Thursday, April 12, 2007

scholarly life

One of the advantages of being a student in Bloomsbury is the easy availability of free refreshments. I gave up the opportunity to hear the honorable MP Tony Benn speaking on the future of the World Bank, but found it useful to attend the reception afterword. Buiscits were dry but the coffee was very strong. I was mingling with myself while the small crowd was busily discussing the prospects of international development. With my cup finished, I retreated to SOAS library upstairs.

Cofee is such a drug, I can't believe it's legal. For an hour I was racing like mad through the library. Each book looked just the one I needed. Everything seemed connected, it all made sense. The completion of the thesis seemed a matter of days. But then it came to a halt. I felt tired, hungry, and lost. I looked round and found myself surrounded by stale and dusty books. I had to leave.

Outside, the queue for the Hare Krishna food stall was unprecendently short.

3 comments:

Niki said...

"I was mingling with myself".

yep, i find myself doing this in many a gathering as well.

Once, a friend of mine dragged me to a fancy art opening at a city museum where the mayor and his fancy friends were celebrating the opening of a new exhibition which was basically really bulky and ugly metal sculptures that had herbs growing in them.

We were mingling with ourselves and eating the fancy snacks when a guard approached us with the intention of kicking us out.

When he asked what we were doing, my friend calmly replied:

"we are celebrating those basils"

I guess that was enough of an explanation for him because he left us alone

Marjojo said...

Dear Mink,
It's a pleasure to read your blog. Recognise the coffee-induced megalomanic bliss, if only it could be maintained. The same sometimes happens to me when I wake up in the middle of the night to urgently scribble down an idea for an artwork, convinced it's better than anything I've done before, only to wake up in the morning and find something incomprehensible - or worse: quite banal - written down.
Look forward to reading more of yours.
marjojo

mink said...

Thanks Marjojo - yes those elusive great thoughts, crumbling into dust like thorny flowers in the sunlight.

Niki - one is never sure what to say to people in uniform. It does help to remember that at most times they are not sure themselves what they are doing. On a similar note, my friend - when she was waitress in a hotel near Victoria and had to serve impatient rich customers - had a technique of imagining them naked, and then not care about whatever they said.