Given the extent to which metaphysics has been chased out of the lecture theatre, and indeed out of cultural theory itself in the past few decades, it may seem rather surprising for me to herald its return. And I do so not on the balance and tone of any purported majority of recent publications, but solely on the writings of one, albeit erudite, literary critic, co-opted by me to strengthen my unashamedly biased wish to see this subject informing scholarly discourse in the humanities once again.

Writing words on the way other words were written covers a broad range of academic activity, from semantics and linguistics to literary theory and the classics; this does not mean to say that doing so, writing on writing, can be anything other than the apogee of hermeneutic schizophrenia. Take immortality, a notion on which much has been written. We have accepted that, ultimately, our political, theological, philosophical and even scientific strife has been on account of our effort to attain physical immortality. And yet any relevant rhetoric is currently in denial; all disciplines unanimously declare that ‘we will always be mortal’, and then indulge in all the aforementioned research activity aiming at the contrary. Alternative ways of negotiating immortality do exist of course, albeit only in the realms of megalomanic medical paranoia and mental disorder.

Journalism as a feasible career option seems likely to feature, if only fleetingly, in the mindset of the majority of arts students. Like the coveted law conversion course, the consideration of journalism has become a customary hurdle over which to bound, both in terms of personal vocational exploration and to placate one’s parents following the inevitable post-first year career discussion.

On Tuesday 15th and 22nd of January 1712, Joseph Addison produced two articles in The Spectator magazine on the “Dissection of a Beau’s Brain” and the “Dissection of a Coquette’s Heart”. He took a satirical look at the inner workings of two eighteenth-century stereotypes, and caricatured their natures in terms of how their brain and heart worked. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Beau” as “a man who gives particular, or excessive, attention to dress, mien, and social etiquette; an exquisite, a fop, a dandy”, and “Coquette” as “a woman (more or less young), who uses arts to gain the admiration and affection of men, merely for the gratification of vanity or from a desire of conquest, and without any intention of responding to the feelings aroused; a woman who habitually trifles with the affections of men; a flirt”.

Once upon a time, in a land not so far, far away, in a pretty drab and cheaply constructed high-rise office building perched on top of a hill–possibly in Islington or somewhere similar–lived a few young men. These were not the type of men who smiled only when genuinely happy, nor were they anything like pleasant young men. No, these men, while they might have been nice once, had now gone some way towards concealing their better attributes beneath public personas. They were defined more than anything else by their ostentatiously expensive personal accessories, and their bizarre jobs, which revolved around selling things that they never actually saw.