Saudades, ennui, and other words you won’t find on my mother tongue*
As I stare down the exhiliration-tinged-with-terror of another International Travel Extravaganza, I also seem to be staring down multiple other emotions, close to the home (of three years) that I haven’t left yet (and will be absent from for less than three months). In travelling to another continent to fuel the final stages of my thesis (which will constitute my licence to practice intellectual life, or some conclusions about how to practice this life in the most aware and connected way, or a piece of tragic claptrap from a self-absorbed nerd head, depending on your viewpoint); I seem to be inconveniencing, disappointing, and downright hurting a number of people whom I love, as well as feeling the peculiar weight of privilege tug at my heart (as opposed to my purse strings).
I’m reminded of Mel Gregg’s reflections, from a while back, on contending with this chosen reality when it means that “we will need to move a long way from our family and friends to live according to the values and habits we’ve been taught (are worth losing all this for) in grad school, and to begin to imagine a shared ethics with which we can challenge those who’ve been part of this privileged world a lot longer than we have.”
Rather than join this guild after finally ‘achieving’ entry into it, perhaps I should just move to the South Australian countryside to farm chickens, feed cats, and watch over my family and friends. At the moment I just watch the conditionality of the words I write ricocheting off the universe I send them into. I do wonder sometimes what the point really is if I can’t use it to pierce the walls that surround me, thick with expectation.
*the content of this post may or may not have something to do with the bottle of Lindemanns (from the bottle-o bargain) Bin currently located next to my laptop.
I increasingly believe that the world of academe is turned on it’s head, and not in some banal anti-intellectual sense. Rather than being required to chase after us for our skills and ideas, the institutions make us jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. The universities NEED us as teachers and researchers, and yet we have to fight for entry into what, after all that, turns out to be a lot of insecure contract work and admin.
In conclusion: let’s start a think-tank. That way we can do a few days work a week preparing ‘research’ for whoever needs their crack-pot theories legitimated, and use the profits to bank-roll cat farming etc, or warm afternoons reading Nietzsche.
Comment by Adam — 7/14/2007 @ 2:20 pm
Adam! A man who understands. A think-tank! Yes! Especially if we can give it some benign name a la the Centre for Independent Studies that allows for said crackpot theories.
And here I was thinking I would be reliant, in post-Phd life, on the profits from my musical/talking book dramatization of Thus Spake Zarathustra!
Comment by ana — 7/14/2007 @ 6:28 pm
Of all of Nietzsche’s work, that is the one that would be best treated by a musical theatre adaptation. It practically writes itself, dramatic key changes for the final chorus of each song included.
Comment by Adam — 7/14/2007 @ 7:45 pm