Over the course of this Christmas vacation, I was mostly reading Karl Ove Knausgaard. Not his slightly weird-sounding recent stuff (see: The Wolves of Eternity), but rather his six-volume international best-seller, My Struggle. It’d long been on my radar, mainly because I seem no longer able to engage with actual fiction – and Knausgaard’s mega-hit is one of the classics of autofiction. So I got the first three volumes, put my folder labelled ‘THESIS’ away, and settled down on the sofa to enjoy Karl’s struggle.
While I very much liked what I read, I didn’t like what happened to my brain as term time came back around. Gradually, the old mental tics crept back in. Instead of reading the words on the page, I found my mind wandering. As Karl was talking about his father’s seemingly pathological inability to say anything nice to him, or about his embarrassingly misshapen penis, my thoughts returned to my work. ‘Shouldn’t I be dedicating all of my mental energy to my degree?’, I asked myself. Could reading about Karl’s penis and his relationship with his father possibly contribute something towards my next thesis chapter? And if not, shouldn’t I just put the book down and do something more constructive with my time? I hate these kinds of thoughts, so much so that I spend nearly as much time thinking about how annoying they are as I do actually having them. Yet every time a new term comes around, I find it almost impossible to stop them.
No doubt, my inability to stop my mind wandering is partly a symptom of our social-media-laden, doom-scrolling age. No matter which book is in front of me, I’m almost always reading in twenty-second bursts, and I’m constantly thinking about what else I could be looking at if I only picked up my phone. In other words, even if I was working on my thesis, I’d probably be thinking about something else. But my struggle with non-academic reading is also an example of what Oxford itself can do to you. The problem is less my concentration than my feeling guilty at reading anything that doesn’t directly contribute to me getting a better result in my degree. And it’s hard to make the guilt go away. In our imposter-syndrome-inducing bubble, it’s easy to think you have no choice but to give up any non-academic pastimes. The constant pressure of weekly deadlines, the desire to show that you deserve the place you worked so hard to get – it often seems like the only option is to dedicate 100% of your time to your degree. Any time I don’t do so, I end up feeling like I’m doing something wrong.
Of course, something must have gone very wrong if university messes up the one of the pastimes you might think it was designed to facilitate above all else – namely, the reading of books. But in a way, my messed up reading habits are just another example of the instrumentalisation of higher education that has been going on for a long time. University league tables, eye-watering amounts of student debt, the closing down of degrees that don’t ‘increase earning potential’ – all this makes it hard to escape the feeling that higher education has become less an opportunity for intellectual pursuits of all kinds and more a product to be purchased in return for earning a certain amount of money once you leave. In this context, Oxford can feel less like a place of intellectual freedom than of maximising future earnings. Karl’s struggle might be engrossing reading, but if it’s not going to be financially beneficial, it seems like I’m supposed to set it aside.
If this all sounds extreme, and maybe even a little bit mad, then that’s because it is. The idea that I’m not allowed to continue reading for fun during term time is no saner than the idea that I shouldn’t see my friends. More to the point, it’s no doubt counterproductive in the long run – the irony being that I’d probably do better in my degree if I was less obsessed with doing well in it. So this term, my last Hilary at Oxford, I’ve decided to try and fight the guilt. I’ve brought Karl’s books with me, and they’re staring at me from the shelf on the other side of my room as I write. I’m trying to tell myself that it must be possible to find a happy medium when it comes to my reading habits – that it’s not fatal to my degree and my job prospects to allow myself some guilt-free reading time every evening. This might be easier said than done, but I’m determined to give it a go. For Karl and for me, I’m curious to see how it goes.
