Walking with My Thesis: Thinking with Feeling, Cultural Fall, Paradise Lost, ‘Pure Event’ and Some Other Characteristics of a Hermeneutical Exercise

Abstract

Just before lunch time one cumulonimbus July day in 2010, I stood outside the door of the Crescent Super Cinema building at the top of Parkside Lane, which faces on to Dewsbury Road at one of the various intersections between Beeston and Hunslet in south Leeds. The Crescent is no longer a cinema, of course, and it is not so beautifully preserved and maintained, but it remains one of the few splendid aspects around here, and it still has the charm to turn a few heads. Not much else in this part of Leeds has such pulling power; perhaps the proposed new mosque, which rumour has it is going to be built on the place of the old Co-op on Woodview Road, will have one day, but this is a locality whose social and economic decline is present before you in almost every street scene.