I haven’t done much in the way of painting lately due to my impending thesis deadline (coming up in less than a month now!). I’ve hunkered down to write and have essentially become a “thesis hermit.” My hermitage is my dorm room, where I’ve shelved the 200 books I pilfered from Widener Library.
I’ve heard of seniors having thesis-related dreams before. Most of them involve the frenetic writing process (missed deadline nightmare, anyone?), but my one and only thesis dream to date had nothing to do with the actual writing of the thing. Last night I dreamed I was actually inside my thesis, in a sense: my topic is “Mountains as sites of epic spiritual struggle in the Middle Ages,” and I subsequently spent my dream clambering over a mist covered ridge. (I’m not sure where the ‘epic spiritual struggle’ came in.)
I woke up at 3am, keyed up from a combination of imagined mountaineering and real caffeine, and knew I had to commit the image of the mountain ridge to paper lest I forget it by morning. And so out came the pencils—and here is the result.
“Why is it among the most glacial mountain peaks I find the greatest warmth?”