Honoured Members of the University!
You have done me the honour of inviting me to give an account of the life I have led as an ape of the University.
It is now over ten years since I entered the doors of the university, a short space of time perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at top speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors and good advice. Above all, I have been served by my own capacity for mimickry, my apishness, if you like. This was the trait has served me most well in the academy, and one which led me to attain my comparatively elevated position.
I still remember how I was captured. I was happy on the savannah with the other apes, sitting back on my haunches and looking over the expanse. Food was plentiful and life harmonious. I was not the alpha male, but nor was I the omega one; as long as I did not threaten my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened. But something was missing. But something marked me out as different from the apes around me. Was I more intelligent than them? Or was it simply because I sought a from of stimulation I was unable to find on the savannah? Now, having studied a few theories of intelligence and evolution, I am inclined to put it down to a kind of aberration. My soul had been hollowed out a little too deeply. For this reason, I willingly let myself be captured by the University.
Once I was a free ape, free to stand and look all around me on the savannah. But now, in the University, I have broadened the circle of my freedom. True, I became a prisoner of an office, bent over a keyboard, my sore eyes fixed on the monitor, but I was a happy prisoner! I steered my apish body through the halls of the academy. I knew if I was to survive in my new world, I would have to imitate those around me. I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes; I learnt not to holler and whoop. I still dreamt of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered my ape comrades who would pick the lice from my thick fur. But I was resolved to make a success of myself in my new surroundings.
Most difficult was writing. It was hard enough to hold a pen or to type on a keyboard (our fingers are stubbier than yours) let alone compose a string of words observing the rules of grammar. We apes employ much simpler means of communication. Often, a simple whoop will do. Our sensitive nostrils tell us a great deal about one another. We have no need to read and no need to write. Besides, apes are not too inquisitive; we are not given to abstraction. For the most part, we are happy to get on with our lives, happy to be free from immediate danger. Writing, therefore, was always a tremendous labour for me.
On what should I write? It was clear to me that only foreign thinkers were worthy of accolade, and only difficult ones at that. What mattered was to hitch your little wagon to one of these great lumbering beasts, and to follow the trail of the books which dropped from them like dung. One book a year was not enough, for example, for X., nor for Y. Two, three, even four books a year sprung forth from their mighty pens. How much they had to say, I wondered! How much there was to write! And how much for me, a humble ape, to read!
Happily, there were books to guide me through the wilderness. How many of them there are! The message was simple: the French thought and the British paraphrased. They were very good at that, the British. I learnt that everything can be expressed in a calm and measured prose. The wildest thinker can be tamed. All thought can be measured; philosopher can be placed alongside philosopher. Reading one series of commentary after another, I felt ought to commend the editor of each series for the uniformity of their pages. Truly I was in contact with the great minds of the age, and with little effort required from me! I was up to date with what was most radical and new in European ideas! Now I only had one problem: to which thinker should I hitch my wagon?
I found a thinker around whom the wall of commentaries still let in a chink of light and wrote a book to block out that light. Then I wrote another to make sure it really was blocked out. Nor a chink of light should escape! Truly, these thinkers burn too brightly for our poor British readers! So I commented; and I was proud of my contribution. I thought: I have done as others have done; my book has disappeared into the library, and if I have had no thoughts of my own, this is appropriate, for we are not thinkers here in Great Britain. Others think and we paraphrase. That is the correct division of labour.
A colleague often jokes he can still tell I’m an ape. It’s the way I hold a pen, he tells me. Your hand curls in towards your chest, he says. Once that hand was a paw, I tell him. Apes are not made for typing or for holding a pen, I tell him. And there’s that look you get, my colleague says, when you have to do anything. As if you’re going to tear open your shirt and whoop, he said. This too is common to all apes, I tell him. We are not made for seminars and colloquia, I tell him, but for the savannah where we whoop to express our joy and our strength.
Alas, I know my apish spontaneity has long gone. Sometimes I wonder, busy with my labours, whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in the zoo. There is so much to do, after all! My poor eyes burn from the monitor and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to type. I have translations to finish and essays to write; if I am to keep my job, I must make sure a steady stream of books flows from my printer. But even now, my boss tells me it’s not enough. You will have to raise money, he says, covering your pay three times over. It’s a lot to ask! But already I’m looking around, watching what others do and imitating them, aping the way my more diligent colleagues have as they say put in for funding.
Sometimes I ask myself – but how is this possible? – what would it mean to do what I do for real; to write because I have something to write, to think only with the aim of discovering what it might mean to think? I laugh in my apish way as I think of all I have written – all my books and articles. What foolishness! I copy others who copy others. But what am I? An ape, an ape among humans, not yet a human and no longer just an ape. Sometimes I wonder whether others around me were not once secret apes who came out of the savannah as I did. Sometimes I wonder whether our British academia is full of secret apes!
Once or twice, I have I felt the shock of encountering a genuine thinker from within our ranks. A thinker – imagine! How is it possible?, I ask myself. Is it true? Do I dare say it? Yes, there she is. A thinker. At that moment before her I am ashamed of my apishness, ashamed of everything I have said and done and written. I am ashamed too for all those whose activity conceals indolence and pretension. I am worst of all, no doubt of that, but then I am an ape. Perhaps, honoured members of the university, it not only takes an ape to recognise an ape but also to recognise non-apes! Perhaps we all know, secret and not-so-secret apes who the real thinkers are!
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