A familiar chapter in any Bildungsroman, when the hero begins to pierce the outer layers of the establishment only to to find its centre constantly shrinking and moving away, - to find that no-one including of course himself is ever part of what once (from outside) seemed so monolithic and solid. We chase it down, and after many Proustian penetrations eventually reduce it to (Stieg Larsson-style) a single mild, old and terminally-ill gentleman who views us through milky ice-blue eyes and murmurs that, these days, he restricts himself to a few lines of Sir David Minnay's exquisite translations from the Ancient Persian, but even so, this is really only because Davie is a grand-nephew...
And yet, cultural establishments exist (it is better not to think only of poetry); they are much better exemplified by the Institution and by mass structures than by the supposed individuals concerned: e.g. in this case schools, colleges, newspapers, radio programmes, prizes, societies, diplomatic exchanges, tourism hotspots... They exist and their patterns persist, like social classes, in spite of all the individuals who decry social class or prefer never to mention it. They persist like the morale of sick institutions, exemplified by no single employee yet hugely resistant to transformation. The outsider's view, as so often, is the perception that must be silenced if it can't be dimmed. And the response to the outsider -( "but you don't understand, if only you could meet... you would soon see... etc etc")- itself manifests the effective though invisible self-defence of the establishment.
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