Like a great ring of pure and endless light
But the other night -it was so long ago.
Dreams of London (now my private metaphor for a life-not-this) have now been entirely replaced by the sluggish, but very (aversively) occupying lifestyle of an average adult in the city. I no longer allow my mind to slip into English summers in brown dormitories, springtime walks down pavements of history and tall libraries dusty with the incense of knowledge. Next week, I tell myself, all my plans for the future will have to become real - real and realistic.
It is easy to give in to the the voices that cry thinly of a starving bank account, needy family relations and allegations of ineptitude when you can't see London from your bedroom window. Increasingly, the grapple to balance humility with honesty and the (greater) battle to distinguish delusion from awareness wear me down; it is impossible to give myself an intellectual profile. But I think I've come to understand that no truth-promising assessment will balm this restlessness. It boils down to the fact that this is not an insecurity (any longer, at least), but a realization that the world extends for much longer and wider than I've ever imagined both Upwards and Downwards. Knowledge, with its outmoded implication of rigid, material claims, matters less than intelligence - the arrival at and manipulation of elegance, I have come to believe. I am a little contemptuous of those who believe, in their specific, mediocre environments that they may be dubbed "highly intelligent". Intelligence is transcendental, it makes you breathless and reduces all personality into a single humanity. Nobody dares claim it, I shudder at its feet. In this life I am living, I am forgetting what it feels like to feel eternal elegance and have it take my breath away.
All I wish for, I think, is to be able to watch from a window closer to this sublimity.
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