Dark Academia and Meme Versus Reality

It's an inevitable feature of getting older that you come late to the party when it comes to trends -- sure, the Internet makes it so that you have the ability to search more, but you still have to know where to search, and how, and whether that search is worthwhile, and whether or not you should actually spend some time making sure that you've used the right cover letter for the TPS report. 

And that goes double for the "aesthetics" shared by a (mostly) Gen Z public on the infinitude of social media platforms I try to avoid taking part in, except for anthropological purposes. Various -cores have come back with a vengeance, and so forth, a rhetorical device which is older than me, and which I've always hated -- when I was 19, I refused to vocalize the word "mumblecore," and I refuse to still.

And thus it was that over the past year or so, I became aware of the concept of "dark academia," an aesethetic adoration and -- like all things deemed aesthetic now, somehow erotically charged but utterly desexualized -- of all things dusty and forgotten. Leatherbound books with dusty spines, tweed jackets, ivied and crenellated Gothic libraries, Byronic poetry, tasteful earth tones, decanters full of cognac, horn-rimmed glasses, brass candelabra, and the lingering scent of old pipe smoke.

 

I get it -- I, too, once wrapped myself in a scarf and wore tasseled loafers and showed up at parties with a well-thumbed Dover Thrift Edition of Death in Venice tucked into my back pocket, pontificated on the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes to anyone foolish enough to be in earshot, prowled used bookstores for copies of long-forgotten novels, tried to speak shitty French at parties, had six cups of coffee for dinner.

In other words, I was a cunt. I would say Timothee Chalamet would have played me, but I was never near as handsome.

And if you are a teenager raised in some hellish exurb, it seems to me natural that you would want to find some alternative reality that you could fantasize about. Someplace where ideas seemed to actually matter, someplace where humanistic education was more than being asked to find the symbols in The Great Gatsby to practice for the AP test, someplace dark and strange and interesting.

But that wasn't my reality. I was raised in an academic community, and so a lot of this is second nature to me. I was the product of an illicit student-professor affair, in a house with a bookshelf-lined livingroom and Faulkner first editions and antique furniture and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue playing as my dad, the Royal Tenenbaum who had lost his crown before I was born, would pour the first of many Scotches in front of the fire on frigid November nights.

To a certain degree I imbibed it. The world around me, it seemed, was a generally cruel and stupid place, and I spent most of my youth thinking that I, too, would retreat into the ivory tower eventually.

The thing is though is that reality sets in. Lacking the necessary capital and not going into a field which would have placed me on a professional track, I would have had to sink myself 100,000 dollars into student debt in the hope of getting an adjunct teaching position at an anonymous university for wages that a factory worker would (rightly) sneer at. And so, like all overeducated but decidedly non-blueblooded youth in the years after the financial crash of 2008, I worked a series of low-end jobs, the more horrifying the more novel, and became known as the "smart guy" (with the subtext being "lacking any actual monetizable skills") the guy who could happily talk about surrealism on his lunch break at the car dealership or the psychiatric facility, while he was earning 10 dollars an hour, people saying "y'know, you should really write a book or something."

Which leads to the divide between the aesthetic and the real.

It's easy to fantasize about a world of intrigue and scholarly madness and long Orson Welles shadows, but a lot harder to actually live a life dedicated to art and knowledge and letters. To actually devote oneself in this way -- something I've done on and off for my entire adult life -- is really goddamn lonely and painful and alienating at times, because, above all else, it's a form of escapism. A lot of people might refer to Of Human Bondage, the story of a seeker who realized all gods, spiritual or otherwise, were failures (which is great), but I think it was best phased by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point in 1928: 

"I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life — the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism — is its easiness. It's the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children — and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life."

And the older you get, the harder it gets. When you're 15, perhaps you can fancy yourself one of the lads in Dead Poets Society (a movie I've not rewatched as an adult, and do not plan to -- I'm sure I'll despise it). But one transitions shockingly quick from charmingly adorkable Oscar Wilde cosplayer to Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, bloviating about Baudelaire before getting rapey with the handsome young men in his company.

Perhaps it's this that unsettles me more than anything else as I look at the nascent wrinkles in my forehead, having graduated from thrift-store shoes to vintage desert boots from a nice consignment shop on Ekkamai Road, as one's life involves a lot less stoned arguing about shit over delivery Indian food, but no less introspection in the long taxi ride home.