciting an extremely personal poem in the Old Dining Hall – a gloomy, typically Oxford-esque room, adorned with portraits of past Principals and academics – was an unforgettable experience, and hearing the work of writers infinitely more gifted than I was a reminder of what can be achieved here, irrespective of the Teddy Hall inferiority complex that is somewhat endemic here.
I shall update again by the weekend. Today is a day of renewal for me; after five consecutive nights in which I have been up until between 03:00 and 03:30 working, I have resolved to manage my time so as never to have to do it again. I am looking forward to studying Modern Drama this week, including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I am using tonight to recuperate; drinking tea, planning my Easter revision and reading Pablo Neruda’s sonnets, which a friend of mine in Emden Building was kind enough to provide me with. I refuse to give up on my goal of a Distinction in Prelims, but if I am going to rescue a term that has meandered, lethargic and laconic, the rescue attempt must begin immediately. If nothing else, it proves that, as Dawkins so rightfully notes, the propensity of humanity for teleology is unavoidable – no matter what might happen to challenge those beliefs.
Regards,
Jack
jacknmoran 