End of Cambridge

From Varsity, 17 June 2009

Just less than three years ago my father dropped me off at Clare in the old family Ford Galaxy. He had studied here himself, and seemed nostalgic as we unpacked my belongings into my set in Memorial Court. I asked him if he’d have done anything differently were he to have his time again. ‘Worked less’, he replied, looking around a court almost unchanged in thirty years.

As I come to the end of my time here, it’s tempting to ask myself the same question. If I were to start again is there anything I’d do differently? It is difficult to answer. It is hard not to equate the suggestion of alternatives with regret for the present, and I’m quite uncomfortable with the idea of regretting anything so early in life. Regret is a melancholy for life’s lost possibilities; the roads less travelled littering all our pasts, and university a place where this sense is acutely felt. I hope the self-absorption of all this is excused; no one perspective will be the same.

For such a permanent place, founded on glacial academic progress, the undergraduate experience at Cambridge has seemed overwhelmingly speedy. Though I have a sense of an awful lot having happened in the past three years, there is also the feeling I haven’t been here very long at all. Lurching from supervision to supervision, essay to essay, exam to exam, with a thousand other things in between, the modern Cambridge undergraduate degree has an unequalled intensity; life here is condensed into eight-week paroxysms, followed by lengthy vacations of exhaustion.

It might be argued that this is preparation for real life, but it isn’t really. Life isn’t like Cambridge at all. Life is imprecise, unpredictable, more evenly stressful. Many jobs are less intense than a degree, but then few degrees make you get up at seven in the morning every day. Cambridge lets you know exactly what you’re going to do well in advance, but then encourages you not to do it, or at the least to make sure you have fun doing it, and doing other things as well. It is a structured playground; an assault course for the mind and the character.

Before I came I wasn’t sure what to expect, and now I’m not quite sure what has just happened. But looking around the debris of three years I can draw a few conclusions. I certainly haven’t worked too hard. I have gained a band of loyal if disreputable allies, a taste for the good life, a limited understanding of English literature, and a much greater understanding of how to do things effectively at short notice. I have lost a great number of illusions, particularly that life might always be an endless horizon of opportunities. Perhaps this counts as growing up.

The quality of a party is determined finally by its guests, and it is the people at Cambridge that have made it great. What I will miss are conversations. Conversations about great poems with great minds, conversations where I disagree with everything being said, conversations had blind drunk with friends just made, conversations to hatch wild schemes for the future, conversations with people brighter, funnier, more brilliant than myself. These have taught me, and it is these I will treasure most. The constant sense of vibrant, engaged exchange. No library could have given me this, no number of hours passed poring over books, but equally no other university.

Defending drug use, the comedian Bill Hicks said “I had a great time doing drugs. Sorry. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife or kids, laughed my ass off, and went about my day.” This is perhaps close to my Cambridge experience. I haven’t done anything to change the world, but it has been addictively exhilarating and played out at breakneck speed. It is time to do something else, however. Like any party it has to end eventually, but equally it is closest to the end that you least want it to stop. I’m not sorry to leave. Maybe there are some things I would have done differently. This is not regret, this is simply the way of education.