One of the most enjoyable experiences of my life (so far) was reading
(and reading) Paul de Man's short essay "The Epistemology of Metaphor."
What a sizzling cocktail that was. The amazing and baffling thing about
academic work is how heady and fun it is, but how untransmittable: all
the academics are at the party sparkling in their own orbit. I've been
in rooms with people whose preoccupations seem identical to mine, but
their examples are different: and there's almost no point of contact.
So we loop around ecstatically just missing one another. That's the joy
and pain of academic life (if that's not an oxymoron).
Mairead
www.maireadbyrne.blogspot.com
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