They’re at a later stage than we are. They’ve passed through ambition and vanity and related stuff. They’re not like us. They’re liberated from wondering whether they’re geniuses or not. They don’t even need to be geniuses. Or to try and see whether they’re geniuses. None of that.
Even we’re ambitious, that’s the thing. Even we don’t want to be idiots. How do we free ourselves from that? We want to make it all worthwhile – all our studies. All those years – doing whatever it is we were doing. Reading and so on. So-called reading. Supposed reading …
We want to make it worthwhile. To redeem ourselves by writing something – by putting it out there into the world. It isn’t enough for us, just studying, as it is for them. We’re too linear. Too focused on the future. On making good. On … getting our investment back, or whatever.
In the end, we want our share of glory – of academic glory. We want to become professors or something. Get personal chairs in tosser studies. Are we tossers? We are, aren’t we? We’re doing all this for some personal gain. We’re not pure enough.
Is that what you want to be, Shiva – pure?
It’s hard not actually having any talent … And it’s hard not actually being completely stupid. Just being mediocre. A bit lower than average.
But no academic thinks of themselves as being lower than average.
That’s what makes them average.
So what does that make us?
Higher than average.
Typical deluded academics.
We think we have chance. That we’ll just turn a corner and become brilliants, or whatever. Step into our genius. We can’t rid ourselves of hope.
We think it’s all going to go somewhere. That our lives will be justified. That it won’t all just be a disaster. That we can gather up all the crumbs. Make it all make sense. By finishing our great project, whatever that is. Our great work! Then looking back from the promontory of our great work. At the path we’d taken – because it’d become a path by then. It all made sense – everything we’d undergone. Everything we’d done.
We would always have been going somewhere, even if we didn’t know it. We had a plan, even if we had no real idea of the plan. Everything would make retrospective sense!
It’s like when you read a biographer of a writer, of a thinker. All the years before they made it. All those muddled years when life wasn’t going so well. When Hegel was some middling tutor who’d got his pupil pregnant. He didn’t know, did he? That it would all be justified, soon enough. That every wrong turn was, in fact, a right one.
The mediocre years. The not-getting-anywhere years. The knocking-in-vain-at-all-the-doors years. The bit-of-a-disaster years. The not-adding-up-to-much years. Redeemed!
We can say all these things, call ourselves idiots, because we were still holding onto the idea that we might be geniuses.
Whilst all along having that secret faith that stupidity would transform. That our studies might lead us into that secret Intelligence that was always ours. Into our secret Genius.
Work in Progress 