Weblog entry:
- Thesis dreaming
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Let’s assume, for a moment, that it’s six years ago.
Goodness, it’s been six years already.
Anyway, let’s assume that it’s six years ago. Just for a moment. You’re working on your thesis, and have been for—well, far too long. You’ve forgone parties, senior year celebrations, these last months with good friends, and simply focused on this senior project. Even part of the summer before senior year, you’d sort of wandered about in this vague haze of “research,” checking out more books on late seventeenth-century literature than is probably healthy for your summer vacation. You’ve been working on the infernal thing so long, you’ve even begun referring to it internally in capital letters—sorry, no, you can’t go out, The Thesis needs to be revised tonight.
And it’s on one of these nights in that you find yourself, furiously writing another chapter before a deadline. Naturally, your time management skills being, well, perpetually shit-tastic, that deadline happens to be tomorrow. So you brew another pot of coffee—your second that night—at around one in the morning, and continue to write.
Or rather, to not write. For while the minutes pass, the ideas fail to come. You strive to be witty, succinct, to conjure up new and brilliant things to say about Lycidas that haven’t ever been said before—but of course, the heav’nly muse isn’t singing a fucking note. So instead, you sit. Edit a sentence. Tighten up the end of a paragraph. And sit. Drink some more coffee, and stare at the screen. Just…waiting.
Finally, frustrated with the single-page view on your word processor, you hit “Print”—all sixty-plus pages of the damn thing. Before the synapses can begin to fire, you’ve grabbed a tape dispenser and started attaching pages to the wall of your dorm. You start at the far corner above your bed, and begin working down and across the wall of your room. Once the entire thing’s pasted up, you begin to read.
Despite your frustration, you can see as you read that ideas are beginning to coalesce, that your thesis is beginning to gel. You can even see the end of the chapter, and perhaps even beyond that to the end of the damn document—for the first time in months, you finally seem to remember where it is that you’re going, why you started, and what you wanted to achieve. The lines are blurred, but they’re there. You continue to read, making frantically happy notes in the margins as you go, energized. As your argument gains coherence, shape, purpose in front of your eyes, you suddenly feel confident in what you’re doing. Justified, even: you can look back on the past four years, and feel that something’s been gained, or retained, maybe even learned. Even if you never use your damned degree again, it’s all been worthwhile; you’ll at least have this beautiful, wonderful piece of writing to look back upon. It’s an achievement, a milestone, something that will be printed, bound, tangible, complete by the time you leave this home of four years, and even beyond.
Then you realize it’s three in the morning, you’ve taped about seventy pieces of paper to the wall of your dorm room—half of which you’ve scribbled upon incoherently. You decide three things: first, sleep is definitely the better part of valor; second, you’re damn glad you don’t have a roommate that could have you committed; and finally, you should probably never tell anyone about this.
Whoops.
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- 10th day of November 2004.
- Filed under Story, Memory.
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