It was a dreadful evening, enslaved, at the behest of impatient, uncouth and impolite teenagers and being ordered around by Eastern European hoodlums without an ounce of sense between them. I loathe my "life", yet complaining about it is of no service to anyone. Needless to say, I very nearly threw in the towel this evening, after being treated most discourteously by these... people.
Yet, there is hope. There is always hope. Not here of course, this is a place for paupers, beggars and slaves, but elsewhere in the world. I remember being a well respected musician abroad, living the life of a king. I remember having sat several examinations, having to make deadlines, assignments. Even now, I am surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of books, some of which are so very deep, that it is difficult to fathom whether they are fact or fiction. (Not novels, of course, of which I own very few, except for ancient novels, naturally).
Some years ago, when I was working in Cambridge, I happened to cross paths with a publisher of hermetic texts that needed an editor. I took the job (what the hell else was I going to do?). I remember walking around in a daze for about a week afterwards, disbelieving that these books could be real. In fact, when my (recent) ex-girlfriend happened to glance at a page I was editing, she simply assumed that it was a novel. I used to think that, probably, the ancient legends were true. Now, since discovering hermeticism, I know that they are true. All of them.
My "learned" colleagues at my workplace do not understand this (or indeed, understand anything worth knowing, except for one, who is a mechanic, and even that is frivolous and trifling work compared to the work hermeticists do). I sit, each evening, and gaze around at hundreds and hundreds of books, all of which I have read, several times. I think what the point of all this reading was. If I am no better off now than when I was before I began both my degrees, then what was the point of even becoming educated in the first place? It is like Javier Bardem's character says in No Country for Old Men, "If the road you followed led you to this, of what use was the road?" Yet one ought not to complain. This is not Renaissance Italy, evidently. It's Dark Age Britain. Land of paupers, beggars and slaves.
It's not a bad place, if you are a benefits scrounger, or a crook, or even some nobby prick that never did a day's work in your life. Then it's not a bad place at all. Yet for good honest hard working people, scholars, intellectuals, it is a place for poor people, for beggars, for slaves. In these past two years alone I have met the following graduates:
Law (master's) - two of them
Chemistry (master's, a first)
Oil Rig Engineering
Classics (a first student)
Marketing and Business Administration (a master's and a first student).
All these people do unskilled labour, because this is a nation of beggars, paupers and slaves, like Palestine. Even our patron saint was born in Palestine, thus forging a closer link to that other nation of paupers. There is certainly no work which pertains to anything any of these people learnt at university. In some countries, if you study law, you become a lawyer. If you study oil rig engineering, you work as an engineer on an oil rig. If you study business administration, you administer a business. Not in this glorified third world country pretenting to be something it's not. No sir. Britain is a nation of paupers, beggars and slaves. For if it is not a country of paupers, beggars, and slaves, then why is it peopled by paupers, beggars and slaves?
I wrote a poem about it, just a few days ago (like all my poems, it is in the iambic pentameter).
I sit, late, each night, after a long shift
doing honest work, unskilled labour, that
same job done as an undergraduate,
same job I did as a post-graduate,
and now, as a so-called ‘master’ of arts.
I sit, late, each night, surrounded by books,
a thousand books, as yet a thousand ships,
commentaries of Ancient Greek, Latin,
the centuries of wisdom they contain.
I sit, late, and think of nothing that’s here,
but there is something, that something’s elsewhere.
Max
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