babble

Ah, ah ah ah, no, this is not allowed to happen, I cannot be ill now. I've been kidding myself it was just general Oxfordness plus two days of less than five hours' sleep. But now there is toothache, and joint-ache, and swaying, and uncontrollable shaking, and sleeping three hours in the middle of the afternoon and dreaming vividly about Friedman's monetarism, and, worryingly, a feeling like the gears in my head need oiling. (I can't do any mental arithmetic or parse sentences without getting the shakes. It is very bad.) Therefore my friends aren't letting me drink, smoke or read Keynes. None of these will do me any good, they say. Neither, I think, will climbing to the highest room in the tallest tower and telling Forder I haven't read my Keynes. But to be fair, I'm nearly there - having got through the General Theory in a little under four weeks, I am now on the final chapter, concluding notes on social philosophy, where the man almost gets lucid, bless him.

Keynes, incidentally, has awakened my interest in a period of history I didn't previously know existed. My subject is such that unlike the historians, I don't have a "period"; I have a fairly sound knowledge of continuing themes of modern and classical thought (not the bit in between) throughout history, like the threads in a tapestry if I may use an overworked simile. At least, I do when I'm not hosting viruses-and-bacteria-do-Vegas 2006 in my head. But, yes, I'm losing my line of thought. Keynes and the Bloomsbury set have, for some reason, caught my imagination. I love the idea of the liberal, spoiled intelligentsia lolling indolently around Edwardian Cambridge and growing up to be world famous artists and writers and philosophers and social scientists. And their philosophy is just so joyous, what with Keynes himself writing that the greatest of all things was love, and then their rampant, collective bisexuality. I am reading a biography that was on my reading list, only I'm reading it for pleasure because I'm geeky like that, and have spent the last hour taking a bath and reading it, hence my current desire to talk about it. I especially like the biographer's note that they pursued their sexuality with passion, for twenty-five years, without the merest hint of guilt.

Also: dear modern writers on Keynes, I might be persuaded if you try and argue a case for Keynes being homosexual (the vast majority of his lovers were men). I might also be persuaded if you argued your case for his being bisexual (he had a very long and happy marriage to a Russian ballerina). But, please, please, for the love of all things pink and queer, they are NOT THE SAME THING. kthxbai.

(I now have a ridiculous desire to write a fic where Ten and Rose meet each one of the Bloomsburies in turn. And it might not be as ridiculous as it sounds, because isn't that the theme that runs through prydonianfic? The three of them, Theta Sigma, Koschei and Ushas, always seem to get written as these delightful, intellectual libertines, who have a real passion for certain things, including each other, and it's not that they lose this as they grow up, but rather that it gets twisted beyond recognition and the passion shifts into, well, evil megalomania.)

Argh I am rambling like a stupid person and losing sleep by doing so. I need a smack round the head, I think, 'cause I have three hours of stats from nine tomorrow and then a careers meeting in the afternoon and economics to do and data analysis to get through and waah, I am swaying. I think I should probably say sorry for all this because it is probably stupid and delirious, and I don't think that it helped that I got caught in the rain no less than four times today and then decamped to Pat's and slept in her chair for too long and thus forgot to eat.

Also, today, I had my Master's and Tutors' Handshaking, and it was terribly, terribly gloomifying. Well it wasn't. They all said that I am too safe, that I don't take risks in my writing, that I'm not aggressive enough and I don't engage with the material, but I wish they'd see that I'm not very impassioned and eloquent and full of joy like some of the PPEists are, and besides I have no training, no knowledge, no grounds except three days introductory reading to be remotely controversial in my essays. And if I do try it will all go wrong. And my General Philosophy tutors like me, so I guess it isn't all bad. I am doing another four weeks of it next term, with the utmost pleasure, because I love Mill but not enough for another four weeks in bed with him. But the Master said when I was getting up, "I know you think: who are you to say Déscartes was wrong?"

"Nobody at all," I said very quietly, and they all laughed at me a little bit and told me to go away. I have to do scepticism and personal identity, along with macro, micro, maths, Tocqueville, a little more Mill and Marx. But before that I have to sit three three-hour collections papers at the start of next term, and I am going to fail miserably because of the aforementioned not knowing anything at all.

Waah, I don't feel well, I'm going to bed, I have to get out of it again in six hours, waah.