penniless.’
‘But look around you,’ you would shout. ‘There is gold enough to last you your whole life. All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!’
When people complain that they don’t know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.
‘But it’s all around you!’ I want to scream. ‘All you have to do it bend down and pick it up!’ What on
earth
people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with
school
I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the faultlay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie
Short Circuit
who whizzes about shrieking, ‘Input! Input!’ Memorizing for me became like eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself.
I do not say that this hunger for learning was morally, intellectually or stylistically admirable. I think it was a little like ambition, a little like many of the later failings in my life we will come to: membership of so many clubs, ownership of so many credit cards … it was part of wanting to belong, of feeling the need constantly to connect myself. Rather vulgar, rather pushy.
While the manner and motives of it may not have been magnificent the end result was certainly useful. The urgent desire to pack the mind, my insatiable curiosity and appetite for knowledge led to all kinds of advantages. Facile exam passing was one such. I had never found written tests under time pressure anything other than enjoyable and easy. That is because of my fundamental dishonesty. I never tried to engage authentically or truthfully with an intellectual issue or to answer a question. I only tried to show off and in the course of my life I have met few people who are my equal at that undignified art. There are plenty who are more obviously show-offy than I am, but that is what is so creepy about my particular brand of exhibitionism – I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I think these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence may once have been false but have now become pretty much real, in much the same way that the conscious mannerwe decide to sign our names in our teens will slowly stop being affected and become our real signature. The mask if worn long enough will be the face.
All of which seems a long way from a memoir of university life, which is what this chapter is supposed to offer. The life of a student however, especially that of a more than usually self-conscious student in an institution like Cambridge, does involve a great deal of questioning of the mind and intellectual faculties and the meaning and purpose of scholarship, so I think it right to try and fathom what my mind was about in those days.
I went to three lectures in my entire three years. I can remember only two, but I am sure I went to another. The first was an introductory talk on Langland’s
Piers Plowman
by J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. Lewis’s successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1963 and seemed old enough to have lived through much of the period of which he had made himself a master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation of why the B-text of
Piers Plowman
(an achingly long work of Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more to be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other way around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree with W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text’s rendering of the Harrowing of
‘But look around you,’ you would shout. ‘There is gold enough to last you your whole life. All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!’
When people complain that they don’t know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.
‘But it’s all around you!’ I want to scream. ‘All you have to do it bend down and pick it up!’ What on
earth
people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with
school
I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the faultlay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie
Short Circuit
who whizzes about shrieking, ‘Input! Input!’ Memorizing for me became like eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself.
I do not say that this hunger for learning was morally, intellectually or stylistically admirable. I think it was a little like ambition, a little like many of the later failings in my life we will come to: membership of so many clubs, ownership of so many credit cards … it was part of wanting to belong, of feeling the need constantly to connect myself. Rather vulgar, rather pushy.
While the manner and motives of it may not have been magnificent the end result was certainly useful. The urgent desire to pack the mind, my insatiable curiosity and appetite for knowledge led to all kinds of advantages. Facile exam passing was one such. I had never found written tests under time pressure anything other than enjoyable and easy. That is because of my fundamental dishonesty. I never tried to engage authentically or truthfully with an intellectual issue or to answer a question. I only tried to show off and in the course of my life I have met few people who are my equal at that undignified art. There are plenty who are more obviously show-offy than I am, but that is what is so creepy about my particular brand of exhibitionism – I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I think these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence may once have been false but have now become pretty much real, in much the same way that the conscious mannerwe decide to sign our names in our teens will slowly stop being affected and become our real signature. The mask if worn long enough will be the face.
All of which seems a long way from a memoir of university life, which is what this chapter is supposed to offer. The life of a student however, especially that of a more than usually self-conscious student in an institution like Cambridge, does involve a great deal of questioning of the mind and intellectual faculties and the meaning and purpose of scholarship, so I think it right to try and fathom what my mind was about in those days.
I went to three lectures in my entire three years. I can remember only two, but I am sure I went to another. The first was an introductory talk on Langland’s
Piers Plowman
by J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. Lewis’s successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1963 and seemed old enough to have lived through much of the period of which he had made himself a master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation of why the B-text of
Piers Plowman
(an achingly long work of Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more to be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other way around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree with W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text’s rendering of the Harrowing of
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