Finding the light switch

You don’t have to work in the dark

There’s a story I’ve been wanting to share for a while now. It’s about how lost I was at the very beginning of my graduate studies. It’s about how silly I was then, too. But most of all, I think it’s about how you really don’t have to make things harder for yourself when it comes to being a scholar, a writer, or anything, really.

First of all, I really can’t stress how clueless I was when I arrived at Cambridge to start my MPhil. I’d studied abroad there, so I sort of knew my way around, but I really had no clue what I’d gotten myself into.

My undergraduate years had been spent at a liberal arts college that encouraged its students to study a wide range of subjects. I’d taken full advantage of this by doing a dual major in literature and history, though I chose my courses in a way that enabled me to pursue an unofficial concentration in British literature and history.

Cambridge, on the other hand, was a land of specialists.

Like most UK universities I know, Cambridge accepted undergraduates into specific degree programs. Students had already selected their subjects before they even applied. And by the time they went on to graduate studies, they were able to zero in on even more specific areas of specialization.

By contrast, students at my undergraduate college often didn’t formally declare a major until their sophomore year. When I arrived, I didn’t know whether I’d be majoring in Romance languages, astrophysics, or something else entirely (as it turned out, it was the latter).

So when I started my MPhil, I really felt like I was only beginning to set out on the path to becoming a Real Scholar. I had ideas about what being a Real Scholar looked like. I don’t remember many of them specifically, but I do recall that they involved things like tweed, faltering eyesight, and having no sense of humour whatsoever.

I finally realised that some of these ideas might be a little ridiculous on my first visit to the North Wing of the Cambridge University Library.

The North Wing of the ‘U.L.’ was, in my day, a rather dimly lit, low-ceilinged place. Echoey metal stairs led to each floor, though some courageous souls opted for the lifts, which looked as though they’d been in operation since the building’s completion in 1934. (They probably had—I’ve got a story about those lifts for another time.)

I climbed the stairs in some trepidation. On each floor, I saw a single long desk lining the front-facing window, opposite which were ranged the fabled open shelves. As I watched, students and staff searching for books shuffled past rows and rows of bookshelves before locating the one they were looking for, at which point they would turn and vanish down a row.

At some point, I realised that the book I wanted was somewhere down a particularly dark row of bookshelves. Some natural light came into the room via the windows, but it didn’t reach all the way down the stacks.

I can’t claim to have had any fully formed thoughts as I peered into the darkness, but if I had, they would’ve gone something like this:

Ah yes…. The time has come. I will now be a Real Scholar by walking down this dark row and sacrificing my eyesight while squinting at the spines of every book. This is what it means to be a Real Scholar. I have arrived.

And so, I plunged off into the darkness.

At which point I heard a sound like…

…cccccrrrrRRRRRAAAAAAAAANK…

…and a bright fluorescent bulb lit up over my head.

You see, what I didn’t know (but could have discovered after about 7 seconds of investigation) was that at the head of each row of bookshelves was a dial. If cccrrrrRRRAAAAANKed, that dial would turn on the lights, thereby allowing me to find the volume I was looking for, ideally before the lights’ timer ran out.

I may not remember all my exact thoughts during this little episode, but I do remember laughing. I laughed because I realised that my silly ideas about what being a Real Scholar was like had gotten in the way of my looking around, asking for help, or trying anything to make my task easier.

In my very first post for PBP, I wrote about how lost I felt during my early years as a medievalist. And now that I’m on the brink of celebrating the end of my first year of writing this newsletter, I want to share a similar message about your work as students, researchers, teachers, and writers. It goes something like this:

You don’t have to do it without help.

You don’t have to do it in a way that makes you miserable.

And you absolutely can—and SHOULD—be on the lookout for things that might make your life easier.

Whatever you’re doing, I hope you find the light switch more quickly than I did.