Getting jobs raised our expectations. We expect more from life now. It’s fatal.
We were given too much hope. And security. Things have been too good.
We need difficulty. We thrive in difficulty. What a joke. Who were we before we came here. Scattered. Lost. Solitaries. Well, we’re not solitaries anymore, are we? We have each other. Friendship … if this can be called friendship.
At any rate, we’re not entirely alone. Life doesn’t entirely disgust us anymore. We’re not entirely appalled. But that’s what we should be: entirely appalled. That’s what Cicero would have wanted.
Entirely appalled. Appalled at everything. World-hatred: we were full of that. World renunciation: that was our gift.
We were natural Gnostics, she said. It came easily to us: world rejection, Gnosticism. Some vague faith in something else. In something hidden.
She’d had to learn Gnosticism the hard way, the slow way, Cicero said. In a communist country!
She came to Gnosticism gradually. But us – it was as though we were born to it. As though we’d woken into it. As though we first opened our eyes in Gnosticism.
We were prodigies of a sort, clearly. Gnostic prodigies. Savants of world hatred.
Cicero should learn from us, she said. She would watch us very carefully. And so she did. Drinking with us. Listening outside the lecture hall when we were teaching. She watched and she listened. She was learning, she said.
Amazing that she’d find such Gnosticism here, in this country, she said. Here! Where life was good – or where it once seemed good. Where it didn’t seem entirely disastrous. Compared to where she grew up, God knows. To where she was from. And what she was used to.
The UK provinces held surprises. The UK sink estates. There was something special about of cultural poverty. No religion – of course. No political hope. No competence. And everything falling apart.
No one reads, in this country. No one thinks. Not in those places. The places from which we came. Out of which we burst. Thinking only of escape.
Work in Progress 