Self-knowledge through tidying

If while tidying you come across a big heap of essays, poems, and fiction written when you were a teenager, my advice is to think twice about actually reading them, especially the poems or any blank-verse drama written under the influence of Christopher Fry. (Pause to go "!!!!") It's wierd to be taken back to a time when I felt so very strongly about things; I'm afraid I'm a bit laodicean these days.

The heap includes the A-level English coursework I submitted, consisting of one long essay and two short ones. They were all titles I made up myself. The long essay is on characters from Marlowe; I was mildly obsessed with him as a sixth-former, which reminds me of Wendy Cope's poem about having a crush on A. E. Housman. The two short ones are both creative writing, because I read the A-level regulations, and discovered that they couldn't stop me from doing this. So in one I rewrote the end of Jane Eyre; I clearly remember being in a bad mood that weekend so I made it that Jane got there just in time to see Mr Rochester die cursing her name and then she married StJohn and went to India to work herself to death. In the other I wrote a speech of Satan from Paradise Lost to his followers, reporting his trip to the gates of hell. It was rather fun to do because I inverted sentence structures and put in tons of sustained classical allusions, etc etc. Then I just wrote an essay showing what I had been trying to do with examples from real Milton, explained that I hadn't managed because I was only me and Milton was a genius, and watched the marks roll in!

Anyway, having read a lot of sixth-form essays for interviews recently it's interesting to look at this stuff in that light. (The Marlowe one is the one I sent in for my Cambridge interview, but I rather doubt anyone read it, things being different back then.) I assess my seventeen-year-old self as interesting, probably intelligent, but very annoying, and quite possibly lacking in intellectual stamina. This actually makes me feel quite good about myself, because I have overcome some of my natural flaws -- I have stuck with ASNC for thirteen years even though I am prone to short-lived enthusiasms, and I like to think I've reined in the annoying a bit too. Hurray! Now if my ex-wisdom tooth would just stop hurting...