A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy

by Charlotte Greig

  “It's just … it's just …”

  He said nothing, but carried on stroking my hair.

  “Ever since my father died … I don't …”

  I went on crying for what seemed like a long time, and then the tears began to subside. I wiped my face on his hair.

  “I don't know,” I said. “I can't explain it. I'm sorry, I just feel a bit distant from everything most of the time. It's really weird. I don't like it any more than you do.”

  “You've lost your father, Suse. That's a big deal. It'll take you a while to get over it. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Well, you can, you know,” he said. “Anytime.”

  “I know.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  The bed was tiny and I was lying beside him crammed up against the wall. I was getting a crick in my neck. I moved over so that I was lying on top of him.

  “Well you could …”

  I started kissing him, pressing up against him. He put his arms around my neck and pulled me down to him.

  “Well, you could try and help me take my mind off it …”

  “OK,” he said. “I'll try.”

  He pushed his tongue deep into my mouth, running his hands over my breasts. Then he moved his mouth down to them, pushing them together and biting and sucking each one in turn. I took his hand and guided it down so that he put his fingers inside me, first one, then two, and then three. Then he took me by the waist and pulled me up towards him, until his mouth was level with my fanny. I closed my eyes.

  Just then, there was a knock at the door. We both froze.

  The knock came again.

  “Wait,” I whispered. “They'll go away.”

  I remembered that Cassie had a key to the room. As quietly as I could, I lay down on top of Rob and pulled the covers over us, in case she let herself in.

  “Susie?”

  It was Jason's voice.

  We lay there in silence, listening. Rob still had a hard-on, I could feel it against my stomach. It didn't go down, even though I could see that his eyes were round with fear.

  There was a sound of retreating footsteps and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Was that Jason?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I don't know how he found out I was here. I didn't think he knew about Cassie's room.”

  “D'you think he's gone?”

  “Probably. But we'd better get our clothes on, just in case he comes back. Be as quiet as you can.”

  We dressed in silence. I could see Rob trying to cram his penis into his underpants. His jeans were tight, and he had trouble getting them zipped up. I started giggling, and so did he. Then we heard the footsteps coming back, and held our breath.

  Jason knocked again.

  “Susie, are you in there?”

  I tiptoed over to the window and opened it as quietly as I could. It was one of those big modern windows that opened with a handle from the bottom. We peered out. We were on the ground floor, and there was a grassy bank just underneath it. I nodded silently to Rob, who picked up his shoes and clambered through, making as little sound as he could. As I helped him climb out, I could feel his body trembling.

  “Just coming,” I called. “Hang on a minute.”

  I closed the window and watched Rob running away over the grass in his bare feet, clutching his shoes. He looked silly, humiliated, like a character in a French farce. Even though I'd motioned to him to leave, there was something about him running off in that way that made me think less of him. I wished he'd stayed and confronted Jason. I wished they'd fought over me, and he'd won.

  But he hadn't stayed, he didn't have the courage. He was too young, too green.

  I walked over to the door and let Jason in.

  philosophy 102

  MARTIN HEIDEGGER:

  Being and Time

  chapter 14

  Father in heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile …

  I was sitting in the doctor's surgery reading for my next tutorial with Belham. Next on the list for Modern European Mind was Kierkegaard, so I'd got a book of his out of the library, but I couldn't seem to make any sense of it. It wasn't that the writing was difficult to understand, or boring; it was just that I couldn't concentrate. It was always the same these days. Every time I opened a book, I would feel so sleepy that I had to stop and either get up and do something like make a cup of tea, or lie down for a rest. It was the same with writing. I would begin to write a sentence, and then that feeling of torpor would wash over me, so that I couldn't collect my thoughts, and I would forget what it was that I had been trying to say. It had got so bad that I was falling behind with my essays, and in tutorials I couldn't seem to follow what was going on at all.

  On top of that, the waking up in the morning business had got worse. I was screaming myself awake every morning now. Jason was really worried about it and had been on at me to go to the doctor for weeks, and Rob was convinced I was having some kind of mental breakdown. That was another thing: I still hadn't made my mind up about which one of them I was supposed to be going out with. I hadn't told Jason about Rob, though Rob knew all about Jason; and I'd told Rob that I was going to leave Jason any minute, though somehow I never did. My life had settled into a pattern now, whereby I spent a few nights a week over at Rob's house in Hanover, and the weekends with Jason at the flat in Brunswick Square or up in London at Bear's place. I felt as though I was living in two of Kuhn's incommensurable paradigms—two worlds that I traveled between, neither of them connected in any way to the other. Every time I was with Jason, my life with Rob seemed insignificant; and every time I was with Rob, Jason seemed unreal.

  “Miss Jones,” said the receptionist, “Doctor Morgan will see you now.”

  I stuffed the Kierkegaard into my bag, got up, and walked down the corridor. I still hadn't quite thought out what I was going to say. I knocked at the door with the doctor's name on it and he called out for me to come in.

  Doctor Morgan was a short, middle-aged man with graying hair and glasses and a pleasant, fatherly look about him. He was sitting behind a desk with his name on a little nameplate in the middle of it. We said hello as I came in, and then I sat down and looked at my lap while he shuffled some notes about.

  “So,” he said eventually, still looking at the notes, “a Welsh Jones, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn't volunteer anything else. I wasn't in the mood to talk about Wales, and which part of it I came from, and all that stuff that Welsh people always went in for whenever they met each other outside Wales, but I could see he was trying to be friendly.

  “Cardiff, is it?” he said.

  “No, Swansea,” I replied.

  “Ah, I'm from Ammanford myself,” he said.

  There didn't seem to be anything to add to that, beyond reiterating that I wasn't, so I said nothing.

  “What seems to be the problem, then?” He looked up at me at last.

  “Well, it's probably nothing much,” I said. “It's just that I can't seem to wake up in the mornings.”

  He laughed. “That's a fairly common complaint among students. Anything else?”

  “I can't seem to wake up properly unless I …” My sentence trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, unless I … kind of … scream, or something.”

  There was a silence. I felt embarrassed. Then he said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Well, let's have a look at you, shall we?”

  He came round to my side of the desk, and started doing all the usual things like measuring my blood pressure and my pulse, and listening with a stethoscope to my chest and back. Then he sat down and asked me some more questions, with me replying that everything was normal, until we came to one and I stopped.

  “Periods all right?” he said.

&nbs
p; “Ah …” I couldn't remember when I'd had my last period, but I had a feeling that it was overdue.

  “I think I might have missed one,” I said. “But only by a few days. Or actually it could be …”

  Now I came to think about it, I realized I'd lost track of that, as well as everything else, in the last few weeks.

  “… a bit longer.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I'm not sure,” I said, feeling a bit of a fool. “I'd have to check.”

  “Do you have any reason to suppose that you might be pregnant?” He was choosing his words carefully.

  “No, I'm on the pill.”

  “And you've been taking it regularly?”

  “Yes, of course. Although I might … I sometimes miss the odd one or two. Not very often.”

  I was lying now. The truth was that I found it quite difficult at the best of times to remember my pills, and recently I'd got worse. These days, I quite often looked at the pack at the end of the month and was amazed at how many were left in it.

  “Right.” He looked at me quizzically. “Well, I think we might do a test anyway. Just to be on the safe side.”

  He gave me a bottle and asked me to go to the lavatory to do a urine sample, and then to bring it back in to him. I went out, found the loo, and did it, drying the outside of the bottle carefully with some loo paper afterwards. When I came back in and handed it to him, it was still warm, which embarrassed me, though I wasn't sure why. I could hardly be expected to pee cold just for the sake of politeness. He put a label on the bottle, and then sat me down and asked me some more questions.

  “Are you under stress of any kind?” he said. “Worried about exams?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Anything else? Boyfriends?”

  I looked down at my lap again. “A bit.”

  There was a silence while he waited for me to continue, but when it became clear that I wasn't going to say any more, he started shuffling his notes again.

  “Well, Miss Jones, I think that's all for the moment. Try to relax. If the problem persists, we may have to put you on some tablets. And perhaps you'd like to pop back or ring us in a couple of hours to get your result.” He handed me a card with the surgery's number on it. “We don't have to send the sample off to the lab these days, we can do the test here.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks. I will.”

  I got up and said good-bye, and then, just as I got to the door, he said, “Will you be going home for Christmas? Back to Wales? See the family?”

  “Yes,” I said. I stood hovering by the door. “I think so.”

  “That's right,” he said, the way people did at home, as though satisfied to find you were playing your part to ensure that everything was carrying on as usual in the world.

  “Bye, then,” I said, and before he had a chance to say anything more I turned, opened the door, and went out.

  As soon as I got outside the surgery, I started fumbling around in my shoulder bag to look for my packet of pills. I knew they were in there somewhere, lurking around at the bottom. I couldn't find them as I was walking along, so eventually I had to sit down on a step and sort through the contents of the bag. I took out the books and files and rummaged through all the rubbish at the bottom: broken pens and pencils, old tissues, a used-up lipstick, a tampon, an ancient mascara wand, a matchbox with burnt-out matches and a cigarette end inside it, and a packet of chewing gum I'd never opened. Then I came across something I'd completely forgotten about: the card that the Aleister Crowley freak had given me on the train. I turned it over and looked at the red-haired man with the bulging eyes for a moment, then put it back into the bag. I rummaged around some more, and finally found the pills.

  They were small yellow ones in a silver packet with blue writing on it. There were several left in the pack, but that was normal, because I wasn't having my period. I turned the pack over and looked at the days listed on the back. The last day I'd taken one seemed to be Sunday. Today was Thursday I thought, but I wasn't quite sure, it could be Friday. Then I remembered that my Freud lecture was today, and my Hegel seminar had been yesterday, which meant that it must be Friday. I'd missed about four pills, which wasn't too bad. In the past, I'd sometimes missed as many as seven or eight, and I still hadn't got pregnant. In fact, I'd sometimes wondered if I was infertile, but I'd come to the conclusion that the real reason, despite what the doctors told you, was that the pills worked all right even if you didn't remember every single one. Either that, or I'd just been lucky. All the same, I thought, I really should try to be more organized in the future.

  I took my pill for Friday as I sat on the step, then put everything back in my bag, got up, and walked on quickly into the center of campus. I thought of going up to the European Common Room to see if Cassie and Fiona were there, but I decided not to. I wasn't in the mood to talk to them. I didn't want to tell them about the test, not because I was particularly worried that the result would be positive, but because I felt stupid that I'd missed so many pills. I knew that Cassie would be horrified, and that Fiona would lecture me, so I headed off to the library instead.

  Once I got there, I pulled out Belham's reading list for Modern European Mind and scanned through it to see if there was anything on it that would distract me from thinking about my test during the next couple of hours. I already had Kierkegaard, but his writing seemed too clear for me at the moment; I couldn't bear it, it was too emotional and beautiful, like a prayer that you might hear in church. I wanted something more gristly to chew on, something ugly and dense, something hard and knotty and closed that would be a challenge to understand.

  It was an easy enough choice. I'd heard Martin Heidegger's Being and Time was one of the most incomprehensible books ever written, and it was an optional text as well, which was another feature that attracted me: pointless as well as difficult. I went over to the short-loan shelf to see if I could find it, but it wasn't there, so I climbed up the spiral staircase to the philosophy section on the next floor. I didn't go up there very often, but when I did I always liked it and wondered why I didn't use it more. It was a quiet corner of the library where you could stand among the enormous leather-bound volumes and peer over the railings at the people below without being seen. Somehow being up there made me feel secure, as though I was observing the world from my stronghold of lofty ideas on high.

  I found the book and took it down from the shelf. When I looked at the library stamp at the front, I noticed that hardly anyone had ever taken it out. As I flicked through the pages, I saw that the main text was full of German words, hyphenated phrases, and repetitive, apparently nonsensical sentences, and there were also passages in Latin and Greek. It looked completely impenetrable, which was just the kind of thing I'd been looking for, so I went over to a chair by the window and started to read.

  I'd come across this sort of writing before, with Hegel, but Heidegger was farther out than that: so far out that he was almost just a dot on the horizon. Not only did his ideas go round in circles, like Hegel's, but there were also bizarre phrases like “ready-to-hand,” “present-at-hand,” “towards-which,” and “for-the-sake-of” which jumbled ordinary words together in a way that seemed to make no sense. On top of that, every time he had something really important to say, he went into Greek or Latin, neither of which I understood, so I could only guess what he meant.

  I mustered my concentration, but after an hour or so, I was none the wiser as to what Being and Time was about. Reading Heidegger was like listening to two people having a conversation in a foreign language: you occasionally thought you might have understood one or two words here and there, but you had absolutely no idea what they were talking about in general.

  Even so, there was something about the text that fascinated me. Perhaps it was the idea that someone would set out to understand what it fundamentally means for us to be here, to “be in the world” as he put it; and that they'd start by reviewing all philosophy hitherto, from Plato on, and pronounce t
hat everyone else since the beginning of time had got it completely wrong; and that they'd go on to claim they'd finally found what it was that was missing from the history of human thought; and that they'd then dream up new combinations of words for their inexpressible ideas, and string them all together with hyphens, and expect people to take them seriously. It was such an impossible task, and so insanely ambitious to attempt it, that it almost brought tears to my eyes. And then there was the writing, which was so abstruse that I wondered at times if Heidegger was mad, or if this was a case of the emperor's new clothes and he was just taking the piss out of a load of academics, the way Nietzsche did a lot of the time; but whatever the case, you had to admire the guy's nerve.

  After a while, the familiar torpor I'd been feeling every time I tried to study began to wash over me. The quiet of the library up there in the philosophy section moved in on me and began to wrap me up, while the bustle of people down below grew quiet and distant. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and rested my head against the rows of books behind it, feeling myself falling asleep, guarded by the dark red and green leather-bound volumes that stood like sentinels all around me.

  When I woke up, it was beginning to get dark. I looked at my watch and realized I'd missed my Freud lecture, which was a pity because I liked the lecturer. She was an elderly woman named Maria Jakowska with a strong Viennese accent. She had apparently studied under Freud, and had escaped from the Nazis to England during World War II. Her lectures were always packed: she made you feel that you were right there, in the thick of it all, horrifying the prim Viennese bourgeoisie with tales of the irrepressible libido; and when you listened to her steady, guttural voice you felt she was talking as Freud himself might have talked, and that you were listening to a piece of history.

  Now that I'd missed the lecture, I realized that I'd been looking forward to it all week, hoping that it would take my mind off my trivial problems and make me feel I was part of something big. But instead, I'd fallen asleep after failing to understand a word of Heidegger, and missed the whole thing. What was more, I now had to make a telephone call and find out whether or not I'd been dumb enough to get pregnant.