It’s been a long time. How have you been?
I have lost count of the number of times I have drafted huge chunks of this post in my head, walking along. I come up with a way into what it is I want to tell, and start to write the key sentences, and link together the various ideas and explanations. I’ve done this so many times. All these attempts could have stood along as a series of interesting posts about different things, capturing far more of the past year alone and intact than this much belated concoction of a post can possibly achieve. They were in the moment, they were impassioned in various ways, rather than the one solid feeling that’ll end up coming out here. It upsets me to know what I have lost: the way in which the events of the past year, with all their variations and ups and downs, will be smudged together with the events of the summer.
Because an awful lot has happened. I’ve done many new things, and I’ve observed a very different place and a fascinating group of people within that. I’ve thought many things, too, and this is what I am most upset over losing. I would like to create a better balance between my microblogging stream, my tumblelog and this journal. Perhaps after this post I will get over my unwillingness to post things here. I might move some tumblelog posts over, and get closer to what I want, which is the ubiquitous and organised capture of interesting things. We should all capture things that are interesting to us more carefully, especially with computers so readily available. Friends find it interesting, and even if they are few in number one’s future self probably will too. We’re all repetitive and mediocre, and just because I write this blog and the next man doesn’t bother doesn’t make me any more profound or interesting. Sharing is good, though, if you avoid any preconceptions that what you are sharing is any good.
So let’s get down to it. I shall try to put aside the nagging concern, born of my perfectionism, that this is going to come at things in a way entirely at odds with how it would have done if I’d written about those things sooner, and that to compensate I will start writing as in a ship’s logbook. I shall try to put aside my distinct and present worry that, so far, this feels like the floweriest, most pretentious and downright ridiculous English I’ve ever produced. I will try to be happy with this introduction.
I have completed my first year as an undergraduate student of Mathematics and Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford University; I have done my first Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity terms, with all their individual flavour and challenges. Academically it’s felt pretty disastrous all the way through. Using the assumption that I tend to have ridiculously high standards for myself and am probably underestimating my efforts, I have worked myself /into the ground/ compared to most other students. In purely quantitative terms, excluding the last few weeks before exams where my energy was almost entirely gone, I did far more work than most other students. I spent hours with things, hours and hours with questions and I refused to give up or turn to others until I was really sure that I wasn’t going to get it. I read carefully through the reading lists, as much as I felt I could, and carefully felt out the intellectual territory. Sure, there were times when I wasted my time, as we all do, and felt bad about it. But (for once) I feel confident to state that I did my best in terms of the amount of work I did.
I have been careful to stress that my satisfaction here only holds for the number of hours, the perseverance. The disastrous nature of the year’s study comes from the fact that this simply didn’t pay off, and so I can only assume that either I wasn’t doing the work right – a lack of quality – or that my tutors made a terrible mistake in thinking that I was capable of the course, when they offered me a place. I wanted my degree course to be hard; I didn’t want to be near-top of the class, able to do pretty much anything, anymore, as we all were in the sixth form with the mickey-mouse nature of modern A-levels. But I assumed it would be /doable/, and this just doesn’t seem to have been the case. A little background on how my studies were organised is needed to explain this further.
The degree is joint honours and is supposed to be half Maths and half Philosophy, but it feels to be mainly Maths at this stage because half the Philosophy is Logic, which is taught in the way Maths is taught, and because Maths tutors take their teaching responsibilities more seriously as a general rule, at least at this stage of the course. Maths has lectures to the whole year, and the lecturers set problem sheets for us to complete. Our college tutors marked these and we had a three hour class once a week to go over the week’s Maths, and a two hour Logic class. I should note that Balliol’s system here is a tad unusual and most colleges have substantially more tutorial time and no classes. Maths tutorials were generally not too useful, but interesting. I got an hour a fortnight of that. What proper Philosophy I did was basically just a reading list, essay and tutorial a fortnight, in that order.
Now here is where my utter confusion and despair begins. Maths lectures are varied, and often you’ll have a lecture which no-one really gets, as the lecturer spends half an hour flying through a proof the syllabus requires them to fit in in a period of time that isn’t really long enough. Notes can be reviewed afterwards and the content can be understood. And other lectures do make sense in the main. After the first term, where everything was new, I really did feel like I understood what was going on in terms of the presented Maths. It made sense, I saw how the ideas fitted together – I saw the elegance and I loved it. I loved to watch the lecturer play detective with basic groups. I loved to see the exciting ways in which A-level Maths was smashed up with a wrecking ball, and then carefully built up on much better foundations.
It all seemed fantastic until, each week, I sat down with the problem sheets, and could do so little. Hours would pass: these things are supposed to take hours, but I would be making no progress /at all/. The words of my tutors, friends nor those of older students have been able to reconcile my feeling of confidence with the material and my lack of success with it. Maths exams at this level are a bit weird: they are set up to be 60% “bookwork”, which means the reproduction of partially memorised definitions and proofs. Yet I was unable even to do these. The proofs made sense and were beautiful yet they would not stay in my head. I ended up more and more frustrated at not being able to solve problems and not even being able to memorise interesting things. This problem is not in any way solved and I have no idea how I am going to complete this degree.
A few words about the proper Philosophy, which is a different story. The first year Philosophy course in Oxford is a bit rubbish, so I’ve been put off a bit by that. But the metaphilosophy has been raging as it should. The tutors and I seem to have pretty different ideas of what the subject is and I have got deeply emotional as I turn it over and over. But this is it. This is all I really want to do, ever. I will learn from their cold analysis without sacrificing my unending romance and scepticism. I shall leave this now as it deserves its own post. As far as completing the course, I think I’m mostly okay. My tutors hate my essays, but the examiners don’t seem to mind. After a ridiculous Logic paper that pulled us all down by 30% due to its weirdness, I didn’t put much effort into my essay paper, knowing that my overall Philosophy mark was already ruined. So I wrote about what I thought were interesting things. The essays were still terrible, but I almost got a first. So I’ll probably be okay on that front when finals come around. I’m looking forward to next term’s Philosophy so much.
The academic part is the easy bit. The rest of the experience is so much harder to capture so far from the event, without digging through my old private diary entries which is probably a bad idea. But to set things up, I am being totally honest when I tell anyone who asks that I had a great year and that I really enjoyed it. Look at how ordinary I am being, the typical student who is “loving it” and “having a wicked time.” The key thing about Oxford is that everything is intense, and there are no half measures. The tutors throw everything at us and we throw everything at each other. This creates a divide, for this pressure is for many people unwelcome. There is a huge minority (or majority? Very hard to tell) of people who will stay in their rooms and work and fret and worry and be cliquey and all the rest of it. Then there are those who embrace everything, and form the life of the place. Sure, they are sad at times too, but their sadness is also intense and full-blown and very public. Everyone’s throwing themselves around the same rollercoaster.
Surprisingly, I’m in the latter group. I’m no typical student: I’m not nocturnal, and of course I continue not to drink at all. In this latter respect I am extremely rare. The number of people who drink to get drunk, frequently, is frustrating and saddening. And since I don’t join in with these activities, I guess I’m probably closer to the other side of the divide than many others. But this isn’t, to me, the point. The point is that I involve myself in the place and make all the aspects of it my life. The JCR, or Junior Common Room, is Balliol’s students’ union and there exists what I like to call the “JCR crowd,” which is the bunch of people who spend time in the physical JCR and who are involved in its activities. As the JCR Secretary, this is where I am most at home. Cynically you might denounce the inherently selfish behaviour of such an organisation, and its political games which might seem silly. But what we have is a bunch of people who care, and who genuinely want to take a worthwhile project for the benefit of others and see it through: we do things properly. Fiddly democratic procedure is taken seriously. Unconventional, student-y approaches are used to solve problems that the corporate world around us would never try. Sure, there are officers who do nothing and there has been at least one time when high-ranking members have made very disappointing decisions against the hard work of others. But I cannot help but be incensed by the commitment and energy. This, to me, is the life of the whole place. Really, being Secretary has saved my year, as I told the President when I said farewell for the summer. It has given me something in addition to my painful academic situation to focus on. I am so sad that I only have one term left.
This post is going to start to twist uncomfortably if I attempt to express this any better than I just did. That, then, is my university year: the academic side, and the biggest part of the rest – perhaps I’ll write more posts on the other bits. While I too am often scared by the pressure, much of the time I feed off it. But the year ended at the end of June. And the two and a bit months since then feel at least as long, and ten times more sad, than the whole rest of the year.
Writing the above has made me realise that I seem to be over my inferiority complex issues in many respects. It’s still there, as strong as ever, at times. But my focus has shifted at least a little when I look back on things, which is positive. A new menace has slipped into its place: my motivation to do pretty much anything at all has all but disappeared since I left Oxford. It happened at Christmas and Easter too, and we all find it so much easier to work in Oxford than we do at home. That’s okay. But the past days are now all the same, and they are all terrifying. It’s been eight days since September started. I decided at the beginning of the break to do my proper work in September, doing lots each day – both the academic work I’ve been set and the other work-like tasks I need to do, such as JCR stuff. And yet I’ve done virtually nothing thus far. Each and every day I try a new plan the night before. I’ll work in forty-five minute slots. I’ll do more in the morning, when I seem to work best. But at the end of each day I come up with nothing. Time slips away from me because I can’t bring myself to do things. What the heck is wrong?
I know that I’ve always been lazy and that it is my biggest obstacle. I know that I can overcome that with effort – and I know that writing up ringing society minutes is boring, and that it is natural to put things like that off. But I was pretty sure that Maths and Philosophy were my things. So many times I have loved them, and seen life as offering nothing else worth pursuing with any real intensity. Yet now I question it all. I am currently reading a fascinating book called Proofs and Refutations. It’s really on the Philosophy of Maths, and how we might proceed in doing Maths. It’s causing me, at times, to furiously scribble down ways in which I might reconcile my degree work with its sceptical conclusions. I’m widening my view of the possible. I’m living this stuff, as I love to. The book is not even particularly heavy reading in the main; I should be salivating every time I am about to start reading it! And yet I can barely make myself stick with it for forty-five minutes at a time, and it’s taking days.
Perhaps the reason for this is that really, all I enjoy is being successful at academic work. This is either being better than others, or feeling like I’ve achieved something better than I did yesterday. Feeling like I’ve got cleverer. Perhaps I don’t care one jot about the subjects and all that goes with the process: it’s just another way for me to get kicks out of being right, or out of being more sceptical than the next man. This is a horrifying prospect, as it destroys everything I thought I had in life. Yet it is a theory that would seem to make sense.
My analysis, as you will surely see, is as thin on the ground for this as it is for my troubles with Oxford Maths. I think perhaps I will write other posts on my attempts to overcome this, but they’ve been unsuccessful so it’s probably not too important. I need to figure out how to be patient, and how to accept that not all this stuff is mesmerising, and that the mesmerising stuff comes after the dull stuff which must come first. The experience recounted above with what should be a great book makes me doubt even this simple belief.
I have got to sort myself out before next term. I have twenty days to complete the tasks assigned to me by tutors and by myself. This fits in easily enough: if I were to work maybe three hours per day on academic stuff, and spent the majority of the rest of the day on my other tasks, I’d have no problems. But every day proves that I just don’t seem to be able to do it. What are the things I am able to do? Systems administration. New backup schemes. Clever computer stuff. It’s all worthwhile and I am really able to get my teeth into it in a positive way, and it’s a finite process of cleaning up electronic mess that I’m slowly making progress on, that will come to an end. But I’m pretty sure it’s not my passion.
The above account feels concise, and mostly complete. I think I’ve done justice to my current point of view on things, even if the lateness of this entry has rendered me unable to do the same for my year in Oxford. Perhaps it is now clear why this post has taken so long: it’s just another thing that I haven’t been able to motivate myself to do. I’m happy with my work tonight. I scribbled an elegant expression for not being okay with the post at the end of this text file when I was halfway through my writing, but I think I’m going to delete it. Hopefully I have unblocked this particular stream, so that I can write on this blog and on my tumblelog more appropriately. I am sorry for a pretty depressing end. It is not all bad. When stuck into the activities I have been able to do, it’s been a great summer in many respects. And the things I have done away from my desk (I’ll do another post on these) have been good too. I have had some lovely times with friends and other loved ones. But at the end of each day I am nothing that I thought I was and I cannot climb out of it.
[...] ninety minutes carefully constructing a plan for the rest of September. Yes, I know – a recent post claimed that doing this wasn’t being at all successful for me. But I think the reason for [...]