Naked Singularity
bereft of an event horizon
January 30, 2010 at 4:25 am
filed under the dismal science
I got the questions for my Economic History midterm exam a few hours ago. Stared at the printout in blank uncomprehension for a few seconds; then, bewilderment giving way to panic, I sat back down in front of my computer and started searching for references. It’s a reaction I’ve been trying to drill into my head for the past few months: don’t panic! Just work! And it’s helped, all things considered. For several years now, I’ve been reading mathematical problems and proofs every time one of those late-night periods of melancholy and aimless brooding hit. The math — or, really, having something to focus on aside from my own depressing thoughts — forced clarity into a muddled mess of emotion, and more often than not guaranteed that I was functional sooner rather than later.
The reasoning behind this adjustment to my work habits is similar. Earlier, I felt my panic easing away as soon as I’d found what felt like a sort of foothold in the midst of what I perceived as a morass of vague confusion. Getting hit by the full extent of your ignorance (in the form of “what is this, I don’t even understand the question!”) is always an unsettling experience, after all. But there’s an antidote, difficult as it may seem to actually handle: sailing full force into the teeth of the storm! Onward, blindly!
Or perhaps not so very blindly, because I’ve found that no matter what deficiencies my undergraduate education may have had (and, okay, there were a lot) at least I emerged from it knowing how to do research. I don’t think it’s a skill that can be taught so much as learned, in that there are no hard and fast rules for it, you can sit through a hundred lectures about it if you want, but you won’t really know what it’s like until you buckle down and do it. It’s like math, or if you want to be more specific, the way I learned contour integration. If you do it enough you acquire a feel for how to approach the integral, what contours to use; not so much a mystical sort of knowing, but the kind that comes only with a lot of attempts and the inevitable failures that accompany them.
So when I started searching for articles and references I could use, I already had an idea what to look for, apart from the obvious answers to the questions; as I read abstracts I began to form the argument in my head, establishing what terms needed definition, what structures, in terms of lines of reasoning, would be needed to address the questions. The process seems like it should be natural. A given, when trying to formulate an approach to a certain problem. But I think I can say without exaggeration that I wouldn’t have been able to do this without having slogged through all those research papers I’ve done; not while I was an undergrad, and certainly not before I entered Theory. Research is a process the exercise of which is an art, and like all arts it requires experience to wield and sound judgment to wield well.
Not that I’m saying I’m doing it well, exactly. Maybe passably; right now I already have some sort of outline for the two hardest questions, out of the four I’m doing, forming in my head. But I won’t know whether I’m doing it right, or whether I’m even doing it well, until I sit down and actually begin writing tomorrow. My sixteen-year old self would start writing as soon as she had the vaguest idea of how to begin, but I’ve learned that it’s better to have a cogent argument first, its structure more or less coherent in my mind, before I begin putting the words down on (digital) paper. It helps to be writing know what your end goal is, and that way the development is more streamlined and I avoid the unnecessary segues that I indulge in way, way too often. (This doesn’t count. I’m just rambling sleepily here.)
But it’s very nice to do these tasks and find that, hey, all the headaches and frustrations in the past were worth it, after all. That this does matter, that there’s a reward to immersing oneself in a certain process and waiting for results that emerge only after years of study. That the thinking and thinking and thinking, during inconvenient moments and the gaps in conversations, while waiting in hospitals, between sips of coffee at a cafe — gives one something more than the exercise of the moment. That choosing the hard way — confronting the text, grappling with it, trying (headaches and confusion notwithstanding) to understand beyond surface comprehension, delving deeper into why is it that way, where did it begin — is so much better, in the end. Because now I can look at the references I’ve amassed and the articles I’m printing and think, okay, I don’t know precisely what I’m doing yet, but I can find out. I can work with this. I can turn this into something that doesn’t just parrot what these sources are saying, but rather synthesizes them into an answer that is uniquely my own, written in my own voice, my own words, and my own constructed arguments.
Earlier I was a little upset because I realized that maybe I might be doing things differently from my classmates in the sense that I’m not relying solely on the given readings and have instead downloaded tons of other research papers. And I thought, am I overdoing it? Well, I suppose maybe, if it results in my not finishing on time, but in the sense of effort having gone to waste…
I don’t think it will be a waste. Not at all. The fundamental thing, I’ve found, is time — to let information percolate in one’s brain, to gain more and more until one is finally able to make all these little connections, food and foundation of epiphanies and understanding.
And even more fundamental than that? It’s beginning.
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