It was a startling reminder that thesis-writing was an act of material as well metaphorical distillation. I had built a thesis out of books and notes and drafts, no differently than I had built a desk out of boards and pegs and paint over the previous summer. Martin Heidegger once wrote “Denken ist Handwerk”—thinking is craftwork. This observation, simple and revolutionary, contains within it the assertion that thinkers and intellectuals are bound into the same matrices of morality and creativity that control all humans who build things—that is, everyone.

¶ 9:22 PM