Seamus Perry says it is natural for dons to ask why one bothers

The academic year is drawing to its close and it is natural to ask of oneself at such transitional moments in life: what is it all for? Or, as the question is sometimes framed: oh why do I bother?

Putting it that way gives the enquiry a slightly apocalyptic quality, but the underlying question is a good one: just what is it that motivates the don, as the last exam paper is put to one side, to gather up the tatty exercise book in which the notes had been quietly accumulating for the next bit of research?

My late colleague John Burrow, an extremely eminent historian of ideas, once told me that he had given this matter some serious attention, and upon profound self-investigation he had decided that the psychological motor that drove his own career as a scholar was humiliation.

If he hadn’t published anything for a while he found himself imagining, as he entered common rooms and lecture theatres, people exchanging knowing glances and whispering: “Here’s old Burrow, hasn’t done much to write home about for ages.”

Eventually, provoked by the utter shame of it – a shame which he knew was really quite fictive – he would immerse himself in a subject and busy himself writing something.

At that point the productive power of humiliation came to his aid in a different way. For accompanying every sentence that emerged on to the page in his cramped and impenetrable hand he would vividly associate the mental image of a colleague, maybe a reviewer – perhaps someone terribly grand and senior, or perhaps someone with all the natural ferocity of the gifted young – who would notice some astonishing and unambiguous blunder.

The shame of it! And thus, or so he claimed, John would habitually persecute himself into producing works of wonderful scholarship, written with a humane grace and witty ease that completely belied their origins in inner turmoil.

I don’t expect to create a run in Blackwell’s by recommending his introduction to Humboldt’s classic, On the Limits of State Action (1791), but if you are remotely interested in such things do take a look: it is the very model of an essay.

Humboldt thought the state was fine as far as it went, but that that really wasn’t very far at all. John captured his thought in a way which has stayed with me ever since I first read it: for Humboldt, he wrote, the state was nothing mystical, it was “simply a kind of public convenience”. I do so like, in the company of serious Germanic theory, that very English and comic glimpse of the door to the gents’ toilet.

John wrote finely himself about literature and he would have been following the election of our new Professor of Poetry with great curiosity and, I daresay, the innocent mischief that he found in all things institutional.

The winner is known to everyone by now: he is the eminent poet Simon Armitage, and we are very pleased to be welcoming him to these precincts in the new academic year. Why, by then we will all have written our next books.