It occurs to me that I have said some negative things about grad school of late. Also of early. And yet I read an article just today that made me nostalgic for the kinds of issues that used to dominate my consciousness on a regular basis.
Have I gone soft? Am I forgiving, or simply forgetting? Who knows. Herewith, a gradschoolisticle of stuff I miss about those glory/gory days.
1. Heated debates about Freud in particular. (I'm mostly in the "against" camp, but I get the appeal, especially for literary folk.)
2. The sense that one's primary purpose, for the next 5-7 years, was to learn. OK, that probably sounds even more naive now than it did then. In reality, one's primary purpose was--or probably should have been, if one had any kind of instinct for material success, which I most certainly did not--building one's career. You mean it's your second semester and you haven't published anything yet? Aren't you going to MLACLAHASA? Still, living in an environment explicitly dedicated to intensive learning and intellectual discovery was quite a privilege. And being identified primarily by my ideas, while not always beneficial, was an interesting experience.
3. A very nice (for me) balance between responsibility and freedom. Papers had to be written, classes (at first) had to be attended. Still, I had a lot of unstructured time, and could get things done mostly in my own way.
4. The intense focus. Sometimes that got a little too much for me. But the ability to spend days or weeks on the meaning of a single sentence, maybe even a single word (yes, I was a New Critic at heart) seems exceedingly refreshing to me now--when often any act of reading, as opposed to skimming, feels like a chore.
5. Many of the people.
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