My Dissertation

Walking home from school today, I realized that I could pretty well sum up my entire dissertation (or, more to the point, the whole of Longinus' On the Sublime) in about one sentence: If you write, you are a legitimate writer in exactly the same way that the greatest writers of all time were writers. (One could logically extend this thought to any other activity: If you paint pictures, then you are a painter just as Picasso was a painter.)

This sounds a little starry-eyed for academia, but it is an interesting thought. Another version of the same thing: only a small collection of logistical difficulties prevents any person from getting in the ring with Vitali Klitschko. It is otherwise a physically and conceptually possible thing to do. Most people wouldn't even feel demeaned by the ensuing knockout.