you drive through a wealthy old suburb of broad roads lined with solid and sometimes grandiose old buildings, many of them residences with large gardens around them. plane trees full of birds line the broadest of the broad roads, and in the grassed median strips there are flower beds filled with gay annuals. it is a positive boulevard with stylish cafes spilling out tables and chairs filled with well-heeled matrons and sleek businessmen onto wide sunny pavements. there are lights and a pedestrian crossing where the road turns into the university complex. magnificent is the portal arch: granite with bronze plaques bolted to it, its lofty pillars as tall as two trees – almost as massive as towers – supporting a lacy bronze archway festooned with a sort of winding allegory, a frieze of contorted figures half-human half-bird or -serpent or -fish with hard staring eyes of grimy stone blackened with lichen or soot. it is topped by a fine blazing bronze sunburst that seems to comb you as you go through with a kind of portcullis made of the elongated shadows thrown from its spiky points by its own inspirer the morning sun as it rises this autumn morning almost exactly behind it. raked by the shadow spikes slashing through the sunshiny gold you feel like bits of you are being selected out: the slack, the slovenly, the rebellious, the devil-may-care, the burrs and dags of indolence and self-sabotage. nothing remains but the lustrous resilient fleece of dedication intelligence punctiliousness ambition and respect for tradition. if it is not too meagre you will pass muster; if not …
you are still as impressed as at your first experience of driving through with the winding allegory in bronze whirlygigs at the top of the columns, so engaging that you are always right up to within paw-swipe of the stone gryphons before you remember them. but it’s all right. their heads are angled to stare right through the passing windshields at the driver and you make the obligatory eye contact with the usual little shock of thrill. each of them holds a stone pen in one paw and is writing in a big stone book. there’s an inscription in latin on the pedestal below each gone and although you’ve done a fair bit and know enough to get you through most inscriptions and you feel reasonably sure that you could crack this one in five minutes flat with of course the help of your on-line dictionary you are part of a stream of slow but steady traffic and must keep your eyes on the road. in front of you and behind you cars are moving smoothly forth and you must not break the flow. teachers and privileged students are anxious to get their cars parked in time, and not so far from where their first class is that they’d have to run so you haven’t got five minutes. into the big shady car park you glide and find a park under a pleasant-looking tree not far from a signpost that points you in the direction of the library.
the campus though only a century and a half old seems ancient and brooding and even from here only this far in, it already feels dangerous. it has an unwholesome atmosphere, as if damp timbers are rotting somewhere and about to give and some floor somewhere perhaps in the archaeology department might cave in and they’ll find the remains of prisoners in chains or maybe still living though starving or dying of thirst or disease in appalling conditions being tortured for some heresy or lack of loyalty to something or other or eaten alive by rats. somehow it makes you think of the stone gryphons at the entrance and of the earliest history books in the library and you draw a stiffening breath as you submit to the impression that in these precincts other realities impinge. the wispy breezes seem to carry whispers a bee’s whisker away from audible breaths and mutterings in the old and medieval languages that were spoken back then and which you have studied and sometimes taught for more than two decades and are conscious that you have understood so poorly. indeed you more than suspect they always were and still are poorly understood by those reputed to know them best, the lexicons writhing with fibs. these are rebellious nay even heretical thoughts that you’ve never shared with anyone yet it crosses your mind that whenever they arise in you… the gryphons seem restless somehow.
oh the gryphons, the glowering eyes of those gryphons! they haunt you wherever you go. sometimes your spirit almost fails you. there’s a sense of foreboding like a weight upon you, a pavid expectation of evil that you have to shake away with a toss of your head. but boldly on you go, on you go boldly.
and you reach the library, which has three concentric blank walls with corridors separating them and heavy double glass doors in them that you must pass through to get in, where your eyes latch on to those of the girl at the front desk, a new one you’ve never seen before who looks about fifteen but is probably a post-grad student from somewhere and upon whose asking of your name you absentmindedly give her your on-line user-name by mistake: ‘bluestocking the bard’. you scarcely bare your teeth when she asks if ‘the’ is your middle name. but you notice that she is easily intimidated – or perhaps it’s that you are extraordinarily intimidating when you bare your teeth – and gathering up your books you head for the catacombs.
not that there is anything particularly intimidating about you personally. who would tremble at a tall, tense, pencil-thin spinster with her hair in a tight bun pierced through with a complicated steel sculpture incorporating a hairpin decorated with a large minutely detailed eagle with wings extended, stooping to clutch in its talons a large red garnet that looks like something bleeding. you are surely not fifty, perhaps not forty-five, yet that bun it clutches so rapaciously is already showing some steely threads among the dark, brooding brown. it is pulled tightly back from a pale face with an oddly dewy-eyed glance, or should i say dewey-eyed from long years in the stacks. perhaps it’s the contact lenses you wear, as thick as blisters on both eyeballs. long and pinched is your nose from late formaldehyde evenings at your labours. your thin lips are compressed in quiet determination from sheer habit, even in the absence of anything at all to be quietly determined about. around your not yet scrawny neck is a string of big amber beads. your skinny, flat-chested body is sheathed in an aubergine pinafore over a bottle green skivvy, and you wear navy blue stockings and sensible shoes with low but solid wooden heels that hammer the most sound-resistant floor with a satisfying thud. scarcely the intimidating type. yet you saw that girl quail. quelled her with a look. you almost wonder what you are becoming…
onward you go along the miles of corridor you must traverse to reach your destination, dodging the harassed, hurrying, haunted-looking academics you’ve come to think of as headlong rushers, with their books or laptops under their arms, bulleting along head first at top speed past pairs and groups of students texting or snogging, your gaze grazing the tops of dimly-recognised heads and focused narrowly upon the road ahead, your mind firmly fixed on your destination, your body on automatic pilot. your head goes up and your eyes narrow at intervals, as if earnestly seeking the meaning of the signs above the doors as you sail past. your head goes down again to avoid eye contact as you pass chortling professors and their claques of fawning and flattering favourites, up again as you get past them. straight on you go and let the library staff with their arms full skip past and around you, which they’re good at, or ought to be and soon will be if they aren’t yet. under your breath in time to your foot-falls, you sing some bloody-minded old ballad about ravens feasting in fields. on corpses. the slain in battle. young men. and you even let your lips move. ‘… oh, i’ll pike oot his bonnie blue ee…’
a haze of smoke hangs in the dank, dingy hall. there is a smell of cold coal cinders from fires long dead. the ceiling is low, for this is an older part of the library complex, built in the ancient past by people who were only about three or four feet tall, whom you think of as ‘hobbits’ or elves, or possibly even pixies, and consider worthy of further interest. well, no, not that long ago, and not so magical, but somehow you always get that impression. tiny people only thigh high seem to you to haunt it. and why not? they are well-recorded in folk memory and they are indicated but not much mentioned in the history books, but well-know in literature. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together. fascinating to think that they must have really existed, not as supernatural beings, but as severely inbred until pathologically undersized people, regressed in their monkeyish features, their chirruping or yapping voices, their ears large and set low on their broad, low-browed heads, their noses small and flattish. once common but later disappearing as fertility diminished and finally failed. or they married out. fairies? the irish word ‘fear’ (pronounced like ‘fair’) is still the word for ‘man’.
and with a reputation for magic? you have a theory about that, based on a lot of meticulous etymology going back a thousand years to the ancient patois of the educated elite, the linguae francae of the silk roads and the myriad transient shipboard creoles of those times. but that is going beyond the bounds of or even flying in the face of current textbook dogma, which still believes in that stark straight-limbed celto-phobic family tree of languages, and barely sidesteps that garden of eden which is the mythic birth-place of all speech to go galloping after the forty thousand year old, or is it twenty five or no, only twelve thousand,year old venus figurines whose goddess-worshipping makers had surely spoken the purest most laryngeal and densely conjugated and declined pie. flying in the face of such volumes of equally meticulous multitudinously detailed research by impeccable scholars – gosh, you’d weep just to think – and the stony eye of the gryphon may fall upon you if you go too far with anything that does that.
so with a bit of a wince because it doesn’t quite belong there, you let it get shunted into the fantasy fiction category of your mind and entrancing as that may sometimes have been to you in your wildly creative youth, you have no time for it now. you deal in facts, and theories which must be rigorously evidence based, of course and all the evidence is of course, right there in your text-books, not in your general knowledge of the world through reading, listening and experiencing. it’s in the books and the right books at that or it’s not evidence. and the wee folk are in the wrong books, the fantasy fiction books and the ramblings of liars and delusionals. they are not mentioned in the histories of text-books, except as anomolies, or when considering the superstitions of the dark ages, which are not on your radar. so you quell it, this theory you heretically nevertheless have, you crush it, you feel it crumple, there is a sudden despairing collapse of once hopeful dendrites, and almost swooning with a cold damp fit of trembling all of a sudden while reaching for the topmost tome on your pile, you remember that you have forgotten to have breakfast as you so often do, and wonder if you shouldn’t perhaps go and find the refectory and have a liverwurst roll.
but you have opened the tome and your mind clears as the spasm passes and is soon forgotten. your eyes by now are accustomed to the semi-dark in which the light filtered through the dust on the windows obscures rather than illuminates things in a fuzzy blaze of dust-motes, although you have found your way thus far without any need of a sense of sight, moving among the familiar furniture with ease and grace, manoeuvering within the mental map that you keep in your well-maintained memory. your booth is not taken so without looking about to see if there is any competition, you drive at it with speed and skill, tilting yourself like a lance and lunging for the spongy cushion to claim it for the day. if there had been any competition they’d have been knocked clean out of the way. with almost a little cry or sob of triumph you slide into the seat and disburden yourself of your handwoven albanian shoulder-bag, almost slamming it onto the tabletop, and you take out your tablet and begin your furtive, fearful magic.
because in you things are coming to a head. a postmodern head – well, postmodernistic, all full of minutiae and exquisitudes of nit-picking niggliness. right in. up close. and it is time for you to consider your options and make some new plans. you have spent all this time trying to equip yourself to contribute to history. to work with others on the production , clarification, evolution and maintenance of the narrative of human existence. and to this end you have perfected the art of scrupulous self critique. you give your every thought rigorous scrutiny and apply a veracity rating. and in this state of hermeneutical grace you address yourself to the evidence of history, boldly you do. it is time to get serious about it. history is your career. post-modernism has given you an array of tools and you have beecome skilful in the wielding of them. this is your job. to critique. history. text-book history.
no one contests your right to this intention or is even aware of it. as a postgraduate student you are expected to have swallowed the dogmas whole, digested them, made them comfortably your own, and in passing the necessary exams you have implied in effect that you have done just that, so there’s a tiny qualm of conscience where you have not quite resolved all the intricate issues. of course, no student gets through without encountering instances of irreconcilable difference with the textbooks, with the consensus of academic opinion, but few have time to attempt a resolution, or the audacity; indeed few even dare to admit to a doubt that there is but one opinion in pre-renaissance history, except among cutting-edge scholars whom no-one has ever met. and now, instead of resolving the doubts by a more assiduous attention to the footnotes where better scholars than you have resolved them all to perfection, mostly seriously intimidating 20th century scholars with impeccable phd’s, which they got in their early twenties and to which they are constantly adding post-graduate diplomas and certificates, all the while teaching subjects they know as perfectly well as they know their mother tongue, while you haven’t yet got yours, though you’re starting to bristle with diplomas and you do teach undergraduate classes now and again, you are required to blink at the veracity issues, which you see as simmering like a low level of infection, not serious, nothing to worry about, and perhaps you do wink a little, knowing that you’ll never get through it all if you don’t just plunge into the races along with the rest and get drafted into the elite paddock, scarcely letting it matter because you’re not coming top, not getting the hotly competed for scholarships although you’re always in the running for them, so you’re never going to be cutting edge even with your phd; and then you find you still have that stubborn little cough you can’t quite shake, that never quite clears your throat and upper respiratory tract, and anyway must be repressed because this is after all a library, and then…
…a pair of very high-heeled snake-skin shoes goes past and you are momentarily distracted. momentarily you even forget your palpitatingly potent plan and go into a tiny, misty stupor of nostalgia – and almost remember a time when you, yes, you, might have worn such heels, such sleek, such fashionable shoes – when you were younger, a fashion-conscious girl of nineteen… but no. no! no! not here. not now. you are no longer young. and this is not the habitat of that chic intellectual elite you were running with then. you no longer go to the opera, the ballet and the theatre with that set. they have all graduated and gone, or dropped out and disappeared into the obscurity beyond the academic pale. no not that now. this is the catacombs. this snaky, haunted old tomb. tomb of tomes. tomb of the tomes and dreams and dreary or thrilling careers of generations of scholars old and ancient, neophytic and newborn. outside the gryphons glower, and their stony feathers seem to shiver in the flickering autumnal light.
it is like a club, this room, modern but with the atmosphere of an old, old club where tobacco is offered with pipes to smoke it with, or snuff in elegant boxes, or cigars or marijuana in tiny clay pipes with long curving stems. the wine is a deep secretive burgundy, tasting of old leather, as if it had been bottled in a sack, brought to you in an elegant enough decanter by a ghoulish figure whose joints creak audibly as he walks. or sometimes it feels like an ancient hall of learning. it is l-shaped. there are low shelves along two walls, much wood-paneling and those booths along the shortest wall where you come in at the door. a skeleton or two and some parts of skeletons hang from iron spikes in the walls in rusty chains, along with corpses of foxes, a stag’s head, and a series of stuffed raptors. except there are no pipes, no burgundy, no skeletons, rusty chains or corpses, at least not now, and never were at this university. it is some archetype that haunts this one and perhaps all universities throughout time. of these relics there is only the merest suggestion, a certain odour or subtle ambience, caught accidentally in the architecture, the furniture and the decor, and exuded by the deeply learned ancients and awestruck aspirants who pore over its precious old tomes…
not in a booth, because he is too important to be stuck away like that, no, not in a booth, but rather sitting up at a big heavy wooden table that runs the length of the hall almost, so that students heavily laden with teetering piles of books have to sidle round the top and bottom ends of it, sits professor ogden o’gugelsuch, your doctoral supervisor with whom you have an appointment soon, but not yet. he is busy. light from a window is shed upon that table, and muted as that light is by the dense frosting of dust and smoke on both sides of the window and light dressing of guano on the outside, it lays a light airy eerie beauty upon all it touches. and the fairest palest most poignantly touching things it lays this beauty upon are the thin veiny pink and white blue-veined hands of this aged – we might say ancient – scholar. indeed, we might call him a veritable sage. hoary the fringe of hair at the nape of that high domed shiny bald head. legendary he is in the folk-lore of the university; awe-inspiring enough to warrant it in real life. he has asked you to call him oggy, once, long ago, with one of his sweet smiles that reminded you of a hard boiled egg shell cracking to reveal the sudden whiteness within.
you are still as impressed as at your first experience of driving through with the winding allegory in bronze whirlygigs at the top of the columns, so engaging that you are always right up to within paw-swipe of the stone gryphons before you remember them. but it’s all right. their heads are angled to stare right through the passing windshields at the driver and you make the obligatory eye contact with the usual little shock of thrill. each of them holds a stone pen in one paw and is writing in a big stone book. there’s an inscription in latin on the pedestal below each gone and although you’ve done a fair bit and know enough to get you through most inscriptions and you feel reasonably sure that you could crack this one in five minutes flat with of course the help of your on-line dictionary you are part of a stream of slow but steady traffic and must keep your eyes on the road. in front of you and behind you cars are moving smoothly forth and you must not break the flow. teachers and privileged students are anxious to get their cars parked in time, and not so far from where their first class is that they’d have to run so you haven’t got five minutes. into the big shady car park you glide and find a park under a pleasant-looking tree not far from a signpost that points you in the direction of the library.
the campus though only a century and a half old seems ancient and brooding and even from here only this far in, it already feels dangerous. it has an unwholesome atmosphere, as if damp timbers are rotting somewhere and about to give and some floor somewhere perhaps in the archaeology department might cave in and they’ll find the remains of prisoners in chains or maybe still living though starving or dying of thirst or disease in appalling conditions being tortured for some heresy or lack of loyalty to something or other or eaten alive by rats. somehow it makes you think of the stone gryphons at the entrance and of the earliest history books in the library and you draw a stiffening breath as you submit to the impression that in these precincts other realities impinge. the wispy breezes seem to carry whispers a bee’s whisker away from audible breaths and mutterings in the old and medieval languages that were spoken back then and which you have studied and sometimes taught for more than two decades and are conscious that you have understood so poorly. indeed you more than suspect they always were and still are poorly understood by those reputed to know them best, the lexicons writhing with fibs. these are rebellious nay even heretical thoughts that you’ve never shared with anyone yet it crosses your mind that whenever they arise in you… the gryphons seem restless somehow.
oh the gryphons, the glowering eyes of those gryphons! they haunt you wherever you go. sometimes your spirit almost fails you. there’s a sense of foreboding like a weight upon you, a pavid expectation of evil that you have to shake away with a toss of your head. but boldly on you go, on you go boldly.
and you reach the library, which has three concentric blank walls with corridors separating them and heavy double glass doors in them that you must pass through to get in, where your eyes latch on to those of the girl at the front desk, a new one you’ve never seen before who looks about fifteen but is probably a post-grad student from somewhere and upon whose asking of your name you absentmindedly give her your on-line user-name by mistake: ‘bluestocking the bard’. you scarcely bare your teeth when she asks if ‘the’ is your middle name. but you notice that she is easily intimidated – or perhaps it’s that you are extraordinarily intimidating when you bare your teeth – and gathering up your books you head for the catacombs.
not that there is anything particularly intimidating about you personally. who would tremble at a tall, tense, pencil-thin spinster with her hair in a tight bun pierced through with a complicated steel sculpture incorporating a hairpin decorated with a large minutely detailed eagle with wings extended, stooping to clutch in its talons a large red garnet that looks like something bleeding. you are surely not fifty, perhaps not forty-five, yet that bun it clutches so rapaciously is already showing some steely threads among the dark, brooding brown. it is pulled tightly back from a pale face with an oddly dewy-eyed glance, or should i say dewey-eyed from long years in the stacks. perhaps it’s the contact lenses you wear, as thick as blisters on both eyeballs. long and pinched is your nose from late formaldehyde evenings at your labours. your thin lips are compressed in quiet determination from sheer habit, even in the absence of anything at all to be quietly determined about. around your not yet scrawny neck is a string of big amber beads. your skinny, flat-chested body is sheathed in an aubergine pinafore over a bottle green skivvy, and you wear navy blue stockings and sensible shoes with low but solid wooden heels that hammer the most sound-resistant floor with a satisfying thud. scarcely the intimidating type. yet you saw that girl quail. quelled her with a look. you almost wonder what you are becoming…
onward you go along the miles of corridor you must traverse to reach your destination, dodging the harassed, hurrying, haunted-looking academics you’ve come to think of as headlong rushers, with their books or laptops under their arms, bulleting along head first at top speed past pairs and groups of students texting or snogging, your gaze grazing the tops of dimly-recognised heads and focused narrowly upon the road ahead, your mind firmly fixed on your destination, your body on automatic pilot. your head goes up and your eyes narrow at intervals, as if earnestly seeking the meaning of the signs above the doors as you sail past. your head goes down again to avoid eye contact as you pass chortling professors and their claques of fawning and flattering favourites, up again as you get past them. straight on you go and let the library staff with their arms full skip past and around you, which they’re good at, or ought to be and soon will be if they aren’t yet. under your breath in time to your foot-falls, you sing some bloody-minded old ballad about ravens feasting in fields. on corpses. the slain in battle. young men. and you even let your lips move. ‘… oh, i’ll pike oot his bonnie blue ee…’
a haze of smoke hangs in the dank, dingy hall. there is a smell of cold coal cinders from fires long dead. the ceiling is low, for this is an older part of the library complex, built in the ancient past by people who were only about three or four feet tall, whom you think of as ‘hobbits’ or elves, or possibly even pixies, and consider worthy of further interest. well, no, not that long ago, and not so magical, but somehow you always get that impression. tiny people only thigh high seem to you to haunt it. and why not? they are well-recorded in folk memory and they are indicated but not much mentioned in the history books, but well-know in literature. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together. fascinating to think that they must have really existed, not as supernatural beings, but as severely inbred until pathologically undersized people, regressed in their monkeyish features, their chirruping or yapping voices, their ears large and set low on their broad, low-browed heads, their noses small and flattish. once common but later disappearing as fertility diminished and finally failed. or they married out. fairies? the irish word ‘fear’ (pronounced like ‘fair’) is still the word for ‘man’.
and with a reputation for magic? you have a theory about that, based on a lot of meticulous etymology going back a thousand years to the ancient patois of the educated elite, the linguae francae of the silk roads and the myriad transient shipboard creoles of those times. but that is going beyond the bounds of or even flying in the face of current textbook dogma, which still believes in that stark straight-limbed celto-phobic family tree of languages, and barely sidesteps that garden of eden which is the mythic birth-place of all speech to go galloping after the forty thousand year old, or is it twenty five or no, only twelve thousand,year old venus figurines whose goddess-worshipping makers had surely spoken the purest most laryngeal and densely conjugated and declined pie. flying in the face of such volumes of equally meticulous multitudinously detailed research by impeccable scholars – gosh, you’d weep just to think – and the stony eye of the gryphon may fall upon you if you go too far with anything that does that.
so with a bit of a wince because it doesn’t quite belong there, you let it get shunted into the fantasy fiction category of your mind and entrancing as that may sometimes have been to you in your wildly creative youth, you have no time for it now. you deal in facts, and theories which must be rigorously evidence based, of course and all the evidence is of course, right there in your text-books, not in your general knowledge of the world through reading, listening and experiencing. it’s in the books and the right books at that or it’s not evidence. and the wee folk are in the wrong books, the fantasy fiction books and the ramblings of liars and delusionals. they are not mentioned in the histories of text-books, except as anomolies, or when considering the superstitions of the dark ages, which are not on your radar. so you quell it, this theory you heretically nevertheless have, you crush it, you feel it crumple, there is a sudden despairing collapse of once hopeful dendrites, and almost swooning with a cold damp fit of trembling all of a sudden while reaching for the topmost tome on your pile, you remember that you have forgotten to have breakfast as you so often do, and wonder if you shouldn’t perhaps go and find the refectory and have a liverwurst roll.
but you have opened the tome and your mind clears as the spasm passes and is soon forgotten. your eyes by now are accustomed to the semi-dark in which the light filtered through the dust on the windows obscures rather than illuminates things in a fuzzy blaze of dust-motes, although you have found your way thus far without any need of a sense of sight, moving among the familiar furniture with ease and grace, manoeuvering within the mental map that you keep in your well-maintained memory. your booth is not taken so without looking about to see if there is any competition, you drive at it with speed and skill, tilting yourself like a lance and lunging for the spongy cushion to claim it for the day. if there had been any competition they’d have been knocked clean out of the way. with almost a little cry or sob of triumph you slide into the seat and disburden yourself of your handwoven albanian shoulder-bag, almost slamming it onto the tabletop, and you take out your tablet and begin your furtive, fearful magic.
because in you things are coming to a head. a postmodern head – well, postmodernistic, all full of minutiae and exquisitudes of nit-picking niggliness. right in. up close. and it is time for you to consider your options and make some new plans. you have spent all this time trying to equip yourself to contribute to history. to work with others on the production , clarification, evolution and maintenance of the narrative of human existence. and to this end you have perfected the art of scrupulous self critique. you give your every thought rigorous scrutiny and apply a veracity rating. and in this state of hermeneutical grace you address yourself to the evidence of history, boldly you do. it is time to get serious about it. history is your career. post-modernism has given you an array of tools and you have beecome skilful in the wielding of them. this is your job. to critique. history. text-book history.
no one contests your right to this intention or is even aware of it. as a postgraduate student you are expected to have swallowed the dogmas whole, digested them, made them comfortably your own, and in passing the necessary exams you have implied in effect that you have done just that, so there’s a tiny qualm of conscience where you have not quite resolved all the intricate issues. of course, no student gets through without encountering instances of irreconcilable difference with the textbooks, with the consensus of academic opinion, but few have time to attempt a resolution, or the audacity; indeed few even dare to admit to a doubt that there is but one opinion in pre-renaissance history, except among cutting-edge scholars whom no-one has ever met. and now, instead of resolving the doubts by a more assiduous attention to the footnotes where better scholars than you have resolved them all to perfection, mostly seriously intimidating 20th century scholars with impeccable phd’s, which they got in their early twenties and to which they are constantly adding post-graduate diplomas and certificates, all the while teaching subjects they know as perfectly well as they know their mother tongue, while you haven’t yet got yours, though you’re starting to bristle with diplomas and you do teach undergraduate classes now and again, you are required to blink at the veracity issues, which you see as simmering like a low level of infection, not serious, nothing to worry about, and perhaps you do wink a little, knowing that you’ll never get through it all if you don’t just plunge into the races along with the rest and get drafted into the elite paddock, scarcely letting it matter because you’re not coming top, not getting the hotly competed for scholarships although you’re always in the running for them, so you’re never going to be cutting edge even with your phd; and then you find you still have that stubborn little cough you can’t quite shake, that never quite clears your throat and upper respiratory tract, and anyway must be repressed because this is after all a library, and then…
…a pair of very high-heeled snake-skin shoes goes past and you are momentarily distracted. momentarily you even forget your palpitatingly potent plan and go into a tiny, misty stupor of nostalgia – and almost remember a time when you, yes, you, might have worn such heels, such sleek, such fashionable shoes – when you were younger, a fashion-conscious girl of nineteen… but no. no! no! not here. not now. you are no longer young. and this is not the habitat of that chic intellectual elite you were running with then. you no longer go to the opera, the ballet and the theatre with that set. they have all graduated and gone, or dropped out and disappeared into the obscurity beyond the academic pale. no not that now. this is the catacombs. this snaky, haunted old tomb. tomb of tomes. tomb of the tomes and dreams and dreary or thrilling careers of generations of scholars old and ancient, neophytic and newborn. outside the gryphons glower, and their stony feathers seem to shiver in the flickering autumnal light.
it is like a club, this room, modern but with the atmosphere of an old, old club where tobacco is offered with pipes to smoke it with, or snuff in elegant boxes, or cigars or marijuana in tiny clay pipes with long curving stems. the wine is a deep secretive burgundy, tasting of old leather, as if it had been bottled in a sack, brought to you in an elegant enough decanter by a ghoulish figure whose joints creak audibly as he walks. or sometimes it feels like an ancient hall of learning. it is l-shaped. there are low shelves along two walls, much wood-paneling and those booths along the shortest wall where you come in at the door. a skeleton or two and some parts of skeletons hang from iron spikes in the walls in rusty chains, along with corpses of foxes, a stag’s head, and a series of stuffed raptors. except there are no pipes, no burgundy, no skeletons, rusty chains or corpses, at least not now, and never were at this university. it is some archetype that haunts this one and perhaps all universities throughout time. of these relics there is only the merest suggestion, a certain odour or subtle ambience, caught accidentally in the architecture, the furniture and the decor, and exuded by the deeply learned ancients and awestruck aspirants who pore over its precious old tomes…
not in a booth, because he is too important to be stuck away like that, no, not in a booth, but rather sitting up at a big heavy wooden table that runs the length of the hall almost, so that students heavily laden with teetering piles of books have to sidle round the top and bottom ends of it, sits professor ogden o’gugelsuch, your doctoral supervisor with whom you have an appointment soon, but not yet. he is busy. light from a window is shed upon that table, and muted as that light is by the dense frosting of dust and smoke on both sides of the window and light dressing of guano on the outside, it lays a light airy eerie beauty upon all it touches. and the fairest palest most poignantly touching things it lays this beauty upon are the thin veiny pink and white blue-veined hands of this aged – we might say ancient – scholar. indeed, we might call him a veritable sage. hoary the fringe of hair at the nape of that high domed shiny bald head. legendary he is in the folk-lore of the university; awe-inspiring enough to warrant it in real life. he has asked you to call him oggy, once, long ago, with one of his sweet smiles that reminded you of a hard boiled egg shell cracking to reveal the sudden whiteness within.
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