I’m kind of loathe to admit it, but I like my commute into work. I read somewhere that there’s a very good correlation between the length of your commute and how happy you are with your job. That is, there’s a very good inverse correlation. The longer you commute, the more miserable you are. But this trip out on the Metropolitan line in the sunlight isn’t contributing to any animosity towards my job that I can detect. When I’m not trying to write a page a day, I tend to just sit, not reading, not doing anything. Just sitting. And most mornings, it’s bliss.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the trip back. On the trip back, I’m brain dead, playing games on my phone. Wishing I were home.
Freud said something to the effect that all we need in life is love and work.
So it’s perhaps a rich irony, or an obvious consequence, that the two things that it’s most difficult to write about are love and work. They’re certainly the most difficult to write about honestly. In public, like this, you can’t really write what you think about work because, well, some of the people that you work with might read it. You certainly can’t write what you really think about some of the people at work. And you sure as hell can’t write about what you think about your love life. Even the most sweet, gentle, calm and understanding lover is going to be annoyed to find you spilling all. So what’s left?
Well, you can write fiction. And I bet that’s how a lot of fiction gets written, although you’d better disguise the characters well, or there’s still going to be trouble. You can write under a pseudonym, but again, you’d better disguise the characters and events pretty well, otherwise there’s going to be hell to pay. Or you can talk about abstract things. You can talk about ideas. That’s much safer, right? Well, maybe.
It’s certainly something that I do a lot. I like ideas, I like playing with ideas. I have a degree in philosophy, that’s what that says really. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and remembering how I ended up doing a philosophy degree. He teaches psychology, and one of the problems that he has is that a lot of teenagers decide to study psychology because they want to find themselves, they want to have a broad, free-form, discussion, an exploration about what life is really all about. Of course, psychology is definitely not the place to go for that. Psychology is mostly about rats running around mazes and proving things about rats running around mazes using statistics. If they want to have that kind of discussion, they’d probably be much better off studying English literature (or maybe French and Russian literature) or anthropology, or sociology. Or philosophy.
Even, as I write down each of those disciplines I’m aware that there are regular, solid ways that academics can kill each of those subjects stone dead.
If you happen to have the misfortune to walk into a discipline when it’s under the thrall of just one big thinker, just one orthodoxy, it can be dull as dull, no matter what the original subject matter. That’s kind of what happened to me with English lit. I could never get the hang of the arch, mannered way that they wanted me to pull beautiful things like poems apart. I could never see the appeal of writing about Keats as if you were dissecting a rat.
But with philosophy it seemed to be different. With philosophy in the very first class of the first year we were dealing with the big stuff — arguments for the existence of God! And rather than just regurgitating other people’s arguments, we were expected to join in. Have a go at our own arguments.