Livia’s achievements. What she’d done. Where she’d been. Who she’d known. A doctorate at twenty-three. Completed early (in eighteen months!) A raft of publications – hundreds of papers. The research teams she’d led. The money she’d brought into the university. The conferences where she’d keynoted. Her work in pure mathematics. In applied mathematics.
She was always pragmatic, Livia. It was always Realpolitik, for her.
She was an emigrant. An exile. A refugee. Who’d escaped communism!
She had no fallback. No plan B.
But she’d play the West at their own game – and win. The amount of money she brought into the university … The research funds that she had at her disposal.
Her trips over the Atlantic and back. To the greatest ivy league universities. Her keynoting – at the best universities. A couple of decades at the top of her game. One of the most renowned mathematicians in the world. And a philosophical mathematician, to boot. A mathematical philosopher, pretty much.
And what did she do, in the end, with her research money? What did she spend it on, her mathematical income stream, at the height of her career? Setting up her own philosophy department.
Livia’s forward planning. Her schemes.
The cultivation of a humanities professors at Mercia. Carefully winning them over. Earning their respect. Impressing them with her seriousness. A mathematical colleague. With an intense interest in the arts. In culture.
Livia did the emotional work. Entertained them, these jewels of the humanities. These conduits of Old Europe. Impressed them with her talk of interdisciplinarity. Of cross faculty collaboration.
So she brought them over. They would support the initiative. They offered expertise – as if it were needed. Make sure it was approved. Helped it through the appropriate committees. Added their names to the paperwork. Which is why Livia ended up reviving philosophy, restarting it, at a university that had closed its original department back in the ‘80s.
They were classy, her Europeans. They knew what was what. They came from prosperous European homes. Cultured homes. They were sons and daughters of professors. Bloodlines of European academics. Not like Livia.
Prosperous, cultured, confident. So what were they doing at Mercia? Passing through, probably. A UK sojourn, for a few years at least. Anglophiles, for some reason. Sort of like W.G. Sebalds. Intellectuals on tour. Doing the melancholy European thing. All kind of Welt-schmerzy.
Insulated from the UK. Not dragged down by the UK. Not half destroyed by the UK. Not inwardly collapsed because of the UK. Not rendered witless by the UK. Not become provincial, by living in the UK. Immune from it, the UK.
Breathing their own European air …
Livia liked to drink it in, our stupidity. Like to sip from our idiocy. It made her giddy. Made her high.
She liked gaucherie. And provincialness. And unwittingness – a c certain innocence. The innocence of knowing no better.
She liked it when we half-forgot our idiocy. When we weren’t burdened by it. Wasn’t crushed by it. She liked it when at our most childlike. At our least self-consciousness. Livia liked us not knowing what we were doing.
All but humming to ourselves, as we turned our philosophical pages. Singing to ourselves, as we wrote in our offices. As we busied ourselves teaching, lecture-writing.
Fools, but unwitting fools. The best kind of fools – the ones who didn’t know they were fools. Who’d never been cursed with intelligence.
Work in Progress 