The Length of the Journey

"No man ever knows enough about any art," says Ezra Pound. "I have seen young men with most brilliant endowment who have failed to consider the length of the journey." I thought about this when reading Jonathan's post about the "serious dissertation". It's a difficult piece of advice to give, both in general and in the specific case. Whether you say, "don't take it too seriously" or "take it seriously as hell", you are liable to be misunderstood, and then you'll undermine the joy that writing a dissertation can be.

I remember very clearly, early on in my PhD process, reading Jaqueline de Romilly's Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Though it had a very tangential relation to my project, I found its form very seductive. I immediately imagined my dissertation written in the same way. This was actually a somewhat odd idea since the book is a collection of lectures, but my point is just that I got the sense that I might write a very good little book and submit it as my dissertation.

The key to writing a satisfying dissertation is to focus your thesis (i.e., your result) so tightly that a well-written book can serve as a support for it. A dissertation really just is a step on the way to greater things, and you only have limited time to write it. Moreover, that time includes the effort of discovering what you want to say. It's important to make that discovery early.

This discovery, however, is also a decision. At some point you have to decide that you have learned enough to earn your PhD and now you must demonstrate this learning to your committee. Though you will of course have been writing all along, and even writing on parts of your dissertation, it's after that decision is made that your "seriousness" or ambition about your dissertation and, perhaps, your first book, can be determined.

Some conclusions can be supported by a well-organized argument, others need a long rambling work that goes in all sorts of directions and could never be a book and could, properly speaking, never be finished, so you just have to hand it in when you run out of time. When some people say "don't take it too seriously" they mean that you should just write that long, rambling unfocused dissertation, hand it in, and move on. But other people mean what I mean: find a small but significant thing to say. That is: don't take the depth or range of your conclusion too seriously (there'll be plenty of time to make a "major" discovery) but do take the task of demonstrating the quality of your reasoning ... and your writing ... seriously.

Scholarship is a long journey. You want to start off at a measured pace.