lots of scraps

While thinking over that “never been a Heideggerian” point, I went back to see what was in my dissertation folder on this hard drive. A lot more is in that folder than I remembered. (This is always happening to me: uncovering giant pieces of writing, sometimes form the fairly recent past, whose existence I had completely forgotten.)

The most interesting thing I found was a dissertation “work journal” from 1996-98. It’s interesting to look through that and see what problems that are now crystal clear to me were rather confusing at the time. One does make progress over the years, given enough hard work and focus, and it’s gratifying to be reminded of that.

On the whole, it looks like I was a serious, intense, and worried young person, which is also roughly how I remember the graduate student years. If these were someone else’s notes and I were looking at them in the role of advisor, I’d probably tell them that they seem to be onto something interesting, and that they ought to relax and enjoy it a bit rather than worrying so much about not having it completely nailed down yet.