This is a good synopsis of how I spent my summers as an undergraduate at the university. While most of the student body left town, I stayed put. I had to work, and my job was at the library.
I loved the summers in Berkeley. The university and the city at large decompressed, and I was able to pursue my reading -- the philosophers and the sports page -- minus the stresses of the regular school year.
As we run the last lap on these letters that mark my self-banishment from the academy and my inauguration into the rat race I am going to make an effort to assess the several issues with which I was grappling at the outset of who it is that I currently am.
One of those issues, I would call it a central preoccupation, was the nature of study, of reading, of contemplation. Do we do it just to get a job, a perch with some prestige? Or do we study and think because the activity itself is the only life worth living?
In the last sentence of the letter below I must say I think I get it right: "The more I think of it the more I'm convinced that the dividing line between the sublime and the quotidian is an invention designed by politicians to keep people ruly and kings powerful."
Summer 1989
A real issue rattling around in my head these days is something I read in Rolling Stone magazine about this bright new young film writer/director, Steven Soderbergh, I think his name is; his movie is called SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE; I haven't seen it, but it is winning itself quite a bit of renown. He said the problem with most of the films made by young directors is that they're about other films and not about life. This right away got me thinking about my stint in the academy, and how the very same thing is true of the young institutionally affiliated intellectuals -- basically, too much time spent chasing after Daddy's coattails.
So I've been thinking about this, and saying to myself that I should stop reading as much as I do, stop placing so much importance on reading. But, goddamn, I'm a trained academic. Six years I clocked at that that ivy-strewn strewn marble sweatshop. Six years of reading nothing but the big hitters, the platos and hegels and kants and freges and derridas and wittgensteins. When most students shot off to frolic in summertime pleasures, I stayed and sat in an old stuffed chair reading about the pre-socratics and drinking coffee. Berkeley was good for that kind of thing. During the summer, the fog wouldn't burn off until around Noon. The fog gave you protection, made you think of Kant in Konigsberg; it made the whole thing -- reading, underlining, jotting down notes -- possible.
I would rise at 9 AM, start the coffee brewing, walk down to the porch and pick up the Oakland Tribune. After checking on the A's and the Giants, I'd saddle up in the old €earwax yellow stuffed chair and start flipping through, say, for instance, a photocopy of Francis Cornford's monograph on the Aristotelian concept of motion. Twenty-years old and floating up on coffee bubbles, alongside all the big boys -- the freshness and purity and cleanliness of thought -- to the empyrean of my head.
That's where it all began: those summers of study resulting from "Incompletes" received during the school year. I worked in the library 25 hours a week, which earned me enough to pay the bills. The the rest of the time, mornings and evenings, I spent reading Plato or Guthrie's fat multi-volume work on ancient Greek philosophy or Kathleen Freeman's ANCILLA TO THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS. I was a scholastic in the making.
For diversion, I'd go over to Colum's apartment, tagged the "flophouse" because people were always dropping in out of nowhere and sleeping on the couch, and we'd drink beers (nothing like nowadays, just a six pack between the two of us, and sometimes even less).
But getting back to the issue, spending too much of youth's creativity panting after professors, sucking up the seed, looking for it day in and night out -- reading your fifty-seventh book -- when what you should be doing as a youth is paying more attention to what the fuck it is that you're actually saying, not -- not -- not what you think someone is telling you. Say what it is that's on your mind. Spit it out. Say something about what you did and what you do, even if it's just ambling to the corner market to pick up a six-pack and a bag of chips. What's wrong with that? The more I think of it the more I'm convinced that the dividing line between the sublime and the quotidian is an invention designed by politicians to keep people ruly and kings powerful.
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