The egg has been laid: I have submitted the manuscript. I will hear in six weeks whether the PhD committee agrees. Changes are no longer allowed, so further tinkering with the text is not an option. After six and a half years, the dissertation is out of my hands, over the fence, and no longer mine.
Seated orphan girl with book, Nicolaas van der Waay
For the past few months I have been working monomaniacally on the dissertation. I mightn’t even write a blog, for which apologies. Now the Great Work is finally out the door and I feel mostly empty. Somehow I am happy, but the real relief is yet to come. I need some time to recover first.
Marathon
A PhD research is a kind of marathon, in my case a marathon with a lot of planned and unforeseen breaks. In it I made exhibitions, gave lectures, fell ill and recovered, checked papers and did a thousand other things. But following all those side paths, I kept coming back to the route of the dissertation.
Sometimes you get into a trance during such a marathon. Then you forget the time and you are in another world. You enjoy the landscape that passes you by. In my case, these were the unknown parts of the nineteenth-century city that my route passed. But there are also plenty of times when your calves burn, when you’re dehydrated, when your whole body protests, and when you can’t see the finish line you’re going crazy.
Now I’m suddenly panting out, there at that finish line. In one hand a bottle of water, in the other a bottle of cava. Completely unreal. Fortunately, Van Eeghen is still sitting next to me, energetic and goal-oriented as ever. He might have been at the finish line years ago, but he was kind enough to wait for me. Now we wait together for the verdict of the committee.
