On Summer Holidays

Prometheus Bound, by Jacob Jordaens. Preserved for posterity for its lesson in tasteful foot placement. 

There is something inexplicably oppressive which surrounds a surfeit of free time. I have mentioned this in previous posts and therefore will mention it again. If I annoy somebody in doing so then I can at least claim that my summer was not wasted in its entirety. A tiny worm of achievement shall cling to my soul and I shall nurture it until it becomes a dinghy on which I can sail to some remote shore. This achieved, I will found an ice cream shop and sell dinghy-flavoured ice cream until I have the necessary funds to invest in more conventional, fruit-based varieties. I've got it all planned.

My use of the word 'inexplicable' in the paragraph above was undoubtedly fatuity on my part, for I am about to attempt to explicate the thing to which I ascribed the term. Therefore I have already undermined the very raison d'être of the whole enterprise. In sooth, I think the oppression I mention is both explicable and inexplicable. Inexplicably. Explicable because there are elements to it which are very obvious, but inexplicable because there is still something counterintuitive about the idea, and besides my argument does not wholly explain the phenomenon.

First, and I think most crucially, we are quite mercifully constructed so as to view the idea of immortality with absolute scorn. It is so abhorrent because it exploits many of man's worst fears - the fear of boredom, and more importantly the fear of being bound by mental illness in the mind. Immortality is incarceration in one's own form, a kind of cage from which escape is impossible. In such a state the soul would be eternally garrotted by the senses, anguished by the sight of that which is allowed the repose that one is so unceasingly denied. The very liberation immortality seems to grant would corrode one's will to live, a kind of paradoxical torment which irony would taint everything. It may sound ridiculous to compare this with a summer holiday, but I believe any huge expanse of time inevitably begins to induce the kind of anxiety and dread that the mere suggestion of immortality might beget. I currently feel like Prometheus, or Sisyphus (without the palliative sense of occupation), or Ixion, or Tantalus bound in the pit. A kind of immobility is generated by the limitless possibilities of this ludicrously generous space which I have been afforded. This is the sort of monitory tale told to the ancient Greeks as if to establish knowledge of the very worst kind of despair in their minds. The same is done as a sort of obedience mechanism in the monotheistic religions too. You can almost imagine someone writing these edicts: 'If you disobey my divine right to leadership then you will be punished for a week. Hmm. No, that's rubbish. A whole month! What dread! I giggle at the thought! But I suppose some might enjoy a month's absence from work. Very well, you will be punished forever! Muahaha!' I do not think it unfair to say this could equally have come from the lips of the university administrators under whose hegemony I have been sanctioned to this punishment.

Furthermore, the idea of the summer holiday bears the insistence that I must enjoy myself, which sentiment I naturally reject at its fundament but, more gross still, the further insistence that I shall enjoy myself for precisely the period of time to which I have been so mercifully been allowed access. Then, at the bidding of some ghastly bureaucrats, I will pack up my trinkets and make my way back to the shed of abjection that is university. If it was not obvious, the thing I despise most in this world is being told what to do. I am not sure this is at all unique, but certainly most people tolerate a life of servitude without even an intimation of contempt for the convention. I will not register my approval for such a system. It is why I instinctively despise political conservatism - to me it is the abnegation of free choice, the abnegation of personality. It assumes people are too feeble, too timorous, too untrustworthy to determine their own fates. I say again - this is the abnegation of everything worth pursuing in life. A seething vengeance stirs in me when I hear David Cameron limiting access to pornography, or stymieing the movements of offensive pastry goods; perhaps he assumed the two were being used in tandem in buttery orgies around the nation.

I realise that was perhaps unrelated. I will in future keep my pastry dogma to myself. Moving onwards through this morass of nonsense, I believe an excess of spare time exposes something unpleasant within us, as if the personality which tires of free time is deficient in some way. 'If you are bored,' I seem to keep thinking, 'then you must be boring.' I actually do believe this has some credibility, but at the same time even the most interesting figures would become bored with no stimulus whatever. I think my own personal circumstances must also be taken into account - I would be having a much more pleasant time were I to be left alone for four months, with the odd excursion into the real world. As it is, begirt with familial censoriousness, I am constrained to a skeleton staff in the enjoyment department. This is probably a far greater factor than I acknowledge in this piece. Such an idea is a fairly Blakean one. It is probably not so inimical to the more social among us, but I do often feel I have been retarded by the family system; this is yet another reason I despise conservatism, but I won't expatiate this time. The family is a strange arrangement when one devotes a small amount of thought to it, its members bearing perhaps no resemblance to one another, whilst accepting the task of living together as if being the best of friends. I do not say it is harmful overall, but it certainly has its drawbacks. One of these is an undying tension which threatens to homogenise everything in its path.

Lastly, as a politician would probably say, there is no 'mandate' for the gratuitous length of this hell. Four months is naturally liable to cloy the senses - I should much rather have lectures 3 days per week for a year than 5 days per week for 8 months. I can understand why all educational institutions might synchronise their timetables, sort of like edificial menstrual cycles. Perhaps a poor analogy. What I cannot understand is why several months is the chosen span. I imagine I would be complaining still more plangently if I had been given two weeks instead, but such is the power of my indecision. I do not know what length of time I might be satisfied with. A month perhaps. Part of the sad irony of giving the young huge amounts of free time is that they are usually the least equipped to make use of it - I would travel to Indonesia or Malaysia as is so fashionable now, but I would have to rob a bank or, worse still, find a job, and this would defeat the principle of having a holiday to begin with. The whole thing is bizarre. This holiday will end eventually, but until then I shall remain Tithonus, gazing with despair on the beauty that flits before my eyes.