Bernard Knox. "Closet Modern." in Essays Ancient & Modern. (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 198.
I spent a very pleasant evening in my final year of college watching that movie, dodging the spectre of my senior thesis. A thousand diversions occupied my penultimate semester; I became particularly skilled with the proximity mines in Goldeneye. My free moments, however, were wretched and forlorn on my joyless path, and my doom ever lived, ever flitted around me. The product of my industry at the New Year equated to a lovely bibliography and a dread of the coming months (I had, in my defense, checked many of the books in the bibliography out of the library). But nothing, O Lawrence, was written.
Fortunately or not, I lacked the blustering tenacity of Housman and surrendered myself to the ineluctable ordeal. To propitiate my daemon I performed a midnight ritual of glancing wearily at my notes, scribbling a hurried paragraph on the back of some journal article, and reconsecrating the folder in my desk drawer until my next nocturnal session. I wound up with sixty febrile pages, a BA, and a raccoonish visage. My dust was neither proud nor angry, but content, like most dust, to repose unburdened and unnoticed.
I sometimes regret the time wasted on simple pleasures and puerilities, my salad days. So it goes. At least something was written.
Whatever the reasons, Housman went into the examination rooms totally unprepared."Nothing," T. E. Lawrence exclaimed, "is written."
He was of course not the first nor the last to do so. Many an Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate has spent the pleasant spring months of his last year idling on the river, staying up late with friends, and staving off the awful prospect of disaster with apocalyptic visions--the world may come to an end, war may break out. When the examination date came and the world was still there and at peace, some few made away with themselves, as Housman apparently was tempted to do. "For me, one flowery Maytime," he wrote later, "It went so ill that I/ Designed to die." But most have managed to scrape a Second or a Third by filling sheet after sheet with shameless guesswork and barely relevant material cunningly combined with what solid stuff they could summon from the well of memory.
Housman didn't even try. On some papers he wrote "practically nothing." "Short and scrappy . . . practically no answers at all," was how one of the examiners later remembered his philosophy papers. "Proud and angry dust" are the words he used much later to describe human nature, and the adjectives certainly describe his own character. He was too proud, too angry to make the ignominious effort that would have allowed the examiners to give him a Third and his degree.
I spent a very pleasant evening in my final year of college watching that movie, dodging the spectre of my senior thesis. A thousand diversions occupied my penultimate semester; I became particularly skilled with the proximity mines in Goldeneye. My free moments, however, were wretched and forlorn on my joyless path, and my doom ever lived, ever flitted around me. The product of my industry at the New Year equated to a lovely bibliography and a dread of the coming months (I had, in my defense, checked many of the books in the bibliography out of the library). But nothing, O Lawrence, was written.
Fortunately or not, I lacked the blustering tenacity of Housman and surrendered myself to the ineluctable ordeal. To propitiate my daemon I performed a midnight ritual of glancing wearily at my notes, scribbling a hurried paragraph on the back of some journal article, and reconsecrating the folder in my desk drawer until my next nocturnal session. I wound up with sixty febrile pages, a BA, and a raccoonish visage. My dust was neither proud nor angry, but content, like most dust, to repose unburdened and unnoticed.
I sometimes regret the time wasted on simple pleasures and puerilities, my salad days. So it goes. At least something was written.
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