There's no laughter like postgraduate laughter, we agree. There's nothing as dark. Nothing as knowing. It's death-row laughter, we agree. It's the laughter of those condemned to death. Because they are condemned to death, the postgraduates. Exposed to the greatest of thoughts, the greatest of books, they're condemned to a life without meaning, without succour, to a life of shit in a world of shit …
The postgraduates wear us out, as they always do. It's like looking in a terrible mirror. It's like seeing ourselves, robbed of self-satisfaction, robbed of our pandering. To think that we, too, burned with the same black fire! And to think that by some strange miracle, by some lapse in the logic of the universe, we actually found jobs. To think that we – we – found ourselves in academic jobs.
Lars Iyer's Blog 