Little lily monster

There is something eerie about the whole idea of creating something that will last - indeed maybe even outlast you. I know the project I'm working on now will most likely rot away in some drawer in some library or on some obscure part of the Internet, but it might actually still be around when I'm gone, even if nobody reads it. That is the power of the written word; to connect time and space by reaching into the future with a crystallized image of what exists at the moment of writing. There is both stability and transience in this, both a movement and a single frozen frame. Reading texts by deceased people is paradoxical - the voice is alive but the body is dead. There is something ghostly about this, but it also invokes a sense of awe. Through writing, you may exist indefinitely.

This is why I hope that the project I'm working on now will be the last of its kind for me. It does not really come from my heart. Academic analysis is sort of like dissecting an organism. You discover how if functions, but the mystery is lost in the process, and sometimes even the life itself. There is the possibility of new thoughts and wonderful ideas springing to life from this method of rigorous examination, but honestly, I'd rather be the dissectee than the dissector. I'd like to do my analyses of texts in my own time, with no papers to be written and no people to be impressed by these. And then I'd like to create my own worlds, my own universes, and let the people who love to analyze have a field day exploring them. But most importantly, I want my work to be readable and enjoyable for the majority of people, without making it banal. In fact, by analyzing Ursula Le Guin's work, I've come to the realization that her style is very much what I'm aiming for, but until I've found my own voice, I won't be able to write anything worthwhile. This is the real conclusion from my work during the last year, but it's also one that you won't find in my paper, so what's the point anyhow? Yet as I write this, I see that this may very well have been the point all along.

So this is how it works. This is how I suddenly sit back and realize that I have found a way to connect many of the incoherent moments of my academic life together into something that points forward. Though I'm not religious, life does have an uncanny way of stringing things together. Or maybe the human mind has, and that is just a product of how we experience the world. Existential phenomenology holds that I am a product of my bodily experience combined with my ego, and that the ego cannot transcend the world itself. However, by adopting a presuppositionless starting point for analyzing human experience, it is still possible for us to transcend empiricist notions such as those produced by natural science, and arrive at the essence of things. I believe that the inexplicable interconnectedness of things is such an essence, and one that cannot - presently at least; we must never get too far ahead of ourselves - be explained empirically.

Life is a little lily monster. So small, so beautiful, so dangerous. Reach for it, and you might have to pay the ultimate price, but isn't that a risk we should all dare to take?