Provinicals

We’re desperately provincial! Pathetically so! We shouldn’t be let out of the provinces. We confine ourselves to the provinces. Voluntarily.

The likes of us shouldn’t be allowed to travel about the world. From here to there. We should stay in our adopted region. Locked in our houses. Our rooms.

Lest we defile the rest of the world. Lest our provincialism spreads across the rest of the world, like a plague.

 

We have no thoughts! We have no ideas! Nothing of our own! The cupboard is bare! The tank is empty! There was never anything there! We think with other people’s ideas. Which we barely understand.

We push around the ideas of others. Badly! Incompetently! There’s nothing new or original about us.

 

To have been raised to these heights … is grotesque. To have given us lectureships. No, no. It’s not in the order of things. It shouldn’t be. And nor should we!

There are such things as ranks. As hierarchies. No, lectureships shouldn’t have fallen to us. Not to our kind.

 

We always knew our place – you can say that about us. And Cicero lifted us above our places. We were Lifted – illegitimately. We were Elevated – into the wrong place. Onto the wrong shelf.

These should be our offices, not really. This shouldn’t be our department. It’s like David Byrne sings: this isn’t our beautiful quadrangle. This isn’t our high ceilinged lecture theatre. These aren't seven foot tall our private-school-educated students …