Writing a PhD.

Writing a PhD feels like being locked in darkness, in a cage above a sea of worries and dreams. All the stories that you’ve dreamt of writing, all the articles, all the reviews, all the people who should have had the same interest as you …. they all got swallowed by this tiny word: “PhD”. It is only you and the tons of books to be read, and the torments of writing something “original”, and the exhaustion of juggling with one or two jobs, your students, and the writing process. 

Writing a PhD. means Sisyphean work, loneliness, no communication (at least not in this country), a new level of tiredness, giving up a lot of things, desperately trying to find (more) time for writing, and when you finally find a few moments, ideas don’t want to be written on the blank page, and you ask yourself dozens of doubtful questions every day: “why do I do it? Why do I write about a country which is not mine? Why do I spend my free time by doing this? What do I gain from it?”

I think that at the end there will be a sort of freedom, of being able to figure out what to do next, a kind of freedom that I can achieve now, by giving it up, or then, after other months of work …. But freedom, no matter its shape and colour, always means responsibility. We can pretend otherwise, run away from it, make thousands of decisions to prove ourselves how free we are, but one day or another we will realise that we are no longer teenagers (if we’ve ever been that) who can run away from it.

I know that at the end there will still be dark, and there will be no people around, and there will be no professional gain, but if I give it up right now, there will always be present that stone, that regret, for all the years that I gave to it, for all the hopes, for all the ideas and the things that I read, and wanted to write, for that part of me which I try to put on a blank piece of paper. It is the closure that I owe to that part of my own self. Writing a PhD. is like Sisyphus’s carrying that huge stone on the top of the mountain, although he/I know that tomorrow nothing of all of these will have mattered, and that we will have to start over.   

The Rest is Silence

"What if there existed a dialogue among the lifeforms of this earth from which we had excluded ourselves so totally that we no longer even believed it to exist? Could it be that dialogue which we still sense in dreams? Or in those rare moments of peace when the world seems in some sense to be revealed to us and to be proper and right?"

(Cormac McCarthy)

During the last few days, I have been in a continuous battle to find the perfect words. The words which describe the unconscious, the natural world, the cyclical time in which past-present and future are all the same, the words of the unspeakable world. How can you express them? The words of poetry and the words of war. The words of what humanity really is, in its pure wholeness.

There have been ages since my first encounter with McCarthy. It is an exhausting battle, as reading McCarthy has always been. With moments of complete hatred, when you wish from the bottom of the soul to quit and to throw away all his books and all the studies dedicated to him. Moments when you feel small and insignificant when you start to understand how this man’s mind has worked, but there are also moments when you feel sitting at a table with an old friend. Talking about Life. Talking about our favourite writers. You see, I enormously liked Faulkner and Hemingway, and I had never imagined that there is someone out there to play with their style and mix them and create something new. Moments when you sit at that long table and you learn to listen to el corridos, and to the silence. 

It takes a great deal of effort to understand Cormac McCarthy. A great deal of knowledge to see what he’s doing in his prose. And a great amount of insanity to work with his prose. But, as one translator put it,

"I would like to make it very clear that translating Cormac McCarthy would not be even thinkable without being in love with language, with words, with their colour, their dark, mesmerizing power. Why? The answer is simple. Because Cormac is Poetry. Epic, lyrical, whatever you call it, it is Poetry.”