Education Quote by Patrick White

White turns the university - a supposedly elevating institution - into a shrugging contingency plan. The line pivots on that quietly damning phrase, "another version of a school": education as repetition, not transformation. It catches a mid-century disillusionment with credentialed life, where the promise of intellectual freedom can feel like a rebranded timetable. The real aspiration arrives after the comma, not before it. What he wants isn't mastery, status, or even belonging; it's disappearance.

"Anonymous particle" is doing sly double work. It's modernist in its physics metaphor - the self reduced to matter in motion - and psychologically pointed: anonymity as relief, not failure. White frames London not as a capital of empire but as a solvent. The city he "already loved" offers a kind of chosen erasure, a way to evade the small-town scrutiny and moral bookkeeping that so often haunt his characters. To be absorbed by London is to be freed from being legible.

The sentence also smuggles in class and colonial hangover. For an Australian of White's generation, London was both cultural home base and mythic stage, a place where ambition could be disguised as drifting. He presents that drift as strategy: if the university disappoints, the metropolis will still provide a narrative - or better, an anti-narrative - in which he can move without being pinned down. It's a romantic thought with a hard edge: the dream of losing yourself because finding yourself has started to sound like someone else's assignment.