My dear reader, I will sing of the attainment of a life of beauty and you will listen. You see, it began with the Shakespeare bust in the John Woolley building. I don’t mean to deprive those English students of the image of the Bard that they admire as they pass by it into class, but it was simply so shiny and wonderful that I had to take it. And really, what is a writing desk without a statue of Shakespeare on it? Simply a hunk of wood, unsuited for the true and the beautiful. Yes, with bust? A total transformation, perhaps indeed also the transubstantiation of the spirit of the Bard himself within the lump of plaster. He was unfit for gloomy alcoves, unfit for a layer of dust gathering like hair upon his skullcap. So I took him for myself.
How was it acquired, you ask? The Woolley door is left open sometimes at night. All it took was to arrive at the right moment with the right-sized screwdriver. Granted, my William has a very heavy head, but it was worth the fuss. Anyhow, he looks splendid, peering at me with those shadows deep cut into his sockets as I sit here writing. Much better to look at than a mirror.
My fun went unnoticed, for a while, until a pesky letter appeared in the university’s pathetic newspaper, from a Mr Grift. He enquired into its whereabouts. Luckily, the party-pooper’s perfidious letter was ignored. But the beginning of my artistic project had been noticed.
I have not been entirely truthful with you. My mischief had, I admit, begun earlier, although the Shakespeare bust was the first notable incident. It began with utilities from the staff rooms. My art began, that is. The curation of a beautiful existence. A pencil here, a sharpener there. I quickly moved on to books. Every now and then, an academic’s door happened to be open, and I couldn’t help but peek in. Then the peek would turn into appreciation of their healthily stocked bookshelves, and appreciation turned into delicate and purposeful acquisition. Now my bookcase (also borrowed) is very healthily stocked indeed. What does an academic need books for? They may go to the library and pick whatever they wish off the shelves.
Now, don’t give me a lecture on the criminal nature of healthy reappropriation! You, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! All readers steal. It is in the nature of readership to transform words into your own conception, twist the human shambles of the writer into your own image, to create a picture of your creator. Is what I have done so different? I have beheld the world and made it mine.
What you really wish to know about is the Fisher Library disaster, otherwise dubbed (by me) the Milton affair. What happened with Milton began, like so many beautiful beginnings, with a trip to the library. I had been liberally borrowing books from there too, and my mind was set this day on a Chaucer volume, a reproduction of the Hwyt Chaucer. But no sooner did the air conditioning of the lobby envelop me than did the screw take its first turn. In the glass display case to the left of the main entrance sat a new display of some ten or twenty books lined up, their pages waxy, enclaves of illuminated beauty glinting in the void like stars on the face of the sea. A lovely collection, showcasing the artifacts of the library of a deceased scholar of Australian literature, whose real passion, evidently, was collecting first editions of 17th-century literature; a passion much more sensible than his profession. To this effect, the collection displayed contained the works of Dryden, Marvell, and culminated in the genius of the king of poets, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The book looked old enough to be a first edition.
To my dismay, this collection wasn’t owned by dear old USyd, but was rather on loan from some dusty midwest American institution. The glass was too thick to break, fixed too firm, and fitted with an alarm. I am anything if not a thief of convenience. Thus, I slunk back to my den, the Chaucer I had planned to pilfer seeming infinitely lesser than the display I could never attain.
It should come as little surprise that I live here too, in the Quad. Or lived, until the Milton affair came to pass and I had to go subterranean. Where in the Quad, you ask? I cannot tell you! It is easier than some might suppose, to set up quarters there. And why should I not? It is not out of need, my parents are very wealthy. If I am to live a life of beauty, where is a better place to do it than inside this perfect Oxbridge aestheticism? I enjoy throbbing between two lives, that of the thief and the normal student. But I never attend class; I find it aesthetically distasteful. Full of pimple-popping undergraduates with far too much self-importance.
I did all my writing there also. Now I must do it in my new residence, but only with pen and paper. You see, for me, the computer is the great mind melter. I cannot do anything on it. I cannot write, I cannot think. For all its technological precision, it produces a completely destructive disorder and a degeneration of the vital essence of sensory activity necessary for the perfection inherent in art. It is an ugly thing too, the cabled box, the vileness of it; like exposed veins and brittle skin hardly wrapped around a machine so nearly alive, but never quite human. So utterly anaesthetic. I have no phone and no computer. Know that I am writing this now by hand. See the beauty of seeing the ink darkly seep into the page, the permanent mark. I may write anything, and it should stay.
Anyhow, you ask what I kept in this room. I will transmit to you a list.
Furniture
Bedding materials,
Writing materials,
A borrowed bust of Shakespeare,
A wardrobe, containing clothes I have mostly smuggled out of the various local Vinnies:
Several genuine fur coats,
Several Ralph Lauren Shirts
Several Overcoats
An assortment of ties, vests, skirts, pants
Several paintings taken from various faculties (it is fairly easy to remove art from buildings as long as you wear a high-vis vest and walk with purpose).
A bookshelf (also disassembled for transport and reassembled in the room). My books are as follows.
Books
Complete works of Shakespeare
Complete works of Poe
Complete works of Wilde
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Complete Novels of Franz Kafka
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Deeds of Charles the Great by Notker the Stammerer
The Seven Lamps of Architecture by Ruskin
The Renaissance by Walter Pater
The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
Camile Paglia’s Sexual Personae
History of Australia by Manning Clark
Introduction to Property and Commercial Law by McCracken and Grattan
Kapital Complete Volumes by Karl Marx (My copy is beautifully bound in leather, with lovely pictures inside, and gold leaf on its edges).
I, of course, have a record player and a large collection of vinyl, too. The record player is broken, but it is easy enough to imagine it working. Finally, upon my desk, I have a skull, taken from the bowels of the school of medicine. Some months ago, I began to carve into it a phrase I found pretty in a book I liked, but gave up halfway through as the bone was too brittle. I also gave up that book halfway, for the latter half was very boring and Catholic. I also have a little plastic tortoise toy which I have glued some faux gemstones to. It looked nice in the light of my laptop.
Anyway, later in that month, I made my routine trip to Fisher once more, in my futile attempt to finally master the nuances of reproductive biology. I cannot seem to ever truly learn anything in its entirety, and I change what I study constantly. I am brilliant in the number of topics I have knowledge in, not the depth of that knowledge. Somehow the time came out of joint while I took a break from my studies, peeling myself away from my desk, and I walked out to find a violet hour, the short grass of the Quad lawns quivering in the near-still breeze, the certainty of demarcations fickle in the low light. A change in the wind, a change in the smell of the world. It was a beautiful night.
When I returned to my desk, I made my way past the rare books display. This time, it was wide open, the light framing it perfectly. Through some fault of general management or security or restorations, they had left the case wide open. I walked towards the work, and, without any volition, as if the will of some force of beauty compelled me, I stretched out my hand and took Milton under my arm. A tremor passed through my body. A moment of providence. How brilliant that I was, and so close to Milton’s genius. I could never settle for (god forbid) a second edition. I will never forget the feeling of elation, of shock, of ecstasy, at taking the book.
It is miraculous that the university has no measures for this. The book was not alarmed. I simply turned and walked out into the night, face pale, pulse beating. What happened next, you well know. The book was found missing, so the police were called. An investigation. Nothing found. I think. They have not found me yet, perhaps I was only a blur on the cameras. But I know everyone suspected me. Wary glances from everyone. I could not walk around campus without feeling like a criminal. Perhaps someone saw me take it. Perhaps a picture of my face was emailed to everyone like a wanted poster.
So I had to move all my things into the tunnels beneath the Quad, into my own little cave, an adjunct supply room within the tunnels. No one would find me here. It is wet, and some of my books have been ruined, but still I persist. It is very dark here, but I have a battery-operated torch. I know little of time’s passage. I have not seen the sun in many weeks, though perhaps it has only been a few days. I stockpiled food here in case of an emergency such as this. And I live a beautiful life, surrounded by art constantly, creating art constantly. Paintings furnish my eyes, clothes touch my skin, books riddle my mind.
I consistently reread the first 4 books of Paradise Lost, for I find great correspondence within them. I struggle to read the following eight books. I can’t help but half-believe that Milton was a prophet, for I see my plight within his pages. How brilliant that it is a first edition. I am complete with it.
I write this now to relate the art of my experience, to show the beauty in my acts, so I will not be remembered as a criminal. My deeds have transformed my world into one above morality, a world of good and pure beauty. I will continue to exist. I shall continue to exist within a brilliant, honest, lively, and beautiful life. I am surrounded by objects of beauty. I have become beautiful. If you have found this; know my deeds are noble, true and real. I have made my case, and now I enter into a realm of pure art, of eternal artistic contemplation, and sensuous bliss.
