academic love

I had just studied Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and like Orsino, I was in love with love itself. Like Olivia, I was in love with a dream.

I was a first-year student and dreamed one night about a boy, an older student who bossed me around like older students do with freshmen. I fell helplessly in love. As far as I knew, he didn't exist in real life. But you never know for sure.

I would go to the old factory building where the English department was housed and attend lectures in the depressing basement room (only a few tiny windows near the ceiling showing the feet of passers-by proved to us students that life went on outside). There were lectures on British society by a white-bearded English gentleman, who worried about us in with avuncular kindness, and a smart, older-brother-type of a post-graduate student. There were grammatical drills by a stern but eternally smiling blonde lady (I tried to dislike her as much as I hated her subject but found it impossible) and strange literary analyses led by a weird girl who sometimes seemed to detest us and an even weirder fat man who spoke in a dreamy voice about medieval alchemy (never realising that none of us could follow him to the higher spheres where he dwelled). There were lectures on language history that I followed with reluctant but increasing interest, held by a Santa Claus-lookalike who patiently endured the fact that few of us showed up for lectures and even fewer ever did any homework (his subject somehow always ending up last on our long list of priorities). There were courses in American society, literature and language varieties led by the guest professor from Harvard who was deceptively funny and likeable and who scared us all silly with his high demands and his warnings against procrastinating. There was the one memorable course dedicated to Shakespeare, presided over by our awe-inspiring professor who had once shook the Queen's hand.

(How I would have admired all these people for their intelligence and knowledge, had I met them later in life...! At the time I was either too scared of them or just assumed I knew everything I needed to know.)

I also spent time in the dusty, deadly quiet of the two library rooms of the department, strangely inspired by the towering bookshelves around me and the feeling that these contained knowledge not found anywhere else. I was never inspired by the small room where we endured small-group tutorials and were forced to answer difficult questions, present our essays and sweat through the criticism of teachers and fellow students. I was scared of the common room, cosy with its coffee fragrance, magazines, and funny quotes pinned to the notice board, simply because the older students gathered there.

And wandering around the long corridors and tiny rooms with old carpets and new desks, meeting bright and beautiful people everywhere, I secretly hoped that I would one day turn a corner and stand face to face with HIM, the prince of my dream. Or that he would suddenly emerge from a group of older students gossiping around their coffee mugs. Perhaps he would pretend I was beneath his notice, like other first-years, but as he passed me with a regal stride he would grudgingly nod at me or toss me a mocking but well-meaning comment. And that would be enough. I would be his forever.