Between the idea and the reality

I'm at University now. I thought I'd mention that for those you who don't know me, or who haven't been paying attention. Now that everyone's on the same page, I'll begin.

The seriously sharp amongst will have noticed The Hollow Men has crept its way into my title. I love that poem. Eliot is brilliant in general - without him there'd be no Cats, and that would be a travesty.

The Hollow Men is a truly beautiful piece, all about the nature of disappointment. More specifically, it deals with the inevitability of disappointment. When it's not being ironic, the phrase "that's the way I want to go," ordinarily applies to drifting off peacefully in one's sleep. Irvine Welsh thinks otherwise. Choosing life is akin to choosing "rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home." In the end, though, it's likely that the vast majority of us will die in a hospital ward, low on relatives and without any recollection of events from our last twenty years of life. Medicine is likely to advance far enough to eliminate all but a handful of diseases, car safety will improve exponentially and violent crime is forever on its way out, so the odds of living long past the onset of senility is practically an inevitability for anyone who really wants that. So, it follows thus, we will all end, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

How disappointing is that? Realistically, the death of Thorin Oakenshield is what most people would desire. To have that final victory, that ultimate battle, to win it all, then just leave one's corporeality. It's not quite a bang, but it's far from a whimper. The alternative is to perish in battle, but that is disappointing, too. Granted, it's a bang, but dying halfway through the story, with no epilogue, it's almost, but not quite, as unsatisfying as dying years later, the last remnant of your own forgotten tale.

If I can return to my original point after that pseudo-digression, The Hollow Men deals with the dissatisfaction that every man feels when his idea becomes reality. On a side note, wherever I use a gender specific noun, just read it as the other gender or your favourite non-gender specific equivalent if you're the kind of person to take offence. Back to the point, now that nobody is taking offence from stylistic choices, I can't remember ever imagining something perfectly. I'm often quite close, but the accuracy of the my approximation correlates to the relevance of my past experience. I can imagine a future train journey very well if I know the train, the line, the time of day, who the passengers will be, whether or not I've already read the book with which I'd occupy myself and so on. In the case of University, I had absolutely no idea.

In terms of academic content, I had a better idea than most. Wikipedia, the Open University and the odd visit, for one reason or another, to Newcastle University all gave me an insight into the vast difference between school and this place. The disparity between teaching at schools and learning at University was more of a shock to some than to myself, given that circumstances necessitated my self-teaching onwards from at least five years ago. Even before that, I knew above and beyond the scope of the curriculum by virtue of curiosity, an ability to read, and access to far too many encyclopaedias, atlases, poor excuses for newspapers and very few channels that weren't BBC. Enough autocentricism for now, academia is less than half of the University experience. For some, it counts for closer to zero.

The next most obvious consequence of conscripting oneself to the West Midlands for four years is that, if they're fortunate, your family doesn't live there. This came as no surprise. I was every bit as callous about the lack of brothers and sisters and, for that matter, a mother as I expected to be. Anyone who actually knows me will know just how much I love being one of the five, but I can do that from afar. Perhaps I would have found it more difficult if I were the first to flee the nest, but, as it happens, I am the middle child and the second to put down hooks outside the Northeast. Again, my mother makes it easier. I love that woman, though I never tell her, but living with her isn't half difficult. She does do my laundry, though, and thus I regularly make infrequent trips to the launderette here. It's 100 metres away, and in the opposite direction to everything else in the 'verse, given that the only entrance to this glorified Travelodge is at the opposite end of its grassy courtyard to the launderette. As such, I've been of my own accord less than three times, and that condition satisfied by a margin of at least two. I never expected to do much laundry, so as of yet, I'm yet to mention a condition of this bubble onto which the shadow falls between the motion and the act.

If you've not read The Hollow Men, you probably missed three obscure metaphors by now. Go read it, come back. Done that? Good. Yes, I know, it was in Apocalypse Now. So was I Can't Get No Satisfaction, but they don't mention that every time it plays on Radio 2.

The real shadow, the headpiece filled with straw, the discrepancy between essence and the descent, is the people. Unlike trains or launderettes, people are intrinsically different. A train goes choo, and a washing machine whirrs, but a person can make those noises and so many more. "Thanks, Captain Obvious," some of you say. "Nice way of putting it," say others. "Stop with the quotes," go yet another set. That's exactly the point. You load up a washing machine, bit of soap powder, hit the button and it washes your clothes. So I'm told. As far as people are concerned, there is no right way through clothes at them. For washing machines, there's no wrong way. That's what it does. I can generalise about washing machines; they don't take offence. People revel in their differences, and I can't even make comments about all of a single group without someone piping up in protest. I'm not complaining either. Quite frankly, people make life worth living. Not even trains do that, and I bloody love trains.

I've met a whole load of people in my life. A whole load - still with the washing machine lexicon, I see. Sorry about that. Nonetheless, just as I based my expectation of mathematics on what I'd seen earlier, I based my entire expectation of who I'd meet, greet, eat, beat, sheet, neat, hang on, the list stopped working. I based my expectation of what people would be likely upon some biased concatenation of every personality I'd ever encountered. That's a lot of personalities. Ordinarily, taking that much information, adjusting it for inflation, dividing by the square of the speed of light and then taking logs would usually yield at least some approximations worth their weight. In this case, no amount of calculating gave me anything like a glimpse at the nature of the people here.

It's almost as though nobody I ever met had anything besides anatomy and culture in common with everybody I've met since. It's terrifying and enlightening, seeing so many new combinations of little idiosyncrasies, culminating in a plethora of personalities, none of which are anything like any conception of my mind. From an existentialist point of view, there's no greater argument against being simply a brain in a jar. My subconscious is incredible: my conscious is an abacus next to its DeepThought, but it would take a machine infinitely more complex to simulate just a handful of us luminous beings. Not this crude matter at all.

Nonetheless, the horror of surprise created by twenty-two-thousand unfamiliar characters pales into insignificance under the right light. That light, to me, is the future. It counts for nothing, making every last one of these beautiful amalgamations appear in an instant, since time - the destroyer of minds, men and mountains - will vanish them all in due course. Not with a bang, but a whimper.