There comes a point when the world, its events and its people finally become so overwhelming that you just have to call it a day. I had a similar feeling back in 2010. I had expended considerable time and energy in attempting to begin an academic career. I had a place on the MA Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at Liverpool Hope University. The problem was that I needed teaching hours in order to finalize the degree. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get those hours. I was offered voluntary positions, but so far away from where I lived as to be physically and financially impossible. So the day came when I gave up my academic ambitions. It’s funny, but you always know when the end has arrived. The odd thing is, in 2011, deciding to walk away from academic work, I discovered the Academia website, where it was possible to publish your work. I had no idea how the site operated or how it could be used to advance your work and reputation. I just felt like shedding myself of the accumulated weight and baggage of so many years of academic research and walking freely into another life. Publishing work on Academia was my goodbye to all of it, all of the hopes and ambitions, all the pretensions that all that writing and philosophising at a high level actually made a difference for the better in the world. I published it all up as if throwing it away. Imagine my surprise, then, when I started to receive notifications indicating that people were actually reading my work. I then started to receive messages from people thanking me for that work, praising it, taking an interest. So a new world opened up.
But now I am feeling another ending approaching. I have been desperately trying to rethink and rewrite work I have had written for a few years now. My intention has always been to finish this vast Being and Place research project I have been developing since 2007. Frankly, I now see it as a withdrawal from a social life that had become well-nigh impossible, a retreat into a Republic of Letters, and an evasion. It is good work. But I am seeing things I wrote at length upon years ago still being either ignored, misinterpreted, or expressed, albeit in crude and simplistic form. All that work seems to be of no avail, since it was based on the faulty premise that human beings are rational beings who are willing and able to take the time to read millions of words by one person …
So I give up. I don’t need to polish anymore. I don’t need to worry about re-writing every sentence so that those who don’t have the time and the inclination will find the writing readable. Facing the stresses and strains of real life, I find that I am as alone as ever I was. You can’t live in the world of words. There are words and there is the world. My life is a dialectic of world and words.
Facing yet more pain, crisis, misery, and uncertainty back home, with precious little to support me as I struggle to deal with things that are far beyond my capabilities, I looked at the writing I have done and saw it as nothing, a record of years that would have been better spent doing other things. Because who actually reads, listens, understands, cares, acts?
I posted five works in a couple of days, representing some 350,000 words. I read only the one of them, in order to put it in some kind of order and to supply links to my other works. The others I published raw as written. There is nothing polished for effect here. These other works represent me addressing the world in my writing voice.
The sentences and paragraphs could well be better constructed, the ideas and arguments better presented. But the events of the past couple of years have been dispiriting. I used to think that the problem was that people were not understanding my message. I still think that is part of the problem. There are still people who equate morality with individual choices and abstract moral codes, and then proceed to argue against morality as ineffectual, irrelevant, and repressive to boot. Such people are as clueless as the age they live in. They are perfect mirrors of the emptiness of the modern moral condition. I have sweated blood to show that such an identification stems from a false ontology that separates agents and the conditions of moral action. I just despair. No more will I wade into such debates in order to clarify and ease understanding. I’ve worn myself out doing it. And I also note how wedded people are to their pet prejudices. I can’t shift them and will no longer make the effort.
These works and others to follow could be better. But I am tired and have worked hard enough long enough for a rest.