The History Boys

Perhaps only a historian could tell us about  death and futility, and the small fissures in a personality that would, in time, open up and unfold into an irreversible disaster. A historian, as drawn up by a novelist, that is.

You continue to be underwhelmed by Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. This should have been finished in one session but, I don't know, it just comes across as lightweight. Does the name 'Julian' have anything to do with that? [he asks, putting on his east European hat]. I suppose all teenagers pretend to be intelligent (that itself is a legacy, I guess, of parents telling them when they were kids how special they were). But when it continues deep in to middle age, which is what happens in academia, then you're fucked. If you're still reading Nietzsche when you're forty...

Loved Levels of Life and his essays: dazzling and quick..a different kind of 'lightness'. I think I rapidly reached the limit when I glanced-yeah, how superficial is that?!-at his book on death and God. There can sometimes seem something slightly childish about not taking religion seriously. Not necessarily, of course, but by those who haven't truly got over it and who want, in the back of their minds, to convince others about what, to them, is the glaringly obvious truth: there is no problem regarding the divine because nothing is sacred. Or, the sacred-to the extent that it exists-is to be found elsewhere.

Still, let's see. Flaubert's Parrot to go. Perhaps you should finally take a stab at Donna Tartt's Secret History?

The History Boys, the film: highly enjoyable. And the lovely Hardy poem. Displacement, again. Forgotten under a foreign sun, a death that doesn't become a legend but is just another number to be noted in the scrapbook of history; the life that could have been, the treasure trove of words not said, the quirks of character passed down in a child he didn't see.

But, again, boys. Rites of passage, the relation with high culture, books, literature, tradition, the greats...is all of that only reserved for young men? To be fed up with books, see through academia and its charlatans, be disgruntled about how knowledge saps the vitality of life. This sounds all too familiar. Someone once asked: is all this 'existential angst' a particularly male phenomenon? (As if to say, in other words, that domesticity is the irreversible destiny of one half of the population?)

The inability to grow up. This is bigger than Japan. But in what little you've read it appears to be a largely, if not exclusively, a man-thing. A man-cub thing.

~~~

'But underlying attitudes revealed in this case lift the lid, yet again, on the depth of misogyny in this society – all the women-hating, woman-blaming, woman-fearing instincts that can reach right to the top.'
---Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.

But if that is true in good ol' Blighty, then what of the land of the pure where acid is till thrown on the faces of  'dishonourable' women? And what of India, with its centuries of backwardness? This is something, you feel, is beyond the reaches of history or cultural specifics. There is some deep-seated misogyny that rears up no matter what. What will some future archaeologist of the human heart dig up, what madness will they find?

~~~

'Every day hordes of London commuters have passed unknowingly over the bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street'
---The Guardian.

On open day you actually saw this site, just round the side of Liverpool Street station. And the fantastic Masonic lodge. 

~~~

Everything was thought or said by the Greeks. In a brief interlude from the darkness, a few sprightly minds thought that questioning was a good thing and we've never looked back since. But at times it can also seem as if what one person in the distant past has started is inescapable. Is there any escaping from our history of violence, from our identity? And an escape into what, precisely?