UK
Thursday, June 15, 2006
All Soul’s College
I am sitting in a cozy garret guest room at the top of a stairwell in the main courtyard of All Soul’s College. The moment is filled with such time-warp overlapping memories – not even really memories, but whiffs of memory: the 26 years of the no bullshit Marxism group meeting in University College London, then here and New York, and now here again; my time at Balliol almost 40 years ago; and then the extraordinary five months at All Soul’s with Marcia in the winter and spring of 2001. I walk past the Bodelian and feel Marcia reading in one of her reading places. I see students in their academic gowns coming out of the examination schools, and I feel myself writing the essay on the trajectory of the Elizabethan parliament in the late 16th century in the history finals in June 1970. I go to lunch with Jerry Cohen and Hillel Steiner and I am having lunch in an Italian restaurant near Russell Square in London and an Indian restaurant near NYU in New York. I am 22 and 40 and 59.All at once, all interlaced. As I sometimes say, the life cycle is really really deep…
