Short Story - Robert Harcourt

Robert Harcourt had been embedded at the very heart of Academia for so many years that he had lost sight of why he decided to climb the Ivory Tower to begin with. 

He was a professor of modern history at one of the oldest and most highly regarded universities in Europe. During the course of his long career Robert had inadvertently made a name for himself by promoting the somewhat controversial view that all major wars were avoidable prior to resorting to major military confrontation. He was not an idealist or a utopian, at least not any more than an intellectual had to be to stay sane in contemporary culture. 

No, the reason he believed all wars were completely avoidable was a fairly rational one; he believed it was primarily due to a lack of education, not just in the usual protagonists of war (the generals, the politicians, the diplomats, the fervent commentators and the military-industrial lobbyists), but everyone. Because a society includes every last individual and if the average man on the street can be maliciously manipulated into supporting a war for political reasons, then the knowledge and education of that person matters just as much as those with their greasy hands on the levers of power.

Robert grew to be a zealous communicator who would jump at any chance to appear on television or radio to push out the ideas that he had shaped his academic career around. Many of his colleagues looked down on him for this, feeling that the job of a historian was to simply analyse historical sources, not step into political spheres to push ideological messages.

Fundamentally, it was his belief in the value of education that had encouraged Robert to dedicate his life to teaching others, for although he was well aware that education is an ongoing process that never fully achieves the aims with which it sets out, he also firmly believed that it’s imperative that we start somewhere.

But years before all that, even before he had turned twenty, Robert fell head over heals in love with a fiercely intelligent and delicately gentle girl named Jennifer and wasted no time in taking her hand in marriage. They had much in common and it wasn’t unusual for them to stay up in front of the fire late into the night chatting about whatever happened to spark their interest. One thing they definitely didn’t share in common was Jennifer’s tragic upbringing. She spent two of her childhood years in Auschwitz concentration camp and witnessed five members of her family, including both of her parents, disappear from her life forever as they were forced to make the one-way journey to the gas chambers.

Jennifer didn’t mind talking about her time in Auschwitz as she thought talking about past trauma was the key to greater understanding and peace, both for an individual and for society as a whole. It was through hearing about Jennifer’s tragic experiences in such saddening detail that made Robert feel a sense of connection with the multi-generational plight of the Jewish people and indeed all those who happened to become, by no fault or choice of their own, the enemies of fascists.

For a few years Robert put most of his energy into his marriage and didn’t care for much else, but four years after they exchanged vows, tragedy struck in a way so great that the direction of Robert’s life would change totally and irreversibly. 

He and Jennifer were travelling through the mountains during their fourth winter together on their way to a quaint little ski resort that was close to both of their hearts. They had stopped in a shaded lay-by half way up one particular peak when another car came around a blind-bend a little too fast. It hit Jennifer who then, due to the unfortunate position in which she was standing, was thrown over the adjacent bank and fell over a thousand metres to her untimely death. Robert was left inconsolable for months. 

It was around this time that he decided to dedicate his life wholly to his intellectual work and passing on his wisdom to others. Some of those who knew him closely say that every single thing he did after the day of the accident was weighed down by the sadness of his loss.

Once he had gained his doctorate in his late twenties after a long period that was not without considerable intellectual effort, Robert was gifted a position at the prestigious university where he would spend the rest of his life. Not only did the professorship have a considerable salary attached to it, the unusual tradition and inherited architecture of the university meant that Robert was also given a large set of rooms above the lecture theatres in which to live and study. 

As years turned into decades, his days had evolved to possess a remarkably similar structure. He would usually get up around 6am and meditate for a while before eating a hearty breakfast fit, if not for a king, at least for a minor prince or noble lord.

He would spend the morning of most weekdays giving lectures to undergraduates or sometimes to professors visiting from a different institution or country.

After a short break for lunch around midday, he would spend a couple of hours replying to correspondence (which would often involve drafting lengthy rebuttals to challenges of his work) and, when he had the time, researching new ideas that interested him. He was also obliged to schedule office hours on some afternoons where he would invite students to come and see him if they needed clarification or advice about their studies.

At around 4pm he would spend the time up until dinner reading and then in the evening he would often socialise with friends or colleagues for a few hours over food or drink before retiring to his study at around 9pm to write.

Many years passed like this. Robert quickly became the dominant authority in his field and this led to his name, despite a certain amount of constant simmering controversy, nevertheless being attached to a significant level of prestige. His journal impact factor was higher than any of his colleagues and he was regularly asked by newspapers, publishers and radio stations for his input on the latest news or cultural minutiae. The dean had increased his salary by a startling amount for a university professor over the years - largely owing to the huge increase in military research grants that made the university’s financial position considerably more healthy - and by the time he was fifty Robert was able to live a life of almost unparalleled freedom. It was not money that motivated him though, he was driven by the desire to change people’s minds.

As he got older however, Robert, without realising it himself, was becoming more and more cantankerous. Maybe it was the ever-rising tide of utterly depressing news that was saturating the intellectual ground or simply the fact that he was getting ever-closer to death as the days ticked by.

Or maybe it was the lack of love in his life. He missed Jennifer more than he realised was possible and although he undoubtedly found fulfilment through his intellectual work, he always felt there was something missing from his life after he lost her.

Robert began to spend increasing hours in the afternoon arguing with students and writing ever longer and more complicated replies to those challenging his work. He also started publishing ever-more scathing elaborate treatises, constructing a complex intellectual framework to defend his views.

As time went by and he became ever-more entrenched in those views, the students for which he was paid to teach began to doubt the veracity of what he was saying. The language that he used didn’t quite match that with which the students spoke and the misalignment of his ideas relative to the rest of popular culture led to his students increasingly dismissing him as old and irrelevant to the world in which they lived.

They would laugh behind his back after lectures at the craziness of the things he would say. Then, after a while, they started regularly sniggering during his lectures too. He would often reprimand those he caught laughing in a rather severe manner but he never once realised that they were laughing at his ideas because, after all, this was the Academy; the integrity of an experienced academic’s intellectual thoughts and advanced ideas, carefully moulded and refined over decades and peer-reviewed in the world’s greatest journals, was absolutely guaranteed. It was Nazis, Fascists, Authoritarians and Dictators who set down limits on free speech and free thought he believed, not the people who live in democracies.

Although his young students were now regularly challenging his ideas in online forums and YouTube videos, his academic colleagues at the university never once thought to question the veracity of his work. Someone who had spent decades in academia climbing to his position obviously had a greater knowledge than those he was teaching and therefore they never once saw the need to take the mockery of his students seriously on an intellectual level.

Professor Robert Harcourt was well into middle-age by this point so the dean of the faculty assured him that his professorship was more than secure. 

His wider reputation on the bleeding edge of global intellectual circles was not so safe however. In the world of the intelligentsia it can take a lifetime to build a solid reputation, but conversely, when a sharp young mind with a reputation of his own to build gets a sniff of weakness, even the greatest of reputations can be all but lost in the blink of an eye. Robert’s certainly wasn’t lost overnight but, over the next few months, cracks certainly began to appear. When students en-masse, both inside his classroom and out , start to doubt the words of a professor with the stature of Robert Harcourt, it isn’t ripples that are sent out into the ocean of global discourse but waves.

A number of savage articles in an influential journal led to a definite weakening of his status in little over a year.

His obliviousness finally crumbled when the full weight of what was happening became apparent to Robert one morning towards the end of the summer term in his sixtieth year. He was giving a lecture on the events that led up to the Second World War and the hand of a particularly outspoken student named Philip shot up while the professor was in mid-flow.

“Can’t you just wait until I’ve finished telling you about the Reichstag fire before you ask your question?” he said after pausing his lecture.

“No. This is important.” replied Philip petulantly.

“Very well. What is it?”

“The Reichstag fire was a complete accident, I’ve read about it, so the whole premise of your lecture is pointless.”

The Professor of Modern History sighed heavily and removed his glasses while he considered how to respond. Any sincere sign of curiosity or inquisitiveness was completely absent from Philip’s face and he was sitting in the third row of the lecture theatre with a subtle smile while barely breaking eye contact with the professor.

“That’s simply not true Philip. If you come to my office after the lecture, I can give you a couple of sources that explain the event in more detail if you like?”

“No, I’ve read all of the sources I need to Professor. It’s clear that what you are teaching is simply not true.”

“If you are persisting to prevent this lecture from continuing Philip, I suggest you remove yourself from the theatre so that we can all continue without you.”

“Philip’s not the only one who thinks you’re teaching nonsense” said another student with who’s name the professor was unfamiliar. “We’re all tired of these ideological lies that you are pedalling.”

“Ideology has nothing to do with it my lad.”

By this stage Robert was struggling to keep his tone of voice under control. He knew full well that we could never really know the actual truth of what happened in the past, but the greater the number of reliable sources one could find that pointed to a certain chain of events, the more likely that chain events was to have happened. In all the years he had been lecturing, he had never had anyone question what he was teaching with such a wanton disregard for the truth as this group of students. He was quite simply at a loss as to how to respond.

A number of students including Philip stood up and began to pack away their books.
“Sit back down this instant” shouted Professor Harcourt, his voice breaking mid-sentence.
His words had no effect and over half the class casually walked out of the large oak door at the back of the lecture theatre.

Robert had had enough. He had reached the point where he thought of his students as utter pedants, terrorising him at every opportunity. They reminded him of his two little cousins that he was occasionally corralled into looking after when he was a teenager. Minutes after his parents left the house, they would be running riot around the kitchen, throwing food, diving under the table and knocking sundry things onto the floor. He tried his best to keep them under control but you simply couldn’t appeal to children of that age using reason. Their minds simply hadn’t developed to the sufficient level yet and therefore one could only take pity on them and attempt to firefight the situation. It was beginning to feel much the same with the students in his class.

That night, Robert had a vivid dream unlike any he had experienced before.
He was a Knight in the Crusades of the 12th century inside a grand complex of halls and passageways that were richly decorated. As he passed from room to room, he saw people being tortured, bodies of an unknown enemy lying motionless on the stone floor, the charred remains of relics, and in one room, a man whose sheathed sword was identical to the one Robert held aloft was laughing as he pissed over the face of a bound, helpless man.

After passing through a few more rooms whose contents carried on much the same theme as the others, he came to a grand hall where a startled young man brandishing a huge broadsword had a scared look on his bloody face. The young man would not yield and as he was standing between Robert and the door at the other side of the hall, Robert was led to believe that he would be obliged to put an end to the man’s young life. The man kept repeating a few phrases in a language that Robert could not understand but the tone of his voice did not sound particularly threatening, if anything it sounded slightly confused and filled with a heavy melancholic despair.

Robert lifted his sword high above his head ready to do the deed that fate had bestowed upon him, but then a soft voice came from out of nowhere. It was a man’s voice and had a firm and affirming tone.

“Put down the sword and help him” it said slowly and intently before Robert awoke with a start.

After the weekend had passed, Robert was dreading stepping outside of his study due to the fracas with his first-year students that had spiralled out of control the previous week. He thankfully had no lectures scheduled that week but that same afternoon he had promised one of his graduate students a half-hour of his time to discuss some problems she was having with her thesis.

As the clock hit midday and the door to his office swung open, Robert’s heart began to race as instead of Vanessa, who he had been expecting, Philip strode purposefully into his office.
“What are you doing here?” Robert bellowed.
“I put down Vanessa’s name on the scheduling sheet” he said. “ I knew that if you saw my name on there, you’d find a way to wriggle out of the meeting.”
“Well in that case, tell me why I shouldn’t kick you out of my office right now?”
“I know you won’t do that because, although I lied, as head of my course you’re obliged by the university to advise me.” 

The professor sighed as it quickly became apparent that the boy had crafted this rendezvous quite ingeniously and his obligations to the institution that paid his salary meant that Philip was entirely correct; he would not be able to wriggle out of this particular encounter very easily.

“Very well, sit down. You have fifteen minutes before my next appointment” he lied.
Philip sat down on the opposite side of the imposing mahogany desk to Robert and took out a large ring-binder from his messenger bag.
“I want to do my anti-hero assignment on Julius Evola, but my supervisor won’t let me. He laughed in my face and said the only way I’d have a chance in hell of submitting it is with your approval.”
“Why on earth do you want to do it on Evola?” the professor asked with a look of resigned dismay. “I explained last month that he was a morally bankrupt rogue who had nothing whatsoever of import to say about the modern world.” 

“That’s because he was a Traditionalist who believed that the modern world has become corrupted and needs radically diverting back to an older, more traditional worldview” Philip interjected.

Robert’s voice raised a few decibels as his anger became more incensed.

“Julius Evola despised and worked to destroy everything that open, inclusive, peaceable, progressive people have tried to do and create. He hated women and anybody who was not a white European. You simply cannot be taken seriously if you proclaim those views. It’s not a question of debate or ideology; it’s simply anti-human to proclaim such things.”

Obviously Robert was an experienced academic and, like anyone who has been embedded at the heart of the Academy for the entirety of their adult life, words flowed easily from his mouth in an extremely persuasive manner. After this particular rebuttal however, Robert felt a rare tinge of sadness penetrate his mind as he started to join the dots and suddenly contemplated exactly where Philip’s terrifying views had led those willing to fully embrace them in the past.
A sudden painful vision pierced Robert’s mind as he remembered his wife’s stories of the horrors she endured in order to survive her time inside Auschwitz and a single solitary tear slowly rolled down his face.

“Like on most things, our views obviously differ.” smirked the young student.
“This isn’t about a difference of opinion Philip. The views that you continuously espouse are not merely harmless ideology. Pushed to their logical conclusion, they lead to genocide, they lead to the purposeful destruction of democracy and they lead to the annihilation of the human spirit. I understand that you are simply being influenced by the books you are reading, the people you talk to and the lectures that you attend but at the end of the day, a person has to be held to account for the views that they are propagating. Society is not a neutral vacuum; every single last word you say has a causal effect.

Civilisation, the thing that we should all try to build and that people like Evola try their hardest to destroy, is our collective effort to be around longer. It’s the action of preparing for tomorrow; a tomorrow that, be in no doubt, wants to kill us. Every minute of every day, natural entropy is trying to conquer us; all of our buildings are trying to fall down, all our food is trying to spoil, diseases are trying to kill us, none of the huge amounts of energy we use appears by magic. We have to work really hard to continually try and stave off all of that threat.

To choose to actively work against that collective project is nothing short of cancerous, it’s the material manifestation of an ideological parasite.”

The argument had escalated extremely quickly and Robert told the student he would be writing a letter to the dean requesting his exclusion from the course.
“You can’t do that” shouted Philip with the tone of a child told he can’t have the expensive toy he had just demanded.
“Oh, you are very much mistaken my boy. See, let me tell you something Philip. Something that will probably just go in one of your ears, and then straight out of the other without so much as touching that little pea in the middle that you think of as a brain. When somebody has reached the point where they see the world the way that you see it, they have crossed a line. They have chosen to step through the door and exit the hall of civilisation, and it’s less of a door and more like one of those steel turnstiles that only let you go through one way. There’re no coming back in. From that point on it’s just a matter of firefighting the situation and stopping the flames of nihilism spreading to other people.”

At this point the anger inside Philip had risen to bursting point.
“Well let me tell you something.” he shouted at the professor with a pointed finger that was visibly shaking with rage, “what you will never ever see while you are doing intellectual gymnastics locked safely inside your ivory tower with your cosy six figure salary and your five figure book deals is that it is actually possible for you, a super famous professor at a prestigious university to be wrong. Also, it’s possible for someone much younger than you, someone who has read a lot less books and hasn’t been published in a single journal to be right.
But more than that; the world is changing fast and rapidly leaving you behind and the more that you think that you are right, the more you let your ego rule, and the more that you refuse to listen to the ideas of other people, the faster the world will leave you trailing in its dust as it speeds off into the future.”

There followed a long period of silence. The Professor was dumfounded. No student had ever stood up to him in that way before and challenged the very principles that he had come to unconsciously take for granted.
His mind was racing. Robert began to question things that he had not thought to question in a very long time.

Everything suddenly became clearer for Robert, as if a fog had been lifted. He stopped speaking and looked out of the window next to his desk. Outside, above the pond in the courtyard below his window, a bird of prey, maybe a buzzard or a kestrel, was hovering intently, its wings beating gracefully. At the edge of the pond next to a patch of tall grass, standing deathly still, was a large red squirrel in total fear for its life. Just when it looked like the bird was ready to dive in for the kill, its wings changed pace and it drifted away across the city.

Robert’s attention re-entered the room, he gently laid down his pen as the glowing warmth of an epiphany spread over his body and smiled with a profound sincerity at the student sitting on the opposite side of the desk.
“I’m sorry” the professor said earnestly. “I think I am beginning to see things from your perspective. Shall we go for a coffee? I’d like to hear what’s getting you down; maybe I can help.”