Left Behind

Ah, why didn't he join them, the former Essex Postgraduates who fled the world?, W. wonders. Why was he left behind in the Rapture of thought?

That's what they all feel, he's sure, those among the former Essex postgraduates who looked for academic jobs, who took them. That's how they must feel, those for whom there was a sense that life was elsewhere, and that one had to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another life; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun …

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, sitting beside me on the train, W. says.