If Stone Could Speak

5. heard

I have to accept, at this point, that I don't just happen to keep finding myself at the front gates of the asylum. There is a curiosity pulling me there, dragging me forward by the taut stretch of a tether. I don't know what it is I'm looking for, but sometimes a thought, a question, an idea will almost possess you and you can't escape its grasp. The asylum feels a bit like the centre of my geography now, drawing a big X on the map of this city. You know it's bad when you measure where you are by how many miles out from the asylum you're standing.

So my leg is bouncing all through class, a horrible drone of a seminar on and on where people try to out-do each other in how much they know and read and prepared... Personally, I don't like to speak unless I really have something to say, and I don't know what there is about antiquity that hasn't been said before or why I'd be the one to say it. Once you realize all you'll ever say are regurgitations of things that have been said before, it puts a bit of a clasp on your tongue. But we were assigned three chapters, and students around me along the big oval desk are one-upping each other, citing their very-original thoughts and referencing which exact page inspired them. "Now in the reading, I think it was page 282..." then, "I agree with John, and I'd also like to add..." I'm drawing gardens of flowers along the margins of my notebook, in between sips of coffee and coffee and coffee. Either I'm not much of a student or I'm too much of one. I think apathy either means you have thought things through too much, or haven't thought them through enough. You arrive at the same endpoint of stillness all the same.

I decided I'd switch into history about halfway through my English degree. I was working part time in the university' classics museum, a random decision spurred by financial reasons, and I held some pieces of pottery and felt that particular spark of magic I could spend the rest of my life trying to put into words. Someone had made this once, thousands of years ago, and then here I was holding it, and I could feel their life breathing through the pores of the ceramic. See, people live on in what they make... in what they leave behind. It drove me mad, this idea, and I felt a bit like I was conversing with the past every time I had to do something like re-curate the shelves according to theme, or even something as tedious as inputting every attribute of every roman coin into our electronic database.

It eased something in me, to be able to be so close to these artifacts - to have my fingertips on them, my hands around them. It eased something in me to be able to hold them against the swaying of time, to still them right there in front of me. That's why I'd like to live my life close to artifacts; I'd like to work in a museum someday. I would do any job within it, as long as I spent my days in its corridors and fluttering between all the cabinets that freeze time under their glass.