I'm not sure whether three-thirty in the morning is my most lucid or least lucid hour, but somehow I still feel obligated to write--probably on the strength of just having finished one of my favourite books, only this time in a new medium: the audiobook. Gaudy Night is of all the Peter Wimsey mysteries the best because Dorothy Sayers put really hard work into it; there aren't only times-tables and alibis to worry over but also matters of reflection. She really had to give a thought to human nature in this one.

It is set in Oxford, one of my favourite places in England not only because of the University Press, and tells very much about women in an academic setting. The story itself takes place in the late 1930's, with a lot of backwash from the Victorian era and the roaring 20's about the place of women in society all very much talked of and mulled over. What she was really doing in the novel was discussing for her character (Harriet Vane, an old-fashioned Mary Sue) whether she wanted to marry or to work and she could not see that she could do both and be competent at both. A passionate lover and a brilliant scholar both have potential for integrity and obscurity, and are both dangerous when crossed in matters of their craft.

I'm not sure precisely where she was going with that train of thought, but her character married happily and was never a real scholar even though it was proved to the Reader that she could have been had she wanted it. Her hero was a real scholar and continued to be so but not in an academic setting. The one character who seemed to excel both personally and professionally was a rather optimistic but entirely woolly creature whose consciousness was quite separated from those of her equals. It was all rather frustrating to see her a minor character with whom Sayers does not converse very much.

In any case, I expected my university life to be something like that at her old Oxford; so much more severe than my American experience and a place where at least some people took a real joy in scholarship. But it wasn't (even taking away the differences of eighty years and a few hundred miles). If I talked about my work as a subject I delighted in I was thought a bit odd, too serious, and usually that ended up translating to "not fun to be around". As my friends were ridiculously important to me at the time, I rather let my work suffer. That is something for which I have not yet been able to forgive myself. Yet even my supervisor who, when I brought my struggle between loving people and loving things to her said that I should simply find myself a rich someone to love so that I could go on loving the things I liked comfortably. I'm sure she was being mostly flippant, but I came away from that experience thinking that I can't be both a brilliant scholar and a loving person who lives and works in her community.

Since then I have found a few non-fictional scholars who seem to have found a balance in their lives. I follow them in the press and media and toy with the idea of writing to them now and then in the more agitated moments of desperation. I feel, because I have not decided on which side of the line I shall stand, ostracised by both parties. There is no common ground, only no-man's land. At first I thought the dichotomy some type of God-and-Money, People-and-Things type of argument but now I see that is not so. There is something I am not seeing, some way that is straight that I have not yet stumbled upon. It is there, and it is waiting, and I have not found it.