In any case, whether it is aptly or inaptly named as cultural phenomenology, it is a matter, for me, from now on, of something to be done. I am, I seem to know, to find what occupation I can amid the implicit, the orphaned, the omitted, the obvious and the overblown, the approximate, the abortive and the also-ran, the negligible, the nonsuch, the infant, the sorry, the worse for wear, the incipient and the ruined. I am resigned to becoming an addict of the endotic. I am going to forgive everything. Anything in the whole rag and bone shop will do for me. I do not aspire to redeem or transfigure any of this cack, only to think up ways for it to scrape a living from me. Nothing demands that anything of the sort should be done, except the dim, coercive hint that it just might. I mean in any case to consent to its gratuity, and for free, for I have been paid already, with an embarrassment of pittances. It has taken me the worse part of a lifetime to get to so queer a pass, from which I can scarcely imagine wishing again to stir. I have been put to this as to a task or, gentle saying, to death, and intend staying put. Far from unfriended, I shall nevertheless be taking to truancy. I, too, am ready to say 'no more school, not ever'. All I have to do is to write my head off. For, you see, a kind of glory has made a stay in my life, by which I am no more to be let be.
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| Steve Connor | English and Humanities | Birkbeck College |