Reading and the Riptide

Spring is here! A-spu-ring is here! Life is textbooks and life is highlighters… okay that doesn't quite scan actually. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring - I do - don't you? 'Course you do. Tom Lehrer references aside, spring is lovely, and spring is most definitely here, as I can finally sleep with the window open, after so long of being unable to over the long and vicious winter we've had. As the Easter 2-week holiday finally arrives, it's time to revel in the new pleasantness replacing the horribleness, time to take something of a breather from the tumultuously busy last few weeks of the 'spring' term and put one's feet up in the only way A-level students know how to:

Yay.

Ruminating briefly on George Orwell's essay 'Thoughts on the Common Toad', which argues that the innate joy of witnessing nature reincarnate itself at this time of year can be enjoyed despite human goings-on, it seems this new seasonal refreshing burst of life has some joy to offer, even with the triple-threat of looming A-level exams, the looming decision of which HE path I want to take, and the looming possibility that in a month's time the votes will swing in UKIP's favour and the whole country will be bolloxed up and I'll likely have to leave the country. Not because I'm of foreign birth and would be deported, mind, it'd just be too awful to stay here.

Now there is this well-earned break, during this period of reincarnation and rejuvenation, it's possible to reflect on what has been and what is to come.



The 'spring' term (which is not during the spring, I have no idea why they call it that) which just passed was incredibly hectic - I remember telling my Dad in a phone conversation late one evening after a rehearsing that I felt caught in the riptide, unable to pull my head above the water. This made it quite impossible to think about any length of time in the future and I thought I was finding it quite uncomfortable. Now, as the tide pulls away, I realise I've grown gills.

It's a strange feeling for one who has previously been heinously lazy, especially in my GCSEs, and as someone who's genealogy dictates a lack of motivation, to need to be working and to want to work hard, but to a human a fish needs to drown. This coming from someone who used to get up at 11am on a weekday, here I am getting up on a Saturday, in a holiday, at 7am, first reading an issue of The Stage, then a couple of chapters of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' (which I have long been meaning to finish), then instigated the task pictured above, and then finished watching a Shakespeare film, all before 1pm. I finally feel myself burning with a desire to succeed - not the burn of fire, but the pleasurable scald of a water in a shower which is too hot.

The above-pictured task I have commenced will be no mean feat - it's the glossary for every single topic of A2-level Biology. Each of those piles is either 2 or 4 pages long (a page of definitions for every page of terms), and I intend to turn each into a series of flashcards and learn the entire glossary by heart before June. A popular story amongst the biology teachers at PSC is of a student going from a C to an A just by learning the glossaries, and I am striving for an A*. I intend to do the same for the linguistic terminology for my English Language/Literature A2, and character profiles and contextual information for my Drama and Theatre Studies A2.

I don't care to divulge the personal reasons behind this sudden burst of determination, this sudden phoenix reincarnation, if you will, but it's somewhat irrelevant anyway. I'm certain it's possible for everyone and anyone to achieve the same tenacity, and I recommend you do, it feels fantastic. As the Eminem song goes: 'lose yourself', and that's what has happened here. I lost myself briefly under the waves and in doing so have found a purpose (which just reminds me of that fantastic song from 'Avenue Q', oh how long did I spend listening to that song wondering what on Earth my purpose could be!) and now everything feels a lot better than it ever has before. Rather ironically, a type of medication I'm on currently I was almost denied because my doctor was worried it would cause severe depression and might lead to me committing suicide, when in actuality I've been on it for quite a while now and with this recent revelation I realise I've never felt better than I do currently.

Of course, a lot of it has to do with Nietzsche.

Holiday reading.

An intention I set myself on the last blog-post I wrote for this site was to broaden and widen my mind by reading extensively. Since then, I haven't. Rather, I've been caught up in the aforementioned riptide of college work, homework, auditions, rehearsals, play- and film-watching, review writing and various other miscellaneous obligations. I have however, mostly while travelling on public transport, found the time to finish the first 15 'chapters' of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' and feel a lot better for it.

You can never really know a person. That's sort of the basis of solipsism: we are all separate brains in jars (our skulls are the jars) and the only connection we have to the outside world is via our senses. Imagine if every time you wanted to see, hear, taste something you had to ask someone else what it was like - that's basically what our brains have to do, and we are our brains. So, you can never really know another person, because a person's brain is separated from yours by existence, because inside a person is a constant internal monologue which is un-hushable, unconquerable and almost untranslatable and is them. That is what we seek to find when we want to know someone, but we will never know it. When we talk some of it comes out, but culture and society curtails the accuracy of the translation, so that what comes out in speech is not even the tip of an iceberg but rather a penguin yapping inarticulately about what might be like inside the iceberg.

This is why reading is so important. As I learnt at a Q&A with A. L. Kennedy at the Nuffield Theatre a few weeks ago, when a writer is writing is the only time that one's internal monologue actually stops, and all that is heard in the mind is exactly what ends up on the page. The internal monologue does not exist as words, for the mind sees in more than words, but in writing we are forced to translate our mind's voice into words and so it becomes them. Reading Nietzsche, as I have not read for a very, very long time and have felt somewhat lonesome with corporeal relationships, I get the sense of a mind other than my own - an internal monologue which exists outside of my own. It's not definitive or empirical proof of another internal monologue, but it appears truth and I am eager to accept. Could someone really be so cruel as to create an internal monologue which is false?

Well yes of course, that is fiction essentially, especially in the 1st person, but often in the 3rd as well. Fiction is a joy, of course it is, but I feel that this kind of discursive writing, such that Nietzsche's is, philosophical writing in which the author tries to explain his or her own mind to the minds of the world, is a special reminder that we as a species are all of a similar kind, all of a similar meaning, all of a similar strife. It's like that wonderful quote from Roald Dahls' 'Matilda': 'So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.' Read, if you are lonely or hopeless, I implore you. Read something you don't understand, read something you mightn't agree with. Know you are not alone in being alone in your mind.

As pictured above, I have a goodly amount of holiday reading. As anyone who reads will know, reading is in itself an explosive action: everything that you read links to something else, something of the same title, something by the same author, something on the same topic, something which agrees or disagrees. Reading opens the mind like a Fibonacci spiral, expanding exponentially in every direction. I have a list on my phone of books referenced in 'The Birth of Tragedy', either in the preface, in the text itself or in the explanatory notes, already it's 15 items long. I intend to read them all eventually - this new purpose mentioned before and this new knowledge rile each other up like rival football-team supporters, a violent symbiosis which cries for action. The above are all on the same topic as 'The Birth of Tragedy', indeed I chose to read them immediately after as the preface cites them as being directly inspired by it. 'The Immoralist' and 'Death in Venice' both discuss the battle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces on a personal level, while 'The Plumed Serpent' is on a interpersonal level - a Dionysian political uprising in 1920's Mexico. These are all excellent for expanding on the subject discussed in 'The Birth of Tragedy', except conversely all of these are fiction, so it'll be fascinating to see how the 'false' internal monologue of these writers handles each topic - knowing the basis of the story in philosophy, it'll be interesting to try and deduce what the author's true internal monologue might sound like.

You may notice that 'Death in Venice' is actually 'Death in Venice and other stories' - a collection of 7 short stories by the same author, Thomas Mann, culminating in the final fictional interpretation of the battle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. 6 other stories on different topics, giving a further expanded world view. As I say, it's like a fibonacci spiral. Read, read often, far and wide. Tether your own beliefs tightly to your waist and then jump into the sea of the human consciousness that is writing. Lose yourself in the riptide of existence and read - you can't go wrong.