Feb 18, 2008 17:36
I love university. It is, I think, as close as I will ever get to a Secret History experience, in that I am absolutely intoxicated when I leave for home. Strike that, I am home. Home, home, home. And in love. Insane discussions about macro- and microcosm, fools in disguise as a picture of identity and whom we are to trust. Shakespeare was fun, though I do not understand much. I am even writing nonsense in my LJ, very Secret History of me. Unastonishingly, I am back to maddening, complicated, spaced interpretations of everything. I am home, Darlings.
Someone exclaimed something along the lines of "You feel everything so strongly, Alex", and I am so glad I do. I pity those that never feel what I do when I read a very good book, eat something divine, hear something that leaves me in stitches or watch a sad movie. "And never have known the passionate undivided / Fidelities that I knew" ("The House Dog's Grave", Robertson Jeffers). They are missing out. I would not swap my temper for anything in the world. Nor my passion.
I think I know what it is about middle-aged/old(er) men. There is something in the way they carry themselves; a certain dignity, a hint of things lived and of knowledge possessed. Security, perhaps? It is very rare, but does occasionally occur in younger men. Not that they usually have pants that fit - as opposed to having the waist relocated to their knees - turns me off them, either.
I want to write my master's in English on Nabokov, and then go on to find some obscure question on to research for a Ph.D.
The title is, by the way, from The Secret History. Surpise! Off to print English-stuff on sonnets, Romanticism, eliot, et al, and be a very happy geek.
feelings,
the secret history,
passion,
university english,
middle-aged men