Wednesday, September 28, 2005
(10:18 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Worry Redirection
I'm worried about many things right now -- the slowness of academic publishing processes, the inadequacy of my scholarly work over and above my coursework, the fact that I probably need to find work soon and that that will further constrict my extra-curricular writing activities, the fact that I'm not as far along on my Patristics directed study as I had hoped to be for when Ted gets back from Korea (where he's been for a month, primarily in order to finally really learn Korean -- truly an overachiever), the fact that I've started to watch too much TV (but the shows are all so good! I'd be a boring person if all I did was study and occasionally blog), together with some minor second-guessing (primarily based on having purchased an insurance plan that I'm now worried I won't be able to afford -- not, mercifully, larger scale questions like my choice of grad schools, etc.), some personal issues, etc. -- and I wonder: How do I redirect this energy elsewhere? Worrying really does use up a lot of energy, and so ironically I can end up totally exhausted from a day of doing precisely nothing.Is there really a method for cutting off the worrying and actually doing something? Or is the search for method actually the problem here?
I'm going to go into the other room now and read some Nietzsche. I'm getting better at German. Every so often, I come across a sentence where I don't have to look up any of the words and where the structure seems totally transparent -- those are the moments that give me hope. I have to present next week over the first two essays in Genealogy of Morals, which I will have gotten through in German by that point. It will either be the best presentation in the History of Man or else the very worst -- operating at a qualitatively different level of familiarity with the text than the rest of the class can go either way.
But I love the text -- it's so much better than Beyond Good and Evil. In fact, at least from where I stand, The Birth of Tragedy, for all its many flaws, is a much better text than Beyond Good and Evil in terms of being productive of thought -- at least an argument of some sort is being advanced. With Beyond Good and Evil, I feel like there's nothing to hold onto at all. I've never read Zarathustra all the way through before, and that's coming up after Genealogy -- I am worried that I, and the rest of the class as well, will be just totally baffled.
