I am having a dramatic confirmation of this old saying at the moment. A friend and former colleague has been sending me draft chapters of a book he is writing, for my comment. Bearing in mind the fact that I retired from the university in 2001 perhaps I was foolish to agree to his request. We are now up to Chapter 11, of 15, and with this one the difficulty has gone up by a large degree, because the subject-matter has become very philosophical …. in a fairly technical sense, not meaning only that it is reflective. I am managing to cover about 25 pages each day, after which my brain starts to hurt. It is a long time since I had to read a paragraph twice in order to make sure that I had understood it.
I think that my function is not to provide any great technical input, but mainly to register the intellectual limits of his likely readership. At the point at which I really can’t cope any more, then any chance of relating to a general readership ceases, and he will have to ask himself whether he is actually addressing a narrow circle of aficionados. Certainly I feel that I am having a mental work-out at a level I have avoided for a long time. Another thing, of course, is that the experience reveals the degree to which I now feel at home in the practise of art, in comparison with the academic world. Even so, I think that I am glad to have the opportunity to revisit my old stamping-ground. The the experience is rather like the experience I had a few years ago, returning to the former Yugoslavia, where I had previously been very much at home, and discovering that I had to struggle to recover a language in which I had once been quite fluent.