• Dionysus – TRAGIC SUBJECTIVITY???? . . . . . .
• Nietzsche’s later works i.e. [. . .] propose diff. idea individ. e.g. [QUOTE HERE]
• WHAT ABOUT morality?
This was it. These were the 9,500 ‘words’ she ‘had’. And she was exhausted already. She’d forgotten to factor in her own diminishing energy, like leaving out the friction in a physics equation.
On the brink of sinking back into sleep, she jolted into a state of wired alertness. The problem crystallised into the urgent question of where she would work. She couldn’t face the library again, couldn’t work on the business faculty carpet, she had to leave her house, but where could she go? The question was impossible to answer, because whenever she tried to think, her brain screamed, YOU’RE WASTING TIME! YOU’RE WASTING TIME! Not bothering to change her pants, she pulled on yesterday’s clothes and trudged out.
Ellie trekked round campus in a panic-stricken search for some quiet, forgotten corner of an unknown faculty, a utopic place where she’d meet nobody and not have to be anyone. She was simultaneously nauseous and hungry, and her eyes felt like picked scabs. As she marched by a huge window, Ellie was stopped in her tracks by a chalk sign inside. It was propped against a hamper of bananas and it read ‘FREE FRUIT’. Around it, the massive table was completely covered in waxy oranges and shiny Granny Smiths, like the surface of a children’s ball pit.
Ellie dashed in, planning to take an armful of bananas and continue her hopeless search. The room seemed to be some kind of mental health initiative: a carefully staged calm environment in which handwritten signs encouraged her to ‘LET IT ALL GO’ and ‘STOP! BREATHE’. Some well-meaning souls had Blu-tacked printouts of William Morris patterns onto the wall-panels, strung up hand-sewn, stuffed letters spelling ‘TIME OUT’, and scattered beanbags in calm shades of blue and grey. Ellie dropped onto one, opposite a sign that assured her: ‘You’re not alone : )’. But she was alone: gloriously, unbelievably alone.
This heavenly place was where she lived, worked and napped for the next day and a half. Every so often, an odd-looking boy with a halo of fluffy curls (who Ellie began to suspect was from the Christian Union) arrived with more fruit. The Fruit Angel gave Ellie a quick, shy smile, and then scuttled off, obviously not wanting to disturb her vital Time Out. Otherwise the peace was punctuated only by an occasional sock-shod Biology reviser, ducking in furtively to swipe a banana. Best of all, this life-saving sanctuary didn’t even get decent wifi.
Ellie didn’t know she could operate at the speed at which she worked that day. But it felt dreadful. Every decision, every rewrite and addition, was a disappointing compromise, a form of shoddy damage limitation. The only priority she could afford was handing in the right number of words. As the afternoon dwindled, her word count stubbornly plateaued at 11,000. Even assuming they couldn’t penalise you for being 10 per cent under (a rule she wasn’t completely sure about), she still needed 2,500 more. She had to come up with a whole new section to her argument, whipping up statements as wispy and unwholesome as candyfloss.
As darkness finally settled over the biology faculty, and Ellie finished her sixth vending-machine coffee, she had the thoroughly novel experience of having quite a good idea, a point that made sense. Aware even at the time that it contradicted most of the things she’d already said, she furiously hammered it out. Now she needed a concluding section, but as the sun came up, she was losing the power to think – her brain whizzed and spun, chasing its own tail. What mattered most was Nietzsche’s religious context – but what mattered most was the influence of Darwin – but what mattered most was the concept of individuality – that was the main theme of the essay – or was it, because what actually mattered more than that . . .
Dawn broke on a bitter countdown to the line, a marathon in which every step jarred painfully. With fours hours to go before the noonday deadline, Ellie forced herself to stop and write footnotes, spreading articles and books across the floor in a mandala of panic. Halfway through the referencing, she realised she was already six hundred words over the limit. Having filled the dissertation with guff, she had no perspective whatsoever on what she should cut. Desperately scanning the pages, she felt so ashamed she could have cried, and so tired she could have dropped dead. For a brief, luxurious moment, she heard the siren song that always played just before the finish line: It’s okay, it said, you’re nearly there. Just. Slow. Down . . .
But she forced herself on, knowing all she could hope for now – all she could feasibly achieve – was to hand in something, even if it was littered with typos and referencing errors and bullshit. She slashed sentences, invented page numbers for footnotes, and desperately tried to make the jumble of reflections make some sense. At 11.37, as she rewrote the last, disappointing sentence of an utterly inconclusive conclusion, she was hit by a new and horrible thought.
Binding.
That needless expense, that mysterious, last, symbolic hurdle, that strange test of organisational, stationery-based ability.
A bystander watching Ellie sprint to the library would have assumed a life-or-death medical emergency. While the automatic gates took several years to open, Ellie caught sight of a queue of more than twenty anxious students, waiting to have their dissertations bound. The sight chilled her to the core. Beside the desk, a large sign read: ‘ATTENTION! BINDING TAKES 60 MINUTES. YOU MUST SUBMIT IN TIME!’ Ellie scanned the line of tense, unfamiliar faces, but could find nobody she knew.
She discovered Chris online shopping in the computer room.
‘Chris!’ she shouted, panting. ‘Where did you bind your dissertation?’
He pulled out his headphones. ‘Sorry?’
‘Bindingbinding – binding.’
‘Er . . . we don’t need to do that. Philosophy submits online. Want me to send you the link?’
‘Oh, God, thankyouthankyouthankyou.’ Relief flooding through her, Ellie dropped to the floor and flipped open her laptop.
All she needed was a title.
‘Anything,’ she jabbered to herself. ‘Come on, anything!’
A couple of students paused their conversation to stare at her.
She typed ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’s . . .’
‘Shit, shit!’
‘Um, you all right?’ muttered Chris.
She jabbed the keyboard: ‘Philosophy of Self . . .’
‘But I haven’t written about self,’ she groaned, through gritted teeth. ‘I haven’t mentioned the word self.’
It was 11.58.
‘. . . and Philosophy of Individuality,’ she added frantically. With shaking, sweaty hands, she fixed two typos in the first sentence that must have been sitting there for four days, and uploaded the file to the intranet.
For a long, throbbing moment, Ellie stared dumbly at the confirmation message. Then, slowly, carefully, she dragged her Dissertation folder to the Bin.
Yes, she clicked, she was sure she wanted to erase it permanently.
Fuck you, Friedrich, she thought, falling back on the carpet and staring in exhausted wonder at the waffle-like ceiling. I am never, ever, going to think about you again as long as I live.
10
Momentum
Nietzsche’s obsession with movement was more than a personal peculiarity. He embraced movement because movement was indispensable for confidence. As he gave himself to confidence, he broke apart his life until it contained almost nothing but the potential for forward motion.
Nietzsche was a good teacher, despite his misgivings. His students liked him and his colleagues appreciated his intelligence and commitment. But he never felt comfortable as an academic and his real intellectual energies were always in his own philosophy. He longed to pursue his vocation and in 1879, aged thirty-five, he took the plunge, resigning his university post, his one proper job, in favour of a life of nomadic solitude. He was following his own passions and instincts, becoming himself and no one else. He was also devoting himself to confidence and its demand for constant move
ment.
For Nietzsche, it was not enough to say that confidence required forward motion. Confidence was momentum, that sense of purpose and activity which is at once the antithesis of, and the remedy to, self-consciousness. His approach was summed up by his attitude towards habit, a term which included routine, regularity, convention and permanence – ‘all habituation and regulation, everything lasting and definitive’. Such strictures, he considered, made life as a free spirit impossible. ‘All that is habitual,’ he wrote, ‘draws around us an ever tighter net of spider web; and before long we notice that the threads have become ropes and that we ourselves are the spider sitting in the middle of the web, which has caught itself here, and must drink its own blood.’
The constant desire for movement was how Nietzsche distinguished confidence from self-belief. Self-belief, in his definition, meant unquestioning faith in oneself – the personal equivalent of religious dogmatism. Nietzsche had no respect for rigidity in any form. His perfect person would ‘take leave of all faith’, for faith was always a ‘wish for certainty’.
Nietzsche’s commitment to movement was characteristically extreme. Nevertheless, his reasoning is faultless. We think that security aids confidence; in fact, it’s the reverse. New conquests, new frontiers: only these make us feel powerful, limitless and free. No one gets a confidence boost from kissing their long-term boyfriend. By contrast, one passed-on compliment from a perfect stranger can fill you with an inner glow several days after the fact.
We have a bad habit of treating confidence as a neutral force, without any true identity of its own. Think of confidence and you think of yourself at your best – confidence is simply the conduit to that more perfect self. If confidence is a conduit, however, then it is one that channels us in very specific directions. Like a language, it comes with its own set of embedded priorities, chief among them the demand for constant novelty. Confidence cannot be captured, it can only be replenished. To replenish confidence we must constantly be searching out new challenges, new feats, new opportunities for self-expression.
Think of it this way: on a night out, if you’re really committed to having a good time, you can’t stand still: you have to keep moving, keep going forward. The second you slow down and start thinking – or worse saying – ‘Why don’t we just stay in this pub?’, you’ve given up the night for good. The same goes for the people you’re with. As Nietzsche put it: ‘A person who strives for greatness looks on everyone he meets on his way as a means, a delay or an obstacle – or as a temporary resting place.’ When you’re chasing the dream, you have to be ruthless in order to advance.
If there was one thing that really committed a person to having a good time, that made it pretty much obligatory, it was agreeing to take part in a group mankini look. With only an internet-sourced strip of Lycra between you and total humiliation, surely the world would be forced to cave in and for once in your sorry life, reward you for the effort.
‘Where’s Ben?’ said Charlie, carefully adjusting his ball coverage.
‘Probably stuck in his mankini.’ Lucas poured two shots of vodka into sticky-looking glasses, and clapped his hands. ‘Right! To the last night out before the official death of fun.’
‘Wasn’t that a year and a half ago?’
‘And to Charlie finally sticking a wad in some lucky bird.’
‘It’s a big step.’ Charlie held up his hands. ‘I’m just waiting for the right girl who respects me for who I am.’
‘Chop that.’
The vodka scorched a path down Charlie’s gullet.
‘What’s your strategy?’ Lucas checked out his mankini from behind. ‘I’d go for first years if I were you.’
‘I’m thinking about texting Sasha.’
‘Fit Sasha?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been chatting to her a bit recently, and I don’t know . . .’ Charlie rubbed his chin. ‘I feel like I might actually stand a chance.’
‘Text what?’
‘Maybe “
See you there? I’ll be wearing the green mankini”?’
‘Far too keen. You want like: “Got corset fatigue already. Hope you’re coming fully clothed.”’
‘Hm, okay.’
‘You never know, it could happen. Panic week, baby.’
‘Panic week?’
‘Where the fuck have you been? Where all the girls start panicking they haven’t slept with enough people at uni and lower their standards massively. Basically, the female version of you, you lad.’ He shoulder-barged Charlie’s chest.
Charlie shoved him away. ‘Are we going to the Union dressed like this then?’
‘Ben is.’ Lucas poured another two shots and pointed towards a heap of clothes. ‘You can borrow those if you like.’
Charlie pulled on a pair of denim shorts, checked his reflection and got a pleasant surprise. Combined with the neon green mankini, the shorts were almost a look, kind of Mr Motivator meets Eighties club kid. A tremor of anticipation shot through him – he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt excited to go out.
‘All I’ll say is’ – Lucas was still giving him the benefit of his wisdom. ‘Don’t limit yourself. First years in their underwear, feeling vulnerable? Older, more experienced man? I’m telling you, SSB is an all-you-can-eat buffet.’
From outside on the pavement came a thin shout, ‘You guys! Come on, it’s not funny!’ They looked down to see Ben in his mankini, hammering on the door, while behind him a woman with a pushchair tried to shield her screaming toddler from the sight.
Charlie leaned out. ‘I’ve told you not to come round here! We’re not interested in your services.’
‘We’re finished!’ Ellie greeted Nadine. ‘Mine’s abysmal!’
‘Mine’s a car crash,’ returned Nadine, with an orange-lipsticked grin. ‘Let’s get shitfaced.’
The Mitre was strangely empty.
‘I thought there’d be loads of people celebrating,’ said Ellie, as they paid for their gin and tonics and hauled themselves onto bar stools. ‘Not my mates obviously – Rose is working, I called Justin, you’re here, so . . . But where’s, you know, everybody?’
Nadine turned to stare at her. ‘Oh my days, how do you do it? Have you got a tiny airtight pod that you step into when I’m not there?’
‘Well, somebody’s got to take the matrix down from the inside.’ Ellie poured the tonic. ‘What?’
‘It’s SSB tonight.’ Nadine shook her head, clacking turquoise earrings. ‘They’ll all be waxing and vajazzling.’
‘Ooooh. Oh, I see.’
‘Yup.’ Nadine raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t think it’s escaped my notice that you’ve been doing sweet fuck all for your fellow ladies, Ms Taber.’
Since the dawn of fear proper, Ellie had completely neglected the campaign. She hadn’t even logged on to Facebook, let alone read her emails.
‘Yeah, but come on,’ she smiled. ‘Writing the world’s shittest dissertation and running its most poorly organised campaign? There’s only so much of me to go round.’
‘Well I posted one comment last week, so shove that up your arse.’
‘That’s impressive.’
‘Wittgenstein was being a dick as usual.’
A thought struck Ellie. ‘Do you think we should we be doing something tonight?’
‘Mmm.’ Nadine bit into her lime wedge. ‘Being totally honest and straight with you, I can’t be bothered.’
Ellie laughed. ‘You had me at “can’t”.’
‘Anyway, this is a night off, isn’t it? You can’t fight the good fight every day.’
‘The world can take care of itself for a change. We can get some cans and sit on the roof of the Scott building.’
‘Plan.’ Nadine pulled out her purse. ‘One more round here first.’
The official SSB pre-lash was in the Union Bar. Human-sized condoms, superheroes, firemen and priests crammed between the standard lamps and against the feature wall. Second years were buzzing with excited preparations, strate
gising about getting on the buses early and organising booze in plastic bottles. Girls had covered up with fleece tops and ‘boyfriend-style’ shirts, stockings beneath signalling that they were taking part. The guys who had put in serious preparation were already debuting their freshly cut abs, making sure everyone would still remember them tomorrow. Charlie felt slightly nervous at the thought of taking off his shorts.
On arrival, he had done a quick tour of the room, but there was no sign of Sara or Matt’s birthday crowd. In fact, third years were thin on the ground. The ladz were playing a drinking game in a circular booth, Tom Race’s girlfriend Sarah Morris and the mini-Morrises hovering nearby. The medic lot had turned up as (semi-)naked hikers, in bobble hats and boots, and were occupying the window area. Charlie knew them obviously – everyone knew everyone, because everyone was always there – but there came a point when chitchat only served to highlight the fact that you hadn’t become mates.
Charlie and Ben were penned into a five-deep tussle for the bar.
‘So no money was actually taken, but I think it was a bit upsetting.’ Ben was narrating Clare’s recent identity theft to Tim Fletcher and Christie, who were dressed as Popeye and Olive Oyl. Charlie scanned ahead for movement, cursing inwardly as someone ordered a round of cocktails.
‘Weird, all these first years, isn’t it?’ said Tim, out of nowhere. ‘It’s like we’ve already left.’
‘What’s that about?’ asked Charlie, nodding at a troupe of girls who had just marched into the other end of the room. He read their long white T-shirts. ‘“Women have pubes”?’ Massive bush wigs stuck out beneath the hems.
‘I think it’s that uni sexism thing,’ explained Christie. ‘You must’ve seen the posters.’
‘Oh yeah, Clare mentioned it,’ said Ben.
‘They’re pro-bush or what?’
‘Well, it’s a bit wider than—’
Confidence Page 13
