The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Last week was a good week: I spent all five days in front of the screen and came super close to finishing a full draft of all thirty chapters.  But those last chapters are, for several reasons, pretty challenging, and I had to give up a little short of my goal.  We took a brief family road trip  that I was worried would interrupt my momentum and, I guess, while it did, it also left me refreshed as I start this week.  That’s an especially good thing since in these last chapters my architect experiences a lot of turmoil.  My book does not have a very happy ending.  It’s hard to write, just in terms of working out the narrative, but also because it is, like that other chapter on the Civil War that I wrote about earlier, emotionally draining.

But here at 8:30 on Monday morning, after wading through emails that have piled up, walking the dog and consuming a strawberry smoothie, I am ready to go.  I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and know, like the nifty GIF above, that it just leads to another tunnel, but that’s OK.  Apt metaphor for sabbatical overall, I reckon.

Source for the GIF

Glory, glory, hallelujah

Writers have good days and bad days.  Bad days can happen for all kinds of reasons: being tired or mentally stuck, having someone crap up your day so you can’t really focus, facing a major laptop meltdown, being out of the right coffee beans, or brewing them wrong, or being unable to find the favored mug.

But then there are bad days of bad writing because even if it’s a productive day and the words are going down in some sort of logical order, maybe even with some art about them, the content is just lousy and there’s no getting around that.  It’s the kind of day that even good writing makes you feel bad.

I have been facing days like that recently, as I have made it to the part of my project that unfolds during the Civil War.  It’s hard for a number of reasons.  #1: there’s very little architecture happening because of the basic rule that war is the enemy of architecture–buildings don’t get built during wars.  Lack of buildings presents a certain challenge to an architectural historian, unless she is really into her people, which leads me to #2:  it’s horrible to live during wartime.  Even for my architect, who did not go into battle, but whose sons did, it was awful, and complicated, and hard, for him to watch his country get torn apart and, on a very personal level, deal with having family in both armies.  I don’t know how other historians face writing about this kind of stuff all the time.  Maybe at the distance of writing abstractly about battles and massive troop movements it’s not so crushing as seeing the war through the eyes of one person.  But for me, writing about the war from this one anxious person’s point of view is really, really draining.

Because my subject was a very devout member of his church I also need to dig into the religious history of the period, and that makes the whole matter even harder.  I don’t like thinking about people wrapping up the war effort in religious language that interpreted the horrible conflict between Americans as a necessary part of cleansing the country for greater spiritual purpose.  You read these diaries and letters and then go back to, say, the lyrics of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and it’s really kind of devastating.  It’s all the harder to swallow when just a few nights ago the PBS show Frontline ran a program on Iraq, going back at least to the 2003 invasion.  You don’t have to listen to many of those news clips before you start hearing similar language.  And that makes it all the sadder.

So this was a bad day, but at least it ended with the draft of the chapter done.  That leaves just 5 of the projected 30 to go, and now that the war is over, it’s all downhill from here: just twenty more years, one more bankruptcy, and the death of two more sons before I can let my architect get on to his final rest.

Image: “The War for the Union, 1862–A Bayonet Charge”
(Winslow Homer, 1862), from the Met

That Was the Week that Was

 

In the midst of my bad day of writing last Monday I sort of predicted that the coming week was too full of extra stuff and I turned out to be exactly right.  I was maybe half as productive as the weeks before–but at least there was some productivity there.  The meetings with campus colleagues were kind of a nice social diversion, as was time I dedicated to prepare food that the architecture honor society students demolished on Saturday night.  And I spiffied up our website, so that’s something.

But now it’s time to get back at it.  Not sure that the photo above is really an accurate portrayal of anything, but it sure is an arresting picture from the World Nomad Games that also posed a small distraction for me last week.

photo: Vyacheslav Oseledko / AFP / Getty Images