I have a premonition – that I will not come back again.

Increasingly - this isn't because of current paper frustration - increasingly I am aware that I am not a scholar. I find it harder and harder - and less and less interesting to write papers. I am losing interest in that part of school, and I seem to have lost the ability as well, this has started somewhere towards the end of third year.

I don't know what will become of me if I don't come back. I can't think of anything terribly interesting - probably drift into teaching secondary school literature, and so on, and that would not be fun at all. And I was - still am only less I suppose - sure that I want to go to grad school. But I also know very well that if I'm excited about grad school it is to do with being in a university, being in class, learning, a library, the mental state you're in. They're just things I need, conditions of living, fundamentals of happiness: and everything else, getting a degree, producing top-notched papers, recognition, these things are not only not very important they seem somewhat banal. A grad student friend said that you must never go to grad school for the sake of going. You must figure out what you want before you go. It is all about professionalisation, she says. But I don't think I can figure it out. And the very word professionalisation frightens the hell out of me. Can't you go to school for the sake of going to school anymore? And Barbara Nolan say that too many people go to grad school because they're good at school and that's the natural next step and not because they're particularly intent on becoming academics or have special passion for the subject. But that's true for me too. I want to go because I want to go. I like learning things, I like being in school, and I'm okay at it. I don't hope that the end result of it will be a PhD and a job as a professor. In fact, I can't see myself as one. By both their standards I am a miserable failure. I want to go for the sake of going. But feeling like I belong in a university, near a library, where I can learn and work, is very different from feeling like I can produce scholarly work. I am surer and surer as the years go by that I cannot. I don't mean that I'm stupid but if I am growing, if these years have changed me in someway then I seem to be developing in a different direction, related to becoming an academic, but not the same thing. I don't know what I am becoming, but whatever I am becoming, I need to be near school for it to happen. And I must come back. Oh. Only I don't think I will. I am starting to think that school isn't for me. Well, if I screw up my current thesis-installment they won't let me continue next semester and then I shall be thesis-less and then no school would want me. And what's the use of coming back if I'll be at some fourth rate school? Not to mention no fourth rate school will want me if I disgrace myself and no one, not even Nohrnberg will write me a recommendation.

And I am afraid. I cannot bear not being here. Too much is at stake. Too much that is important to me depends on being here. I must come back. I will come back. You all know it. And yet I cannot banish this feeling, that whether I want to or not, whether I know it or not, I will never come back.