transport, I asked people what they were reading and why. On my commutecum-book club I met Elke, whose waifish, pale mien and salmagundi drape had something of the elfin in it. In flawless English with a Teutonic lilt, she introduced her tome as Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. A creaky melodrama cloaked in the Arcadian charm of the Welsh countryside, it sounded to me like another wilted postmodern lyric with its anthropoid head up its own Woollybutt. Elke swore on it, though, a self-professed fantasy freak. Despite having been in England for years, she told me, she knows little of the Kingdom’s rich history and lore. With Bail’s phantasmagoria, she was hoping to fill in a few of those blanks. Also an émigré, my efforts at becoming acquainted with British culture have consisted solely of sampling different draughts. I couldn’t help but wonder, then, what so compelled Elke to learn about our adoptive country. Was it an imperative to assimilate in an ostensibly ‘multicultural’ society? Or maybe just a taste for the mysticism of which Anglo24 Saxon history has no shortage? As being
nose-to-armpit in a cramped tube car isn’t apt for asking the existential, I let Elke disembark with the answers. I next approached Peter, who was wrapped around a standing pole despite no scarcity of seats. Turns out he wasn’t going far: a colt City lawyer, his orbit extends as far west as Kensington to Canary Wharf in the east (to Brick Lane, occasionally, but just to be ironic). An obvious master of time management, Peter is reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success piecemeal, punctuating the busy work week with a bit of pop cognition. Gladwell puts forth a formula for fortune in Outliers, noting that certain successful people share some seemingly inconsequential traits. Peter picked it up wondering if he is destined for greatness by Gladwell’s analysis. Apparently, he’s not – he is not Jewish, nor Bronxite, nor seventy-odd years old. When I asked him if he was disappointed, he gave me the kind of wry, self-satisfied smile befitting the much-aspersed City typique. ‘I’m a miserable failure’, he said glibly, ‘I’m not learning anything new.’ I naturally became self-reflective
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