Experiences of an (Actually) Awkward Atheist.

(That's me on the left, creeping.)

26 February 2010

It’s Think Week at Oxford: a collection of events – talks, writing workshops, stand-up routines – centering around atheism, skepticism and humanism. How cool is that? In regards to religion, England aligns with me much more than America. I like any country that puts Charles Darwin on their money. There are still areas in the States in which the teaching of evolution is still a debate; in England you see his face every time you buy groceries.

Unfortunately, Think Week coincides with my busiest week. I have so much reading and writing to do that any free time I have must be spent working. So, tonight – Friday night – is the only night I get to go to any of the events.

The first is a lecture on the subject “Public Perceptions of Atheism,” a potentially fascinating topic. In the last few years, with the popularity of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has been discussed much more than it was when I was growing up, which is a great thing: the idea has become more normal, more pronounced. But with its newfound exposure comes a litany of stereotypes and misconceptions. The media – mindful of the faithful – tend to depict them as bullying old men and treat them as almost a novelty, as if they’d written books about a conspiracy theory. And women are completely underrepresented in regards to atheism. I know women that are atheists. Plenty, in fact.

Anyway, it’s a fertile subject. The lecture, however, is not as interesting as I’d hoped. The woman (see!) giving the talk is young and smart – no question – and she runs a wonderful organization called Camp Quest UK, which is an off-shoot of an American organization that is, to quote the website, “the first residential summer camp for the children of atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view.” She is, by all accounts, an awesome woman.

But she barely covers any of the issues she brings up, which, to be fair, are the exact ones I just mentioned two paragraphs ago, so it’s not as if she doesn’t mention those issues. It is a short, un-thorough talk, during which she constantly checks her notes in order to not say very much.

Next, I head to a bar called Copa to see a comedian named Iszi Lawrence. Her act was advertised under the title “Experiences of an Awkward Atheist,” but awkward she is anything but. With messy, dyed-white hair and a fucking cool (no other word, sorry) outfit, she holds herself very assuredly on stage, handling the silences and the missed jokes like a pro. Not that there are too many of those, but a good test of someone’s stage presence is their ability to tolerate a miss. Iszi passes.

Oh and she’s also funny. Did I mention that?

We talk afterwards, and she’s charming. She obviously practiced at conversation from having performed all around and talking to people at her shows. She’s the kind of person who will never let the interaction get awkward, a trait I often find in performers.  I mention this because this demeanor, when detected, often makes it difficult to tell whether or not the person views you in a way that is particular to you. Is she interested in what I’m saying, or is she just tolerating me? Or, more probably, is she viewing me in a way that isn’t rapt or bored, but as just another nice person who liked her act?

Do not take this as a criticism of Iszi. It is about my neurosis. You see, eventually, these questions are answered in my head in a negative way. I think to myself: Oh, so who do you think you are? A charming, good-looking comedian, who does a lot of shows and meets a lot of people, in all probability, does not take too much notice of me. Now, this doesn’t make me feel shitty or anything; I do not base that very legitimate fact that she meets a ton of people as a means to feel bad about myself. That would be dramatic.

She and some people involved in Think Week head to another bar. After I finish my beer, Tim –one of my roommates – and Mark – a guy we met at the bar – head out to follow them. When we arrive at the bar Iszi had mentioned, we find it closed, with Iszi nowhere to be found.

So I separate and go to a club alone.

* * *

The club is called the Bridge. There isn’t a very long line, but I am kept outside because I don’t have a girl with me.

“We’re only taking mixed groups right now,” the bouncer says to me.

“Okay.”

So I stand there with one other guy as many groups are allowed in ahead of us. The guy in front of me is eventually joined by a friend, who convinces him to leave. Now I am the only standing there being kept out.

Then, suddenly, after a huge group plows past me, I realize now that I am the only person in line. There is not a single other person standing with me. At this point, it can’t even be accurately called a line. One person is not a fucking line. It is exclusion.

I stand defiantly in line for ten minutes by myself before the bouncers let me in on pity. The image of me standing there is probably pathetic. Not only am I alone and outside, but I’m pretty underdressed. I did not intended to go to a club tonight; it was a drunken caprice that began with the stimulation of Iszi.

Finally, I get in, but now I am in a low mood, as the prolonged humiliation of the line didn’t exactly give me a confidence boost before entering the club. Also, the delay (and the sadness) sobered me a bit. I therefore get a shot and a beer as soon as I get inside.

The Bridge has three floors. Ostensibly, each floor has a different theme. This claim is dubious. I imagine that this was true at one point, but that eventually the various themes merged into one.

Standing in the club, I realize that I’m not cut out for this kind of thing. I think about my first night in London, about an incident that I forgot to report in my first blog. I can’t believe I didn’t; it was a very prescient moment for me.

So, after all the logistics with my flight over here (which, you’ll recall, was diverted to Scotland where we stayed the night in a hotel, and then I stayed a night in London because we got in so late), Adam and I went to a bar. After I’m sufficiently inebriated, I start ruminating on this trip. I think, I’m going to be different in England. I’m going to use this time as a way to get over my insecurities. I’m going to start approaching women in bars and clubs, risk getting rejected, as I’ll never make friends in England otherwise.

I look around and see a beautiful girl sitting alone at a table. I take a deep breath, make sure no one is watching, and walk over to her.

“Do you want to dance?” I ask.

She looks me up and down and says, “No."

As I walk back to our table, I think, Nope. I’m not going to be different. I’ll probably be the same as I’ve always been.

I do not have a strong will.

Now, standing in the Bridge, I again become certain that I will probably be the same as I’ve always been.

I order another beer and wonder whether or not I should just go home. A girl approaches the bar next to me and orders a drink. While she waits, she glances over at me, which, in England, is a lot more significant than in America. I lean over and say “Hello,” but she doesn’t hear me. So, I’m about to repeat myself when the bartender comes back with her drink, and she pays and walks away.

By this point, it’s late and I’m tired. And when you’re alone in club and not dancing, there is nowhere for you to stand without seeming weird and nowhere to sit that doesn’t take up more space than necessary (like a table or booth). It emphasizes my loneliness. 

So I finish my beer and leave. As I do, the bouncer from earlier gives me a look that says, “Yeah, I know how it goes. Sorry.”

I go home and sleep, as alone in my bed as we are in the universe.

The Violence and Giddiness of Literature.

It is one of those moments that comes to us sometimes. We are in the midst of something meaningful––or something important, or, oftentimes, something that contains the quintessence of a particular time in our lives––and we are aware of its importance. We are aware that what we are feeling somehow expresses an ordinarily quiet notion: that slippery abstraction of living, of experience, of time.           

Maybe it’s just me.           

Being a fiction writer has its disadvantages. One of which is this constant desire to summarize and qualify. I can’t experience anything meaningful without attempting, mentally or verbally, to express that meaning. In fact, two close friends of mine (you know who you are) were discussing me once––I was told this later––and they both commented (lamented may be a more appropriate verb here) about how I could never simply let a moment pass, how I couldn’t just let life happen, how I had to talk about everything all the time.          

Well, as a response to this, I said that since fiction is my passion, it makes complete sense that hyper-loquacity has become my tendency. Think about it: there isn't a single moment of silence in a novel or short story. Every moment is linguistic. Even moments of silence, in fiction, are described with words. So, for me, something isn’t as meaningful––nay, may not contain any meaning at all––unless it can be articulated in prose. Doesn't make me any less annoying to my friends; it just explains why I do it.

So, the pregnant moment I’m having walking down an English street may be the result more of my odd eccentricities than of any actual, objective significance.

Apologies if this is so. But – I have to keep reminding myself – it is indeed my blog.

* * *

Oxford still maintains the tutorial system it started with hundreds (yes, hundreds) of years ago. Recently, this system has come under fire, as it is not exactly financially tenable. There is simply not enough money (even for an absurdly well-funded University with as many well-connected alumni) to continue a one professor/one student ratio. In other words, Oxford may have to become more like a regular university sometime in the near future. 

Until then, I’m lucky to have been able to experience the tutor system. It is encouragingly independent. You are assigned reading (a lot of reading) and given an essay prompt, which are ordinarily vague and open-ended, sometimes frustratingly so. The purpose of this is to inspire the student to grapple with the topic instead of arguing one point tirelessly throughout the piece. The most prevalent criticism I’ve received for my essays has been a (relative) lack of counterpoints.

Anyway, it’s Friday and today I have my tutorial on James Joyce’s Ulysses. My tutor, a unanimously well-liked man named Edward Clarke, asked me to meet him at his flat. So my friend Shana walks me there, as it is kind of confusing to find. The walk there is pretty, but I don’t notice too much of the wonderful nuances until afterwards.

The tutorial is exactly what I had envisioned when I thought of my time in Oxford. Edward Clarke is an admirable man: charming, extremely erudite and personable. He seems to be interested in engaging with the texts, in culling from them something new, something excited, whatever the avenues it takes to get there. He's also, it should be mentioned, very handsome.

We discuss the opening sections of the novel, which, with one notable exception, are not nearly as esoteric as I had anticipated. He says that that’s a universal assumption aimed at Ulysses, that it’s some sort of literary trick, that it is only interested in proving its cleverness and its author’s education. He says that there is real value in it, though, that it contains some urgent truths about humanity that aren’t obscured from so-called “regular” people, and that it’s the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

He has me read my essay out loud (which I'm also pleased about). I wrote an explication of the opening paragraph of the novel. Our dynamic is fun and intellectual, a combination my younger self would simply gush over. You see, I view this Oxford experience as another in a long, long line of tests to myself. When I was in high school and I was a fledgling intellectual (which means, essentially, an arrogant asshole), I always wondered whether or not I was a fraud, whether I actually enjoyed academic pursuits or if I merely wanted to be perceived as someone who did. I had always visualized this test as a sheet of paper with a line drawn vertically down the center: on one side there was a check for every time I couldn’t finish a novel because it was too challenging or gave up on a story or turned in a lazily written essay or didn’t know about history or didn’t care to know about history or, in general, every time I felt the pang of mental exhaustion that seemed disproportionate to its cause.

So, as I’ve gotten older, when I find myself enjoying––or, more aptly, feeling completely propelled by––a scholarly occasion, I remember that old feeling of presumed fraudulence and I make an imaginary mark under the side of the argument that has the checks for every time I pushed through intellectual difficulty or overcame a struggle in fiction or impressed a professor with an insight or a turn of phrase or, in general, every time I realized that this measurement I set for myself when I was younger is utterly irrelevant and that life isn’t about proving the validity of the claim of yourself, that, instead, it’s simply about doing, motivations notwithstanding.

I leave the tutorial elated. I think to myself, I’m at Oxford. I’m really doing this. I just spent an hour discussing, in depth, a novel that always seemed beyond my scope with a man of whose literary acuity I would be lucky to achieve a portion.

I walk down his street, which now strikes me as markedly English and profoundly beautiful. The houses stand tightly next to each other, with nothing between them save an inch of paint. It is a sight an English person would find banal, but to me it speaks volumes about my progression in life. I wonder down that street with a renewed sense of conviction that what I'm doing is important. I've spent a lot of time in my life regretting missed opportunities and hypothesizing about alternative lives, but here on Edward Clarke's street, I do not think about anything else but what I am doing.

It’s funny: most of my time thus far has been spent in relative quiet, reading and writing. In about a month, I’ve written over 15,000 words of essays, blogs and fiction. I’ve read four Shakespeare plays, two novels and a portion of Ulysses. It has not been some conventionally exciting time, but it has been supremely fulfilling. I find myself (a phrase Cecily Miller will appreciate) thinking of this passage in The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt, one of the novels I’m reading for one of my tutorials:

“There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about that is that we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend––not infinitely, but violently, but giddily––the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover.”

Violently. Giddily. Yes, that about says it.

It was a wonderful moment.