lindsaydotcom | Lindsay didn't have the heart to just throw away the email without preserving it for posterity.

I think everyone knows by now that I get a ton of really bizarre correspondance from prospective students. Most I toss because they're silly and pedantic, but occasionally one comes across my desk that I have to keep or to share. A few years ago a faculty member forwarded me an email he received. I've held onto it for three years because it was just a classic gem of someone who's obviously very intelligent and at the same time very socially unstable. And it's quite frankly just a hoot to read. I was purging things from my files yesterday and found it again to my delight. I no longer want to hold onto it, but I can't bring myself to throw it away without saving at least some of the highlights. The entire document is ten pages long, but I selected my favorite highlights to copy below.

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We both agreed that my chances of getting into the University of Toronto are about the same as my driving home sober on any given weekend so I took his advice and did what I do best: I conceded. And, at the moment, I haven’t anything to lose. I’ve been falling apart for nearly a decade. It’s not evident to the untrained eye of course, I can still sustain the appearance of cohesion, but I passed by the lion and the she-wolf long ago.

I graduated summa cum-laude while holding down full-time employment—and a twelve-hundred-dollar a month bar tab. With my politics and intolerant disposition, I can assure you that I was not a recipient of grade inflation. Everything I got was given begrudgingly and with reluctance. Then again, the university is hardly what it used to be, and I didn’t enroll under the pretext that I would be learning much of anything. I signed up because I feared that I would have a grand-mal crack-up if I didn’t get out of the demoralizing series of jobs that I had been filling. I reached a point where it didn’t matter what I did—so long as I didn’t need to invest much time or attention doing it.

I went to college out of equal parts exhaustion, curiosity, and malice. And I plan on staying. As long as the grades and the cash keep coming, I’m not going. The government has graciously (or foolishly) allocated $148,000 in completely legal debt for me to read books and I intend to spend every dime and read every book.

I’m not proud about work and have been fired from more jobs that ten average people are likely to hold in their lifetime. Doesn’t matter to me in the least what I do to put a roof above me. I can find honest work in three hours if need be, but I’ve rarely derived any satisfaction from any of it. It is neither fulfilling nor degrading.

Just so there are no misconceptions, I’m no bohemian—though I tend to live like one. I prefer the company of men to women but think pederasts are psychologically malformed. I won’t hesitate to write someone off on their inflection alone and I doubt I’d date a woman with a tattoo. Further, it would be well night impossible for me to take a grown man seriously.

… but I part ways with Christianity over the idea that all men are equal in God’s eyes. They are not. And Socialism is just a mental disorder along the same lines. Neither are cultures equal; anyone who believes such blather is either barbarian, an anthropologist, or a self-hating fool (and not infrequently, all three).

Every class seems over represented by non-bathers, single mothers, activists, and derelict offspring of derelict parents. A cursory look reveals a student population covered with tattoos and open sores; at least half have piercings through their tongues, nipples, navels, eyebrow, ear, noses, and genitalia—“three on the lip and a couple along the asshole”—more than a few have venereal diseases, they carry skateboards and drugs are ubiquitous; the majority have never read a serious work of literature or philosophy and fewer could understand it if they did. Their attention—their will to concentrate—has atrophied in most of them to about one-minute, tops; which about leaves them with the capacity to ruminate on the nuances of bathroom graffiti.

I realize it’s been said before, but nothing good came from the 1960’s. No other generation in human history has been so imbued with moral posturing, high sanctimony, and outright hypocrisy than this rotten lot of baby boomers. I hold the last three or four generations of Americans in the lowest regard. They have bad hygiene, crappy attire, and have no cultivates appreciation for anything. I disdain their political imbecility, their pop culture Weltanschauung, and I revile their taste in art almost as much as I detest their cultural icons. Even their gait is slovenly. They appear to revel in being subhuman. Everything about their lives is coarse, dirty, and small. Whenever I visit their apartments I half expect to bump into Virgil.

When the second airplane struck the towers I was watching on the Internet. I went down to the recruitment office a couple of days later but they said I was too fat and too old.

I have a huge soft spot for the Russians—especially the poor souls who were trapped by the Bolsheviks. I consider Solzhenitsyn to be one of the truly heroic figures of this century. (On the other hand, Stalin did us all a great service by killing so many of the imposters pretending to take the place of the old intelligentsia. They deserved every bit of what they got for fomenting the murderous revolution in the first place. And Trotsky’s taking an axe in the head was both a vindication of history and one of the high-points of this century-right up there with Nuremberg, the obliteration of the Berlin Wall, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.)

I don’t know how this is going to come across, but I am absolutely certain that I have at least one work of real genius in me and unless I find some way to get it out, it will most certainly turn septic. I guess I’m not looking for so an institution or a mentor so much as I’m looking for a mid-wife—or enough time to do the work I long to be doing rather than what I have thus far been obliged to do.

I’m unhinged, true enough. I don’t believe in democracy or equality or suffrage or much of anything else being peddled by what passes for the cognoscenti these days. Though I abhor their shitty little god, I even hold a secret hope that Islam rises up to really fight, and that the West, and especially the eunuch states of Europe gets it right in the teeth.

The West will not lose from a lack of wherewithal but from a lack of purpose, from a miasma of self-doubt and self-loathing. And nowhere is the absence of seriousness and contempt for high civilization more evident that in the university. From where I sit the barbarians appear to be winning that campaign.