You are never too free to admire something too much. The Balliol sandstone walls and long, fern lined roads, long roads promised something. University always promises something—its the system. I had done well at school, so I felt that I deserved to be there. I heard words thrown around like “anti-establishment” and “Iraq” and remembered to nod thoughtfully in the hope they would pass
be me? as knowing. How I admired them—the true Balliol men, expensive jackets, Lattes and marbled inner-book covers. Conversations of foreign films, ‘non-linear structures’ and ‘counter-revolutions’. I always wondered what is must have felt like-
To have all the answers.
I really enjoy this break here. It's very sophisticated.Arriving originally at Balliol, in my first years I had no answers—and you learn quickly that they are difficult to find. My first day included not being able to find my first lecture, scampering in and knocking chairs over with everyone, already, primed with their own answers which I sought desperately. Distinctly, i’ll
I'll* never forget some paper which was left on my desk from the previous lecture, which I read after everything had settled around me. It’s one of those moments that stays, self-conscious of holding it as a memory, in the mind forever. Under the waves of answers and knowledge that were pouring on me during the lecture, a rafle
raffle* ticket for an anxiety foundation stared up at me. It seemed like nothing thought provoking at the time—nothing much—I needed something more sophisticated and ‘non-linear’ than a small note. It said “you are going to be okay, (ridiculous american spelling), but maybe not in the way you planned to be. With that in mind, I took plato’s
Plato's* Republic out of my public school bag (affording me many stares from the boys in tweed) and attempted to catch my answers up with everyone else’s. I was drowning in those waves…
It did, as these things unfortunately do, (the youth really is wasted on the young)
This is your third set of brackets in a dense area. I'd reconsider this because you are speaking in the first person, so your story is like one huge aside. But when you add brackets, it is like, an aside from the aside? Sparingly, brackets can be great. But I'd think twice about them here take years of Balliol before I realised everyone there was just as terrified as I was. Sure, I had learnt now how to speak with some fluency about small obscure Russian films, but couldn’t shake the fact
the fact is it a fact? or is it paranoia?that everyone knew it was fake. Such discoveries are never straight forward however…
What is the discovery you're referring to? Unless it is absolutely necessary, I think avoid using the word discovery here. In AOS, it's not just a word anymore. It's a trigger for the marker to quickly locate the discovery to assess you on it. But here it isn't clear which discovery you are talking about, so I'm inclined to suggest that you change the word, or clarify the discovery.I learnt how to use the library and was always there. Working on papers or reading ‘Advanced literature’. It was who I wanted to be. Plato’s Republic flew onto the desk now,
Using the past tense and then saying "now" shows inconsistency of tense, consider changing where that note had sat—now long forgotten
perhaps change "forgotten" to something about being buried in the mind or concealed - because they are recalling it now, so it's not forgotten.—and the answers were mine. I didn’t need the dumber students. I was the student they wanted to be. I was intelligent, I dictated the conversation and I knew why ‘non-linear’ narrative structure were important. The waves of knowledge were greeted now with [A HANDSHAKE] rather than a life-vest.
I was intelligent. Of course I was. But not yet in the way I required.
My final year was centred around ‘The Republic’ and working on my last paper. In the library for hours and hours and hours and hours I remained in a chasm between two shelves of bound books. It was starting to feel as though
me my entire reality was there. A prison. Of…knowledge? I couldn’t know, but I needed to escape. Violently—as in the capacity we indulge the young with—I wouldn’t have it. Just as the waves of answers were looking for a new victim (they were hitherto finished with me), I called them back from a tsunami. I had to leave.
The answers were not mine. I was trapped inside a vortex of paradoxical thinking. The more I knew, the less I knew. My answers were not, my answers. They were the Balliol answers. I didn’t know how to think, I realised. I knew ‘what’ to think.
I again, in the pattern of violent changes of lifestyle with which we indulge the youth, I, the next day, swapped my latte and desk at the library for a blanket and a seat under a tree (like Newton—obviously). If I were to be in conversation with my contemporaries at Balliol, Im sure it would have seemed perfectly cliche (the mark of poor film). It didn't for me though, for at that moment, I laughed as I remembered that note, in its own cliche, with this this member already germinating in my mind and of course knew “I was going to be ok (I refused the american spelling)l just not in the way I had planned to be”.
I had my own answers. My own answers.