mouldy bread

1. i’ve not had the time for blogging this week and all my great & profound (ly sordid) ideas have evaporated. Blogging is inherently ephemeral, for me – if i don’t blog an idea fairly quickly, it either disappears or goes stale & a bit mouldy, like the bread in Das Boot.

i don’t regret these lost ideas, as they are of next to no value. i had good ideas once – ten years ago. Now i seem to subsist on the warmed-up leftovers of my youth, so i sometimes “have” a good idea then realise it came to me first in 1999 and i’m only remembering it now. Likewise i sometimes leaf morbidly through my old journals and am stricken by some marvellous idea i had when i was 24 – and if it were not in my handwriting, and if i couldn’t (with difficulty) remember the circumstances of its genesis, i would assume it was a quotation from someone else.

2. i went hunting for a typewriter in the student quarter of Munich. It was a cool, sunny January afternoon, a good time for wandering & browsing. It is a distinctly student-y area: the old university buildings; bookshops, cafes, none of the usual luxury boutiques. i found nothing but fell victim to my old malady, a poignant, nostalgiac longing for freedom, to do nothing but study, to be free to sleep more than 6 hours a night, to spend all night reading and writing. i have felt this same longing in Durham, Oxford, Cambridge, Göttingen. It is a strange thing as i was glad to leave academia 10 years ago, and i spent my 4 years as a student loathing some of my tutors, and almost all the undergraduates, for being pitiful giggling idiots and/or mercenary knaves.

i don’t know if academia enabled me to think, if having enough time to sleep, to read in solitude, and to write for hours at a time, were the only right circumstances; or whether i would have naturally fizzled out age 25, and become an eventual elberry.

3. i feel drained & beatdown and it’s only the first week of real work. There is mould on my brain and it smells funny.