It’s not as if Cicero was trying to correct some injustice by giving us jobs. She wasn’t trying to give us a chance. It wasn’t about letting us show of what we’d be capable if we had full time positions – if we had time to think.
Because she knew what would happen if we were allowed time to think: nothing. Because she knew that time would only reveal to us the extent of our stupidity, and let us lament our stupidity.
Cicero knew she’d raised us too high, had given us too much time. She knew that our kind wouldn’t benefit from this kind of freedom. She knew that we’d only experience our limitations. That our sense of our limitations would only grow more intense. That we’d only experience them over and again.
She knew that we’d only have our confinement confirmed – in our own stupidity. Would look up at her, with infinite sad eyes. As if to say, stop it. Kill us now.
Cicero wanted to torture us. To give us just enough freedom, enough space, enough time, to really discover how stupid we were. For us to fail at philosophy. At what we most loved. To fail to become philosophers. To fail, at what we most admired.
She knew how badly we’d fail. She knew what we wanted to be, and couldn’t be. She knew how we wanted to think, and that we could not think.
She knew what we admired, and how we could never achieve what we admired. She loved our sadness. She liked nothing better than to hear our lamentations, on nights at Trillians. Our drunken cries.
There was a particular quality to our sense of failure. A taste – for the palate of her mind. That mixture of sadness and lamentation and so on.
Our absence of learning. Our cultural illiteracy. Our general inarticulacy. Our tendency to excitement. To use exclamation marks. Or to wistfulness. Letting our sentences fade off into ellipses. The emphases we placed on certain words. As though they were italicised. As though they’d been underscored a dozen times. Our repetitions. At the beginning of sentenes. At the end of them. Anaphoras! Epistrophes!
The way we seemed to think as one. To mind meld. To speak in the first person plural. As though we were undivided. As though we experienced exactly the same thing, which we probably did.
Cicero was the appreciator of our sadness. The connoisseur of our laments. Which is why she encouraged our drinking. Our incipient alcoholism. She wanted us drunk. She wanted us ruined, or nearly ruined. For us to break through into pure lamentation. It’s a great art, lamentation, she said.
The cry of our stupidity, of knowing our stupidity: that’s what Cicero enjoyed. That came from knowing our idiocy. The immensity of our failure. And of suffering it, that immensity!
The thwartedness of our aspirations! The defeat of our hopes! Our terrible knowledge of what we were not. Of what we could not be.
Our dread and horror at ourselves, which is to say, of our own stupidity. The way we obstructed ourselves, stood in front of ourselves. The way we couldn’t escape our own shadows. We couldn’t leave them behind, our shadows.
Because we were in the wrong element: a philosophy department. We were out of our natural habitats. We were we shouldn’t be. Fish, thrashing on dry land.
Were we thinking we’d get away with it? That we were getting away with it? That we were going places? That we wouldn’t be noticed?
But of course we’d be noticed. We’d notice ourselves. It was inevitable! It had to happen!
We were intelligent enough for that, weren’t we? Smart enough to know our lack of smartness. Successful enough to know how we’d failed! Wasn’t that our curse?
But it’s what Cicero loved.
Cicero’s sadism – was that it? Or was it our masochism?
It’s what we made each other: a sadist, a bunch of masochists. That’s what we became, when we were together. A perfect fit.
How we fail ourselves! And how we fail to do anything other than fail ourselves! And disappoint ourselves!
Work in Progress 