Focus and fog

Almost on the spur of the moment I went to hear Ahdaf Soueif talking on ‘Activist Humanities in a Global Context’ this evening. ‘Activist’, humanities’ and ‘global’ are my sort of words, I’ve been interested in her newspaper articles about the Egyptian revolution, one of the co-speakers was a (very)-ex-colleague, and the talk was in the classy new auditorium at Pembroke College, so it seemed worth two hours even on a Friday evening. I walked through the old quad, past the chapel , over the outdoor, glass-sided bridge and into the new, polished-stone building with its solid pale-oak doors and delicate LED-lighting. Unlike the nearby social housing, built so badly 15 years ago that it is already being pulled down, Pembroke’s building is made to last centuries. There I exposed my brain to intellectual rigour (though not, sadly, from my ex-colleague). Quite a challenge but, although I couldn’t reproduce any of the acuity I heard, I understood enough of it to find myself nodding from time to time.

I was also relishing acuity of vision, since I’d collected my new (two-months-post-op, 30-months-post blur-onset) glasses half an hour before the talk. The shininess! The brightness! The sharpness! And when I got out onto the main road afterwards, the detail in the distance! Listening to my brain bubbling over with excitement made me wonder whether Aldous Huxley’s dreadful vision was a factor in his taking LSD. If he couldn’t have all the sparkly lights and pretty pictures courtesy of glasses…

Today also marks the death of Tony Benn, another source of focus in the fog. I heard him speak passionately at countless rallies and demonstrations, at Levellers’ Day which he attended loyally, and once, more intimately but just as forcefully, to a small audience in Oxford. I felt quite subdued about that light going out – he had compassion and integrity and was a rare champion of those people who are usually ignored.