Perhaps this happens to everyone of us who's writing a dissertation, but doesn't it make you somewhat mentally unstable to sit for a quarter of a day, copying texts you're hoping to comment on, typing and deleting, drinking cups of coffee, writing sentences that don't tie together, fabricating paragraphs that don't flow smoothly; a few hours go by; only a few pages are done, and of course in a very unsatisfactory state; they have more quotations than your own words!; very disappointed, you stop writing, deciding to read recently published book chapters and journal articles that you feel you should know in order to be qualified as a "specialist" in your fields, but immediately find them bad, so bad that you become furious; you don't understand why the papers of that quality could have been published!; but perversely, nothing is more pleasing than to discover such insanely banal pieces, because their very mediocrity could be a promise that your no less mediocre ones might have a similar chance of miraculously getting accepted in some near future; but then opening must-read books and classics by leading scholars, you realize, no, that's a silly hope, that's impossible, you can't compete with these guys who write about that for decades; and exhausted, heavy with useful knowledge you learned from such excellent books, you leave scholarly sources behind, going back to original, "primary" texts once again; then, suddenly, those texts shine brilliantly clear, so much so that you get exalted; at last you find something meaningful to say!; but luminous moments don't endure, fading away quickly, and dull sobriety returns back, persuading you that's an illusion, the only way to move on is to move slowly, painfully, miserably, desperately, blindly, word by word, sentence by sentence, line by line, page by page? It seems that I'm living in this ever-falling spiral this week. Anyway, the back of the neck aches badly, BADLY.
