Divide et impera (?)
« I have often watched a dear child […] busy in the evening trying to send his little herd of guinea pigs to shelter, having let them run free all day in a small garden. He wanted them all to go to their pen together; but it was wasted effort: one would stray to the right, and while the small shepherd ran to chase it back into the group, another, two, three would slip out to the left, from every side. So that, after growing a little impatient, he adapted to their nature, first pushing in those nearest the door, then going to fetch the others, one, two, three, as best he could. We must play a similar game with our characters: having sheltered Lucia, we rushed off to Don Rodrigo; and now we must leave him, to go after Renzo, whom we had lost sight of. » (chapter 11, https://it.wikibooks.org/wiki/I_promessi_sposi/Analisi_del_capitolo_11)
And so an “unconscious memory” resurfaces: I turn on the computer and find myself standing in front of my endless to-do list. Every item is a PhD project or an unidentified side-quest. Every item has as many sub-items as there are tasks needed to close that project. An object that has helped me hold the threads together during these 3 years of papers, conferences, internal presentations, thesis students — but that now comes back to me like a boomerang I forget to catch (ouch!).
And so it occurs to me that in The Betrothed there was a moment when Manzoni had so many characters’ stories left hanging that he no longer knew which way to turn — and he tells us so through the metaphor of the dear child.
And here I am too, a dear child who, in the last year of her PhD, struggles to herd this flock of projects back into the pen.
Manzoni, however offers a smart, practical solution: to pick things up again little by little, starting from what is simplest, one at a time, beginning with « those nearest the door ». This approach reminded me of what in software engineering is called “functional decomposition.” Known to friends as the “top-down approach,” decomposition consists of “unpacking” our big problem (top) into many smaller sub-problems (down), independent and easy to solve. Every time a sub-problem is solved, it gets combined back into the main problem and tested immediately, and so on until all the other small problems have been solved, until the big problem itself has been solved.
Apparently this approach also works when it comes to studying — or at least according to the Zettelkasten principle: book/article and pen in hand, while reading the goal is to take ‘atomic’ notes, understandable even when consulted later and individually, but then to place them within our project or area of interest, both in terms of content and physically. In the end we find ourselves with a self-consistent chain of thoughts, which will become the basis for future papers, projects, and ideas. Or at least that’s what I understood from reading ‘How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers’ by Sönke Ahrens, and from watching the playlist How to take smart notes in Obsidian by Joshua Duffney.
And so I start again from here, ready to begin writing my thesis ‘one guinea pig at a time.’
Giulia