Living Life Academic

Existence in the bubble and life outside of it

Most of my life is about Literature, from Beowulf to the really modern and even post-modern stuff. You read it, analyse it and write a paper on it. Your thoughts are weighed on the scales and most of the time there is a great room for improvement. You are found wanting. 32 weeks out of 52 my thoughts circle around things like gender studies, Judith Butler, performativity theory, aestheticism and the rupture of modernity with traditions.

In this tiny galaxy far far away, people have created their own rules and regulations, their own values that stand isolated from outside influences. This little world is dedicated to preserving grand masterpieces written by long-gone-poets from all over the world. Yet, we apply the theories of equally grand and long-gone thinkers to these works we perceive as texts, a sign system where the author is no longer in charge of its creation. We are devoted to the traditional claim to eternity, fighting against cultural damnation, striving in some ways for recognition, while being forced to reinvent the wheel – so to speak. I once was told all thoughts that can be thought about Shakespeare have already been thought. Still, we try to achieve the impossible, we try to solve a puzzle, find the answer to a question or simply compare something so out-of-touch with reality that nobody could have been bothered to think along those lines prior to our constructed argumentation for our equally constructed problem.

Within my very own literary bubble, that makes for interesting conversation. You could always talk about how feminism and post-colonialism influenced your reading of one thing or the other. One could functionalize dear old Shakespeare and refute the popular belief that the grandmaster of Renaissance theatre was a misogynist, while in fact, he could have very well been a feminist. It’s an anything-goes society, where there are no definite answers, no absolutes, where right or wrong is matter of interpretation and perspective, as long as your argument is strong enough, you can make your case, even for Shakespeare and his proto-feminist movement. Than you find like-minded thinkers who easily agree with your thought process, even those that disagree could still be useful and contribute to a lively debate about one thing or the other. It’s all about the intellectual challenge, the exchange of something ephemeral and at the same time wholly beautiful because of its own frailty.

And than suddenly the 32 weeks are over and you are back home in the real world, where even your friends and family are left to wonder about what you do all day long. Sitting in your room or a dreary old library over musty books thinking about thoughts of other people is not exactly their idea of a productive life. Here people often don’t know a thing about hermeneutics and structuralism, let alone the notion of a post-something movement. And yet, despite their professed ignorance about theses things, it doesn’t bother them in the least. Quite the contrary most of those normal people are actually quite proud of the fact that their “brains just don’t seem to be wired for that kind of nonsense”. While you stand there flabbergasted by this obvious affront to your choices in life, you try to politely explain what you do but quite quickly you realize that even your own family is bored out of their skulls questioning your mental health. You’ve have already lost them explaining your thoughts on Jauß reader response criticism and the Death of the Author. In the end the discussion at the dinner table returns to saver topics. Your aunts start exchanging new recipes, trying to solve the mystery behind grandma’s traditional apple pie. Your uncles talk about cars and politics, about how the economy is going down the drain, politicians wasting our tax money on saving other people while they ignore the plight of their own voters. In the end their voices heavy with emotion become nostalgic. There seems to be a consensus all around, it was better in the olden days, before Europe became an issue, before bankers got to greedy, before seven-year olds are tempted by false promises on the Internet and your private family moments are interrupted by your nephew’s Lady Gaga blaring ring tone. The good old days of yore.

And you? You are not part of that nostalgia, you don’t understand their sentimentality or their reasons for hashing out the same old arguments in the same fixed way over and over again. You spend too much time away from it all, getting the education they’ve always wanted you to have. You are getting somewhere with your life, at least intellectually, only falling short, when reality rains into your parade and you realize, that you are rather inept leading the mundane every day life outside of your little glass bread game in cloud-cuckoo-land. What good is your education at an elite school if it turns you into an independent thinker who depends on everyone else to live life in reality? Because in the end, you will always have to return to that mundane reality where people worry but jobs and retirement plans about health care and social services. In the end your life has to be real not and not imagined.