Morning clouds.

[icecreamemperor]

Today I could see the morning hiding behind the clouds. Little bits of light were tearing through, but slowly. Like the morning might not get here until noon, and even then in bits and pieces.

And, trying to write this essay, I feel a little like poor Mr. Ramsay from To The Lighthouse, counting his way through the alphabet of philosophy, getting stuck on Q. Except it's not that I want to go further, or that I'm stuck at some important intersection, it's that I don't know exactly why. Why am I trying to explain something to someone else that I have already explained to myself? Someone who already knows, in all likelyhood, or who already has his own explanations which he prefers.

I like essays when they parallel a process of self-discovery -- I like writing an essay up until the point where I feel like my own discovery has stopped. This makes procrastination a double-evil: the longer I put off writing the essay, the more likely it is that by the time I go to write it, I will already know everything I want to say. Why bother writing an essay if I'm not going to learn anything new? The longer I polish my own thoughts the thinner they become. Maybe this means they're not good thoughts -- but I don't really think that matters to anyone, given the academic context.

What matters is, I had them. The essay is my testimony: here, I had some thoughts. Of dubious quality, of no use to anyone except me, except for my own development.

I feel like I should be able to write a big 'X' across a page and hand it in. That would satisfy me -- why shouldn't it satisfy the educational system? It would be an honest X, I'd stand by its content... what's the point in lying about your own mind?

--

Or maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I'm addicted to regret.

Comments

[shutupbetsy.livejournal.com]

I liked Mr. Ramsay, somehow.

Mr. Ramsay

[angularanonymid.livejournal.com]

I like him, too, in a way, though I think the whole 'A-Q' passage is intended as fairly brutal satire; it can be read as Woolf's parody of what she understood as stultifying male logical-sequential thinking: certainly in contrast with her much more abstract, rhythmic, lyrical, 'feminine' methods--he style and structure of 'To the Lighthouse' are anything but 'A-Q'...

We are given a lot of reasons to despise Mr Ramsay--at least at the beginning, anyway. But the beginning is deceptive, because it's focalized through one of the children (James), and it's a while, if I recall, before we get a passage focalized through Mr Ramsay. It seems we get the other characters' perspectives (generally unkind) on him before we get to glance over *his* shoulder, so to speak. Still, I think Woolf sympathizes with Mr. Ramsay at times. I think of the closing scenes of part one, with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay reading separately but together, aware of each other, but silent--damn, that's a moving passage! One of my absolute favorites in Woolf. The Ramsays are also, sort of, portraits of her parents. And you can feel that personal resonance, I think--the Ramsays just seem to resonate for me much more than the Dalloways do. Damn, that's a wonderful book. I wrote my thesis on 'The Waves,' which I love dearly, but 'To the Lighthouse' is her best.

[angularanonymid.livejournal.com]

I hear you, I hear you. You've touched on the whole problem with academic writing, and, in a way, the whole problem with the English profession as it is. So much pressure to publish; so much pressure to do 'original' work. 98% of published academic writing is crap, or if it's not crap, it's uninteresting, or even if it's interesting it's usually so poorly written that it's unintelligible. I don't think I'm cut out for it. Like you, writing, for me, is about discovery. It's not really 'writing' if it's dead. An 'essay,' in the original sense of the word (see Montaigne), is an attempt, literally a 'trial,' a go at something. But that sense has largely been lost. The voice of the writer has been devalued. Scholarly writing in the humanities should be *interesting.* Stanley Fish once said something like, "the job of the critic is not to be correct, but to be interesting." A lot of people didn't take too kindly to the remark, and I think he actually rescinded on it, but I know what he means, and I believe it. Agh. It's just very frustrating. I want to teach at the college level, but I don't think I'm going to make a run at being a tenured professor at a major research institution. I don't want to have to make a living on 'original' research and frequent publication. Too much pressure. I'd rather teach and write for discovery. Agh. Anyway, I enjoyed reading your little rant. Sums up how I feel about these things. And how I felt writing my thesis.