20 June 2008
10:13 PM
My heart is beating quickly.
It has a lot to do with the department tutor's introductory letter to the Year 1s, as well as little specimens of some of my new course-mates' strenuous intellect.
I have also received some instructions to have "read Milton's Paradise Lost" before term starts. Or having been assigned a tutor for fortnightly tutorials, who will then "discuss" my essays, or else dissect them, and my work to be "set and commented on", or else criticised and destroyed (me, not the essay). I am given 3000 words to salvage my mind at each try. And as of yet, I can't even begin to string a proper, much less meaningful, sentence. The number of sentences beginning with "and" is an explicit enough confirmation.
Not that I'm worrying myself unduly. But it would have helped if the reading list included more of the things I've actually read before. Even if I can try to quote Woolf's Room of One's Own (part of reading list), I know next to nothing about Nietzche's Genealogy of Morals or Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy for that matter. (I hope not to sound vacuous, but who is Boethius?!)
I can sort of get the General theory of Relativity and maybe even fourth dimension of space-time, but that is just, well, challenging in a worrying way. Maybe I should have taken physics all along.
It doesn't help that one's tutor, a tutor of a tres chic portion of the syllabi, is exactly the kind of brooding, sophistical hero one expects of a man who carelessly holds Subjectivity in the palm of his hand, and modernism in the jugular of his mind.
I am allowed to shrug now. And go back to reading a painful Why I Write by George Orwell, when all I want to do is finish off the less-simulating but wonderfully-engaging world of TIME magazine.
Does anyone have the latest news about who is wearing what. I should go to Fashion school instead, if only I knew how to sew.
