My entrance into the UK came with all the expected (and also probably fulfilled by my subconscious) difficulties.

From the Ryanair flight stranded on the tarmac, door open, unable to relieve passengers until London Stansted retrieved proper personnel to deploy the staircase to the insanely incompetent staff at the poorly reviewed backpackers hostel that I booked at 11 PM simply out of necessity… I am here regardless.

*sigh*

I am here regardless of where I rested last night, ate breakfast this morning, decided to spend my time, my money, my anxious energy. With each pound spent, always calculating the relative equivalent in dollars, my blood pressure rises. It’s OK, I will replenish the bank account once I’m home.

The world is equally as strangling as it is liberating. I have decided to find liberation through staying put. I won’t go to Glasgow, I won’t take the 20$ RyanAir flight from Glasgow to London on the 16th of August (which I failed to acknowledge would actually end up costing hundreds more, considering the travel to Glasgow, even to and from the airport..), but I will spend 17 days in a city filled with endless possibility.

Things are looking up. I’m sending countless emails to people in my research-related field. I’m endlessly seeking some type of intellectual social stimulation outside of the brain-frying carbon-copy hostel-goer conversations that are a right of passage for a 21-year-old college student traveling for an extensive period abroad. I’m sure I can find this stimulation in a place that breeds some of the most intelligent people and high class institutions in the world. I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I’m sure I’ll find it.

In the meantime, I’ll keep flipping my way through a book given to me by my host/professor/friend in Tuscany. I started this book on the beach, under the Tuscan sun, with sand in my toes and salt drying my ever-darkening skin (so thankful to my Native American ancestors for this trait).

An excerpt from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty: 

..Howard had pitched his tent and made his case. He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. ‘Art is the Western myth’, announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.

Loved this passage.

When I was first given this book, I explained to my friend that I typically don’t care to read books in which the voice of the author is highly different than my own; that when I read, I want to imagine that the dialogue lives in another part of my own psyche that I can identify with, make my own, meld myself to. I began this book with no context, did not like the introduction, but continued to read regardless. I’ve found that although the characters and plot are highly different to my own character, my own life plot, I find constant nuggets of literary mastery that do end up resonating with my voice.

I guess the same thing has happened already since entering London..

I will keep reading, keep experiencing London, and I will find the nuggets of this society, this city, maybe even some people, that resonate with me.

British Library, Saturday Morning.