I’ll tell you of my dreaming; dreaming is free
Alright, time for a post of epic proportions to make up for many months of silence on this blog, for it has become merely one of the many backlogs in my life that I seem unable to clear. There are so many times over this summer that I have thought to myself ‘hmm, I could write an interesting blog entry on that’ but I have then dismissed the idea with ‘ah but I haven’t written for so long I can’t just come out and write about this without first catching up on everything else that has happened’. And so it has gone on for months, something I am only now trying to repair at the very last minute before I go away to university for the first time, in the morning at 6am. My blog has a half-finished draft sitting as an attempt at this post but it is too old, too irrelevant, and I feel I must start afresh. The simple truth of the period I am about to describe is that it has been a pretty rubbish summer for a host of reasons. Now things are finally coming together as I prepare to go away at long last, which is good, but I only wish I had got things together sooner in order to make better use of the last four months. Four months. What a ridiculous chunk of my life that has been, essentially, almost completely wasted. Perhaps it is the fact that I have a terribly verbose diary that demotivates me from writing on here. Whatever it is I shall now attempt to correct it.
It’s not going to be easy to attempt to set this out, for I haven’t exactly kept detailed notes as I’ve gone along, and I imagine much of it is boring and repetitive. I will thus start with the most pressing issue. In my life I have pretty much one thing that I see as ultimately and self-evidentially valuable, and that is my academic study. Whether this psychological condition is correct – the way that I see everything else as merely distractions in the grand scheme of things, tossing aside friendships and other pursuits and experiences so easily – is another question, but this summer has made it abundantly clear to me that at the deepest level it is what I seem to believe. Why? Well, this summer I haven’t been studying through school, and have been almost completely incapable of studying on my own, and thus my self-esteem has dropped far off the scale and I have been miserable with the combination of desperately wanting to be able to do something and yet being too lazy to actually do it. My mother extends this lack of motivation to include a great deal else. She notes that since I got in to Oxford I immediately stopped caring about it; I see this as a symptom of the clash of my meta-desires and my desires. She spent the summer harrying me to go and get a job but I don’t really know how to do this, and while I did hand out plenty of CVs, I didn’t have any success. So with my lack of self-worth stemming from my lack of academic activity, my motivation for pretty much everything else also dried up, leaving me wasting the time away on easy things, rather than challenging ones. And then there is of course a spiral of other issues stemming from this which is what I don’t think I am capable of concisely and lucidly describing here.
So of course I have attempted to analyse this down somewhat more, remaining a non-academic over-thinker at all times, and have perhaps worked out a few things. The first and most obvious problem is something I have been aware of for a long time, and that is my inability to read at a good pace anymore, unable to grab the meaning of a whole sentence and move on rather than hyper-analysing it and imagining the scene in every possible way. Reading is not really very enjoyable due to this: every time I sit down to continue with a book, I have to force myself past my dislike of how much of a struggle it has become, and this is surely something of my own making. I can’t believe that my lack of recreational reading in the sixth form, due to time constraints, could have possibly led to an actual decline in reading speed at a basic level because I’ve been reading in lessons and for homework out of textbooks and novels (the latter for Philosophy…). So instead maybe it simply comes down to being unable to change my reading style to be less obsessed with nuances of meaning when trying to read a whole book rather than a small section. I don’t know. But my messed up reading is probably the biggest component of all of this.
There has been some solace in computing activities this summer, which I seem to have got into a great deal more. This is likely because they are easy: I’ve just been streamlining, rewriting for efficiency, adding simple new features, sysadmining. The fact though that, despite the activities being easy, I have been doing them continuously and solidly to produce something worthwhile was fantastic for me as something constructive. Perhaps then I have simply forgotten what academic work is supposed to be. I am poor, perhaps, at doing things that are supposed to be difficult and that tend to be better for this in the end. My old Philosophy teacher once said of me that I do the subject ‘because he knows it is good for him’ regardless of the whirlpools of confusion one can be drawn into, struggling to tread water to understand, struggling for clarity. Perhaps I need to re-learn to live like this. I have no idea how I will slot in academically at university; I only hope I can sort things out so I have something constant to rely on, as that is how humans tend to work. This is all I have to say. The problem and my basic and current thoughts on it have been stated, and wallowing in this any more would not be helpful. I have a fresh start at Oxford tomorrow.
I decided to commence preparation for ‘going up’ (despite it being to the south) in September, which essentially means working on Maths. I feel that after doing an A-level in Philosophy I have the background reading for that side of my course (although I have been enjoying a fantastic book on logic, which I am really looking forward to), but my Maths ability has flown away over the summer as it is apt to, or it certainly has for certain topics. Oxford have provided a number of worksheets to help one prepare and I have done a great deal of them, but my ability varies quite a bit. I can fly through the calculus and the messing about with polynomials and other simple functions, but there are certain techniques, such as most forms of differential equations, that I have completely forgotten, and others like matrices that I have never done before. I should then have allowed myself more time to get to grips with them. A friend who is going to Oxford for Physics this year was invited to go and spend an extra week before Freshers’ Week going over A-level Maths, and the various bits our particular course didn’t cover, and I really wish I’d been able to do this too. I will thus spend a great deal of Freshers’ week trying to get up to speed because Maths is my weaker subject out of the two I am studying and yet it is something I must avoid falling behind on.
This is pretty much my only concern about going down: my academic situation with regard to Maths. I imagine lots of others will be in the same boat but that doesn’t make it acceptable to have not started as early as I should have and got better prepared. But I am trying to convince myself that this is not something I can now affect and should instead leave alone as something I can try to make some headway against during the first week. Otherwise I am very excited about what everyone says tends to be a new life. I am really looking forward to being very poor, because I’ll end up even less materially concerned than I am now (which isn’t much). I imagine I’ll fill up my spare time with societies, because that’s what I did at school through all my lunchtimes, since I seem to find plenty of motivation for those sort of group activities. I have ringing, debating, computing, gaming (i.e. pen and paper RPGs) and philosophy on my list thus far but, without compromising my time spend studying, I think I could potentially add to this.
And then there are the subjects. Once I can get over initial difficulties and even myself out with everyone else, I feel like I am essentially starting what in the past year or so I have chosen to dedicate my life to. The scholar of theory, for that is my only concern, is often piled high with scorn; yet I seek nothing else as already described. The regimentation of an actual course should sort me out somewhat. To think, freely; to learn about the fantastic ideas of others and perhaps suggest a few simple fancies of one’s own, all the time remaining firmly atop the shoulders of those giants of history past. To be so so aware that we know nothing, and how that is a fantastically rich state of mind. As it has been said before, philosophy (and any subject really) is a conversation with the greatest minds of today and the greatest minds of the past. I’m not one of those greatest minds, but I’ll be around some of them down – sorry, up – in Oxford. I imagine the social side of things will take a while to get going for me though. If the crowd is anything like that I met while down there for interviews, I will sit quietely and get on with things and not worry, like most freshers, about trying to make as many friends as possible. Such things are better left to happen by themselves.
So it is probably clear that while I have written off the summer, I have now finally got excited about going to university. I am actually making use of a term I have never really had any use for before with regard to myself, and that is that I am making a fresh start. It is worth however writing a little about leaving school for I now remember once more the poor state of things on this site. Exams and revision were the usual mess they are for me. I can’t revise and I spend my time fed up with the ridiculous system I am in, and then because of this don’t care one bit about my actual results unless they are below what I need for the next stage. While I noticed a few interesting module results on results day I didn’t look at anything in detail once I had worked out that I had what I needed, as they are just not important. My folders of A-level work are my achievement, the thoughts had and essays written and problems solved, not the revision or exams in any way at all. My last exam though, in the highest pure module of A-level Further Maths, was elegant and doable so I had a fine finish.
The Sixth Form is a rather short phase of education and life in general but I feel it has been pretty significant for me. The most obvious and important thing was my discovery of the subject I now want to spend the rest of my life on, which needs no further mention or elucidation. My chronic brevity at GCSEs switched over to a horrific capability to produce waffling text and I actually started to appreciate language itself, which is not something this blog tends to see. I’ve realised many prejudices I had and developed many more, but with slightly more awareness of these than before. For the first time since maybe primary school I was fully involved in my education and relishing every opportunity to learn something new. Others will probably say that I opened up and integrated or whatever, having far more school friends than I had before. This is probably the case. But I never lost my willingness to be as different as is necessary to achieve those goals that my reason leads me to. Fundamentally, the biggest thing that seperates me from most people I know is this. I am never self-concious, never afraid to do what seems to be right. And whatever mistakes I make and whatever time I waste, I am proud to have this at the end of it all.
Fantastic post, Sean! Your ability to examine your life objectively and with a good eye is a valuable one.
I love the title =). Good luck in Oxford!
*sniffs* Fantastic. Good luck.
I read this after a long and fruitless attempt to find a direct line of cummunication to you. I’m glad that I did. You write lyrically and movingly. Robson is right-your level of honesty in your self-analysis is rare. It reminded me a bit of WG Sebald. I was reminded of the pleasure that reading your essays used to give me purely from an aesthetic point of view. I feel saddened that I felt obliged to dicuss limiting your flourishes for the sake of exam marks last year. How frustratingly arbitrary the categories that we judge education by are. Why shouldn’t aesthetic merit count highly? Wittgenstein links poetry and philosophy in joint enterprise.
PS What happened to the picture on ssc.com?
Thanks for the unexpected pleasure!
Could you please distinguish more precisely the difference between your desires and your meta-desires, which do you desire more?
Seriously sean, I need to know about this conflict. Also, do you have any meta-meta-desires, and are they desirable. How much do you desire your meta^n-desires as a function of n?