Part 2 in process - Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

prepared for those examinations, none were taking the same subjects. I have a vague
recollection of the Republic of Plato being skimmed through more than two thousand years
after Plato wrote it, but if I mentioned that I was a republican the shadows of the middle classes
would shy away. One would never get tenure with political views like that. Plato was not
welcome in the chippies or circles of small businesses, whose money depended on political
correctness, students and tourists. They produced nothing of their own. They would destroy and
demolish chapels for their stone and wood, leaving themselves with a wilderness as desolate as
that left behind by locusts or barbarians. Slowly the notes were memorized somehow. I have no
recollection of how it was done, maybe in the quiet spells when I had a corner of the cardboard
box to myself, or when all were studying or more accurately, becoming nervous. With the
greatest and most detailed of care I made sure over and over again that the dates and times of
the examinations were incised in my mind like Roman letters in marble. The examinations
were timed for the convenience of lecturers, some were in the evening in the Old College, some
were in the morning in other buildings, some were on the moon for all the administration cared.
First year students were there for numbers only, so the admin could boast of how excellent it
was. These days all universities describe themselves as excellent. All are superior, yet all are
the same indifferent nonentities.
I began to hear stories of how some wretches had been devastated by
examination nerves - the shell shock of the academic world. These were put about as the
examinations approached, some had jumped off Constitution Hill, some had gassed themselves
or hanged themselves from a bannister, some had taken an overdose of rat poison. Probably
none of it was true, but I began to see fear in the eyes of the unprepared. Some had already
given up and were there just for the pubs. My own method was the same as at Pontardawe, the
only difference was that the school teachers were much better than the lecturers, who delivered
lectures like man traps on the old aristocratic or church estates. Traps that could amputate the
illiterate and starving poacher, or illiterate and starving student. Some were content during
lectures to listen to this low quality rubbish without taking notes, with folded arms and
yawning jaws. They were doomed to a life of empty materialism. The lecturers were ego
tripping their way through tenure, in many cases given to them by accident. No one really
knows how the lecturers were tenured. The College still keeps it a close secret, even from the
Information Commissioner. I know that they were tenured because they made themselves the
friends of the influential. Their low quality is instantly apparent to the young mind, which
enters university at its most critical of society and its endless corruption.
My method was to isolate myself from the surrounding noise, or Brownian
motion of random student numbers and small shopkeepers. This was not difficult because there
was and is nothing to hold the intelligent mind at Aberystwyth. Contemporary roads are
designed to by pass it as completely as possible, so motorists can fly from one tescoed town to
another, all tescoes being the same, burning as much petrol as they possibly can in a Wales all
geared up for tourists. I had no money to buy anything, having expended reserves very
dutifully on course books before I became aware that they were to be found in libraries. The
one exception was a strange cap that I bought to keep my ears warm from the Army and Navy
Stores. Later my ears toughened up and I never wore a cap again. In any case my mother was
repelled by it and probably threw it away. She was also repelled and alarmed by how thin I was