The Importance of Being.. distracted...

09.01.2009 um 21:45

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that I can’t work from home. Forget it. Too many distractions, too few regulatory mechanisms, and I am the last person to dispute the importance of being idle. Fortunately, any student of English suffering from this ailment also commonly known as distractive procrastinitis, can seek to remedy their condition in the library of the English department. It’s equipped with pretty much everything a hard-working heart desires: work stations with cosy lighting, broad-band wireless internet access, and lockers big enough for your laptop when you go for lunch. And plenty of fellow students dogging your every step to make sure you’re really actually working. These regulatory mechanisms range from the brutally metronomical ‘tock tock tock’ of the high heels worn by the over-dressed fair sex, to the occasional tap on the shoulder which inevitably leads to a ‘Let’s catch up’ coffee break.

I quickly learnt to filter out those oversexed metronomes and my coffee breaks by now are executed with increasingly cool efficiency. And so it has come to pass that of all my seminar papers only one was ever written at home. It should thus be hardly surprising that my Lizentiatsarbeit is undergoing the same treatment.

Nonetheless, there is a simple truth in the importance of being idle, or rather, of being distracted. Only just recently I set out for the library with fresh vigour and determination, in desperate search for a breakthrough for the second part of the paper. I started reading up on the theory again, getting back into the groove, etc. This meant reading up on Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume magnum opus Time and Narrative, which reigns supreme over the notions of narrative identity. In search of a tidy aphorism to re-kindle creativity and intellectual fireworks, my pen stumbled across the following tautology:

To write is to be.

No, let’s go a step further than that. To write is to be read. To read is to be said. A chain reaction, like a shower of neutrinos, it electrifies my body and mind. And off I go. Distracted? Without a doubt. But that’s just collateral, and ultimately I had to succumb to the consequent concatenations, and put it all onto paper as quickly as possible. It was like playing a perfect game of croquet in the crumbling courtyard of the mind:

To write
To write is to be
To write is to be read
To write is to be read and to be
To write is to be read and to be re-read
To write is to be read and to be re-read is to be re-written.
To re-write is to remember and to remember is to forget to be
To forget to be is to have forgotten to remember
To forget to be is to have forgotten
To forget to be is to have
To forget to be is
To forget

Sure, the result might remind you of nothing more than poetic tetris, but I am mighty proud of it. As for that next chapter in the lic? In terms of raw number of new words added, I still live in the valley of ignorance. But ask me how I feel? Like having moved a mountain.