When I was about 14, my burning ambition was to grow up and be a major French intellectual. I pictured a life filled with endless discussion, obscure interests, a library full of dense, musty tomes, and a garret apartment somewhere in Paris ... the kind that was charmingly dirty and lit by a large, many-paned skylight. It would be furnished only with an antique folding camp bed, a decrepit leather chair, and stacks and stacks of books. I would live on baguette, buttered radishes and chamomile tea. Every evening, I would wander out into the Parisian night, descending into a red-lit world of seedy bars to meet my compatriots for endless expostulations and bottles of red wine. During the day, I would write furiously, expounding insightfully on topics ranging from Russian fairy tales to post-colonial Africa, participating in barbed exchanges with the cultural heavyweights of a previous generation. I would make no money - I would scorn money - but somehow I would have the perfect wardrobe, clothes that manifested the structural rigor of my thinking and my obsession with detail.
To quote Levi-Strauss, it was a mania for 'chasing after vestiges of a vanished reality' - except for me, it was a reality solely of my own construction, no more real than leprechauns.
If only there was a pill to take for genius.
