Oh blast! This thesis writing business is really beginning to rile me up now. Because, you see, it's a whole lot of charade to begin with. Like any sort of bookkeeping, because that's what it really is, it's one daunting, limitless ocean of morbidity that is wetting my feet as I take my first steps with the intention of wading across. And to reach the land on the other end, I have but a skiff with a spatula for the oar. There is no humor involved and I am not allowed to make it interesting. I cannot write sentences like, 'While the academic world was nestling in the arms of its own complacency, it was hardly aware of what was brewing in one man's mind.' I have to be chronological and am not allowed to keep the best for the last - I cannot build it all up towards one nerve racking, palpitating sentence, 'Yes, my dear Mr. Hamilton - you've had it all wrong. Please have a seat for the shock of it all may be too hard for you to bear.' There is no room to exaggerate, to metaphorise, to embellish, to dream, to give voice to the passion that one does indeed feel sometimes in academic research.
In the golden lightning
of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning
thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun. (-P.B.S.)
No, I am not allowed to do any of it. Rather, I must worry about how to expand the amount of my work so that it at least appears as if my last 4 years have not been completely squandered. At 66 pages currently, and with hardly a hope of going beyond 150 (doublespaced mind you), my contribution hardly appears a gushing spring of knowledge. It's more like a gentle, dying trickle from a broken tap in the middle of a parched desert. And Masters students routinely clock 200. I think I'll have to fiddle with the spacing, and tinker with the font, adjust the margins, and tamper the text in order to post such gallumphing figures.
Maybe I am exaggerating but that is one peeve that I have with the whole process of 'growing up'. There is something behind this that I feel strongly about and often feel saddened by. It's that we do not exaggerate often and well enough as we grow up. This ability of making things up from thin air, adorning it with beautiful false ideas, coloring it with dazzling deceitful colors, it not only leaves us to some extent as we grow older, it also suffers as we develop a condescending attitude towards it. And as this vitality shrinks within, we are left predictable, and immobile, all our ideas fossilized into useless sediments - just reminders of times gone by. And some of us go on to produce Ph.D. dissertations so bland, it's more fun a watch a glacier melt.