What’s the opposite of nostalgia?
My journal entries from my time at Oxford are full of creative, enjoyable activity, yet, even while there, I thought about the experience primarily in the negative, and have done ever since. I don’t think this is only a negativity bias, but rather a positivity-or-negativity bias, whereby the valance of a thing – in this case ‘Oxford’ – is forced to go one way or the other, in the manner of a watershed. My answer to the question of what was good about Oxford has always been: academic work, playing squash, going there with my best friend from school, and meeting there my soulmate.1 Curricular and extracurricular satisfaction, platonic and romantic love – these are a lot to have had, so why do I feel negatively about Oxford? One of the reasons for writing this is to try sincerely to work out an answer to that question.
I applied to Merton College because when I looked it was the top of the academic league table, but I didn’t get in, and was instead offered a place at Mansfield, hence my claim to have attended the two leftest institutions of higher education in Britain, Mansfield College, Oxford and then the Institute of Education (IOE) in London. In the first week at Mansfield my sixth-form socialism came into contact with post-structural theory and people who had been to state schools – I’m afraid it never fully recovered, and was at last put down (inhumanely) six years later, during teacher training at the IOE. I later learnt that I was the only privately educated boy admitted to do English at Mansfield for thirteen years. When I think about it now I find it strange that I got in. It’s not imposter syndrome, but something related, to do with belonging. After graduating, I applied to lots of the places where people from Oxford ‘belong’ – the BBC, the civil service, the London Review of Books – and didn’t get into any of them.
I left school with lots of academic prizes and general esteem, and for a few weeks went to parties and pubs, which I never had before. Tuesday, 14 July 2009:
Very nice to be out with the lads, as I suppose there won’t be that many more times. Since the end of A-levels I’ve come out of myself a bit and realised that I’ve shut myself off from a certain world for about five years. I can’t say I’m not glad that I have, because it’s only through doing that that I’ve done other things, but it is unusual to catch a glimpse of what I’ve been missing during this brief period while I’m unencumbered by any responsibilities or duties[.]
But I was still me: ‘[I] Spend [my] life making lists of things that I must not forget to do’. And it is one of my besetting problems that I can’t do more than one thing at once, so when a reading list arrived from Oxford it became in effect my never-ending to-do list: ‘unfortunately now that I have a reading list, I’m almost as incapable of relaxing as I was during exams.’ I began with Middlemarch and a book whose title will re-enter this story later: Dickens’s Bleak House.
