Читать книгу AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human - Robert Smith Rowland - Страница 38

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Thomas Merton

Michaelmas Term 1987 began two weeks after Anna was born. By now, the three of us were ensconced in a breezeblock-lined, one-bedroom flat, in a university accommodation complex several leagues north of central Oxford, far up the Banbury Road. This was the very flat where, a fortnight previously, I had received that late-night phone call from Simone’s Aunt Lydia, urging me to make haste to London for the birth. Anna slept in the living room, snug in a Moses basket perched on my red futon, which was now doing respectable duty as a sofa.

It was the first term of my last year. With a new baby in the mix, I approached it like a job. Where my fellow students were getting up when they fancied, shaking off hangovers, smoking roll-ups, playing snooker in the common room, and putting off work until the essay deadline was upon them and they were forced to pull an all-nighter, I was a picture of orderliness. I arrived at the library when the doors opened, did my research, wrote my essays, reported for my tutorials, and in the afternoon relieved Simone of baby care. I cycled back not just with books in my basket but bumper packs of nappies dangling from the handlebars.

In the evenings we’d stay in, watching EastEnders on a portable black and white TV with a dodgy picture, while Anna fed or snoozed. When she was doing neither, and just crying, we would take turns swinging the Moses basket and humming lullabies until she dropped off. When even that didn’t work, we’d turn on the vacuum cleaner. No, not to suck the bawling infant out of our lives. It’s not unusual for babies to find ‘non-periodic’ noise soothing, and for Anna it did the trick.

That model of ‘lots of time, few responsibilities’, which was the model by which most arts students lived, was supposed to empower them. Free from the quotidian constraints that were to shackle them after college, they would not only satisfy their academic requirements, but would naturally read around their subject and generally improve their minds.

That was the theory. In practice, the absence of pressure caused a reduction in drive. They grew lazy. At least, that had been my experience before dropping out. Now that my third year had come around, the time available to me for studying, shortened by family commitments, meant that I had no choice but to be efficient. I would argue that the constraints actually improved the quality of my work, in that I saw my studying time as precious. I focused. No doubt there is a general rule in that: we work best under a certain amount of stress. A bell curve applies, as in the diagram opposite. Maybe all students should have a young family.