In Cambridge I began to learn that you can’t learn everything. Other people are clever too and some of them actually read the set books instead of sitting around writing poems. Attendance at a university can save you – or should save you: the prophylactic effect has grown less certain in recent times – from the tendency of the autodidact to overrate himself. As Camus argued, a functioning democracy depends on those people who know that they don’t know everything.
But I would probably have found that out even if I hadn’t gone back to school. I would have found it out in Florence, to which, in the vacations, I would fly in junkyard airliners on a continuous mission to disperse the scrum of suave Italian men that formed around the woman I would one day marry. I didn’t yet know that last part but I knew exactly how it felt when I had to listen to my lovely girlfriend being chatted up in a language that she spoke fluently and of which I spoke not a word. With no motivation other than screaming jealousy, I began to learn my first foreign language. French I am still learning now, but Italian I learned to make a fair fist of because I was fighting for my life.