My Year With Proust - Day 160

   "For some time past the words of Bergotte, when he pronounced himself positive that, in spite of all I might say, I had been created to enjoy pre-eminently the pleasures of the mind, had restored to me, with regard to what I might succeed in achieving later on, a hope that was disappointed afresh every day by the boredom I felt on settling down before a writing-table to start work on a critical essay or a novel.  'After all,' I said to myself, 'perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it.  Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.'"

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 866

Now, sadly, I can definitely relate to this passage. This is the very definition of "duh," but writing is hard.  I've been stumbling along on this book project on the epics for a couple years (the idea itself is much older, but it's only in the last couple years when I had stopped running the Global Modules and had returned from Abu Dhabi that I tackled it more seriously).  It's not like I'm not making progress, although it's halting and clumsy at best.  I've "completed" the chapters on the Ramayana (although I'm waiting for the seventh and final volume of the authoritative critical edition to come out late this summer), Journey to the West, and the Shahnameh .  Currently I'm transitioning out of work on the Iliad (although the chapter is in hideous shape) and on to the Aeneid.  After that I only have Gilgamesh left.  Obviously, there are many epics, but I've decided that's enough for right now.  So: Introduction, Gilgamesh, Ramayana, Iliad, Aeneid, Journey to the West, Shahnameh, Conclusion.  I think that makes a logical, and hopefully useful, book.  Will I ever finish it?  Who knows?  This brings me back to the issue of how hard I find writing.  I love envisioning the work, making connections and doing research, but then there is the tortuous nightmare of writing.  One of my biggest problems (beyond the fact that I'm a product, and one that should have been recalled, of a really bad high school and a mediocre college - and, well, I'm more than a bit of a dunce) is that I'm a very inefficient writer.  Although I should know better, I mainly just throw interesting things at the screen, and then hope that through endless agonizing rewrites that it will turn into something profound, or at least recognizable as standard English.  Plus, because writing gives me little joy, I'm easily distracted, which also doubtless explains taking on new projects such as reading all of Remembrance of Things Past and blogging about the process.  However, it's hard to view reading Proust as a waste of my time, and I think it has already helped me immensely, even down to the simple fact that Proust found writing boring (at least in this stage of his remembrance) - and who do we associate more with endlessly writing than him?

So why am I putting myself through this dreadful process?  First off, it's a topic I find fascinating, and I truly love all of these works, so if nothing else it allows me to delve into them again more deeply and more meaningfully.  Secondly, producing a work that would make them more accessible to students or a general audience could theoretically be an important contribution.  Thirdly, I've, inexplicably, had a fair amount of success (in a limited way) in my career (certainly more than my dissertation adviser, who essentially dismissed me as a "reasonably intelligent young man of Hoosier bourgeois stock" [no, I can't seem to let that go]), but I've never had any success at research and writing.  All of my publications relate to either teaching or the Global Modules, which are definitely useful in their own way.  However, as professors we're supposed to be adding contributing to the greater scholarly world, and I do take that charge seriously.  Fourthly, undoubtedly some of this relates to ego, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  And finally (I'm sure there are others, but I do actually have to get to work on the Aeneid), I need to construct a world where I am happy.  I sat myself down a while back and determined that I'm not really that happy, and I was not raised to wallow in self-pity.  You sort out your problems and you fix them, so I made some changes to my life in an attempt to make it more livable, and I'm hoping that writing will be part of that process.