Collideorscape

I am in an elevator, contemplating its algorithms, full of thoughts, like an internet crammed with wet poems and fishy analysis. I'm clutching books: a history of agnosticism, Gabriel Naudé's Advice on Establishing a Library, an Italian book on Plutarch that I can hardly read, and a modern paperback of Justus Lipsius' De Constantia, in the Stradling translation. There is a black man with me in the elevator, sharply dressed and boyish, with a wicked afro, in fact the spit and image of that guy from Veronica Mars, which my wife watches.

— William Shakespeare? he asks hopefully.

— Er, what?

— The dude on the book, that's Shakespeare, right?

I tell him it's Justus Lipsius, a Flemish scholar. He tuts despondently. I feel like an ass. I want to tell him, Good guess, though. It was a good guess. Right period. Lipsius has a ruff and everything. And it might as well be Shakespeare, for all we know of the Bard's features.

Thus, worlds collide.

*

A few years ago I was sitting on the Tube on the way back from shopping. I'd just bought some new shoes, and I was going home to bed. This was at around ten in the morning. As usual, I was reading. In this case it was an Edwardian edition of Reynard the Fox, in Caxton's version, with Kaulbach's illustrations, printed with the Stallybrass' translation of the Physiologus. I remember enjoying it. I kept waiting for the annoying moral to spoil the old-fashioned sadistic fun, but it never came. The moral of the book seemed to be, Screw everyone over and you'll succeed. That's my kind of moral.

Anyway, I was reading this arcane edition of this rather arcane mediaeval book, and I looked up, and suddenly I realised that the literary world in which I was immersed bore no relation to the one around me. It wasn't just that it was old. If I'd been reading Hamlet there might have been one or two people in the carriage who could relate. Sometimes you see pretty UCL or Goldsmith's girls reading Eliot and the like. Vergil, Beowulf, Chaucer, fine. But Reynard the Fox? At that moment I felt trapped, as if in a bubble or cocoon. I was overcome with the utter irrelevance of my intellectual life. I think this feeling accounts for the popularity of writers like Baudrillard and Žižek, who make theory of the real world, and who make irrelevant books seem like part of it. So many intellectuals need some assurance that it matters.

My friend M. has quit academia, at least for now, because he 'can't justify it'. He wants to make a real-world difference. I suggested he join MSF, but apparently he doesn't want to get killed for it. I tell him that I have resigned myself to a career of glittering uselessness. We joke about Blair interrupting Commons proceedings to announce the completion of my Plutarch thesis.

On good days I am at peace with all this.