Rediscovery
A gentle evening summer breeze comes through the open window as I sit working late in Graduate Student Services, in Berkeley’s Doe Library. It’s re-discovering an old favorite. Finding true quiet that hums with productivity is harder than I’d have expected at Berkeley. The only sounds here are a train in the distance, sometimes the click of another student’s keys. I see people working on literature theses, their tables piled high with books.
Like views and breezes and humming productive silences, I have rediscovered language, nationalism and citizenship this week. The kind of belonging that is about not only passports, but civic duty and common social identity as well. Like a daffodil sprouting from an old bulb in spring, I hit upon a policy to use as an entry point for my study of immigrant integration in Spain, and the other pieces started growing into the beginnings of a real dissertation.
Now I hear a plane. The breeze gets cooler through the window but the late evening sun still comes warmly through the blinds in laticed stripes. I’m thinking about re-reading old writing, pulling and reshaping to fit it to the shape of my dissertation proposal. I’m thinking about writing new sections. The pieces from orals and years of reading taking a new shape. And for the first time this dissertation proposal feels possible.