Obviously, as a historian, I feel I must disagree with Mr. Henley, yet he does have a point. Occasionally in the process of looking back, your mind just shuts down. You can't move forward nor can you move back; everything simply screeches to a halt as your body and mind scream, " "Enough!" I reached this point last week after repeatedly running into stories of sexual assaults on NYC public school teachers committed by students. Horrifying, depressing-- there are not enough adjectives.
But that did it. I needed a break from Fun City.
Instead of working, I have been doing all of that stuff that I suspect the rest of the world runs around trying to squeeze into weekends-- laundry, groceries, yard work, going to the movies, etc. This included developing rolls of film that are so old that I no longer remembered what was on them.
"The boys of summer have gone..."
One of those rolls included this photo of a friend of mine. His pose says a lot about him and, for some reason, makes me think of that line about the ability to capture the "essence" of someone's personality: "Someone who understood him took that." Of course,
if I really understood, judging from his attitude, I wouldn't have bothered trying to photograph him in the first place. His pose also reflects what my topic seems to be saying to me at this moment."Those days are gone foreverI should just let them go, but..."
Looking at this picture, I wonder if, when I go back to work, I'll be able to connect with my topic as I did before. Have I lost momentum, broken the flow? Will I be able to fully reconnect or will there be a perceptible gap inbetween pre-break and post-break writing? Maybe the dissertation is something like a friend you have fallen out of touch with. By taking a break, you lose the essential sense of connectedness, the person or topic becomes foreign to you, and you need to work to discover the new pattern of your relationship.
Hopefully, finding your way back might be easier with the dissertation than it is with people.
