Back in Edinburgh for my final year, at first I avoided all pubs and spent
a great deal of time in the university library and the National Library of Scotland, but
instead of attending to my course books I was distracted by memories of a girl
I'd met over the summer and disturbing reading like Gogol’s Nose and M. R. James’s ghost stories and
the original London Times dispatches
from Waterloo and other finds beyond measure, including Arthur Machen and
Algernon Blackwood; I even took in some of the verse of Sheikh Saadi’s Gulistan, and complemented those Islamic
rose petals with a good Christian downpour of great John Donne, whom I found
cryptic to the point of incomprehensibility and still don’t fully understand
any more than a fly understands the statue it crawls across. But I’d place him
more in a direct line with Hardy and John Cowper Powys as a great artist with
no style, simultaneously strange and profound and unsettling, in the way of all
genius.
Finals were coming up and I was wracked
from end to end with concomitant nerves and worry, once again (after an
agonizing abstinence of about three weeks) spending altogether too much time in
the pubs and also going for walks in the Pentlands and playing miniature golf
with Bill…in short, those final summer days of my university career were
glorious. The sky was clear and warm breezes blew.
I sat my finals
in June ‘76 in a high-ceilinged hall on Chambers Street designed by Robert
Adam, underslept and tired but buoyed by my fatigue and youth’s euphoria. It was a squeaker, but I did especially
well in Philosophy. Which was an irony, because I’d always found it an utter
bore.
