you don’t care if it’s wrong or if it’s right

[Roxanne - The Police]

I’m happy.

If Marx and Engels were concerned about people being alienated from their work, they ought to have met me.

I love my work. I love waking up every morning to sit down to my laptop, to open up my books and continue finding a way to pull Burke, Kant and Tolkien together in my dissertation. If what they wanted one to feel was a sense of purpose and contentment in work, then that’s what I’m feeling (of course, I’ll have to disregard the idea that my work isn’t doing much, palpably, to change the way the world works).

But someday, maybe, I’ll be able to help. Someday, I’ll take what I’ve learnt from books, and help other people learn it too. Or if that sounds too presumptuous, maybe showing them what there is to learn will make them want to learn too.

Maybe.

For now, I couldn’t care less about anything but this. I love it.

Love, love, love it.

[Touchwood]

fragments.

Somtimes, and this is very rarely, reading good criticism makes me cry. I don’t mean criticism directed at myself, but rather, theoretical criticism of the world, of modernism, of literature and of the various fluctuating meanings of the words ‘belief’ and ‘truth’.

For instance, “Postmodernism is a return to storytelling in the belief that we can be sure of nothing but story” (Brian Attebury).

Actually, just read this.

only thing I ever could need, only one good thing worth trying to be

[Bottle it up - Sara Bareilles]

I have a beautiful red Dell laptop and his name is Dmitri. He’s a reformed communist, and having seen the error of his ways, is now my devoted slave.

What woman in the world doesn’t fantasise about being the bearer of Light, being the Florence Nightingale to a disgruntled soldier whose muddy war-wounds you would lovingly wash away; whose bitter temper and existential angst you wouldn’t soothe into witty conversation and adoring devotion to yourself? Oh go on, admit it – reforming a bad boy is your dream, your passport to being the tamer of the bull, or, if we’re going the way of pop-culture, to be the star of your very own story of redemptive love a la ‘A Walk To Remember’?

Despite being 21, and thus worldly-wise and wary of such deceptively idyllic romantic narratives, I can’t shake off the martyr complex. I’d like nothing more than to be someone’s saviour. As utterly ridiculous as it sounds, this is one battle where my passions outweigh my understanding, as Edmund Burke would have seen it.

Anyway, this is an utterly pointless blogpost written solely in order to facilitate my escape from wrestling with the sublime and all those dratted French theorists who wrote about it just so that they could make my life hell. For that sole purpose, yes.

GAH.

of sublime moments.

I’m right in the thick of it. Re-reading The Return of the King, I’m on Chapter III of Book II. The title? Mount Doom.

Of course I hadn’t read the books more than once when I watched the movies. But re-reading them now, after having watched the sublime on screen over a hundred times (not even slightly exaggerating) – I’m astonished at how perfectly some moment were captured. The Ride of the Rohirrim, their final charge on Pelennor was almost perfectly taken from text to screen, giving us living, breathing visions of words. It could not have been more perfect. Or, for another example, take Eowyn and Merry’s destruction of the Lord of the Ringwraiths. I cannot distinguish between the vision in my head, when I read the words on the page, or that of the sublime, terrifying beauty of the scene in front of me on screen.

People are wrong when they say it is a simple battle between Good and Evil. It is a battle between freedom and enslavement; between light and darkness; between knowledge and propaganda; it pits love, valour, honour against bondage, coercion and hatred. Of small, independent courage versus a vast, narcissistic subjugation of everything under one Dark Power. Is that so very different from everything we speak of and vouch for today?

this is what my life will revolve around for the next 4 months