Sphinx

One of the weirder experiences this summer – another minor symptom of the whole lingering plague thing – has been an intermittent feeling of total dissociation from my own publications: looking at books and thinking, well, I know I wrote this, and I can recall the circumstances and motive and so forth, I just don’t feel as if it’s mine. This is probably not unconnected to struggles with getting any new writing done; besides persistent fatigue and brain fog, apparently I need to feel like the sort of person who writes academic sentences for more than the odd hour at a time in order to actually write any – and actually writing some, as I have managed to do occasionally, unfortunately doesn’t seem to do much to convince my psyche that, yes, this really is what I do for a living. I do feel extremely sorry for the various editors who have had to put up with delayed submissions and requests for extensions because of chronic existential crisis.

Today has brought an interesting spin on this feeling: reading through a chapter that I have no recollection of having written (presented to me, six years after I supposedly wrote it, with a request to proof-read and make necessary corrections in a fortnight, but that’s a different story). It is the sort of thing I might have written, it has a few recognisable phrases and idées fixes, and it’s not nearly silly or funny enough to be a parody – perhaps it is the result of training an AI on my published oeuvre and then telling it to pontificate vaguely about the historiography of the ancient economy…

It would be difficult to know what to do with a six-year-old paper of this nature, even if I had a lot longer than a fortnight, if I had a clear idea of what I was thinking when I wrote it. As it is, I’m trying to decide whether the imaginative exercise of recreating my then state of mind is at all likely to be worth the effort, especially given that I would not have the option to rewrite the whole thing if, as seems perfectly plausible, I came to the conclusion that ‘then me’ was wrong and/or boring. Of course what I really want to do, if I had the time and energy, is tweak it into an actual parody…