The pleasures of slow progress

No, this one's not about justifying any working habits I'm picking up down here...

I just discovered a good explanation for my deep love for my old field of expertise, Classics and Ancient Philosophy, even though I am not terribly active in it anymore.

The explanation is bit sobering as well. It is from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance, p. 101: '[...] the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort.'

It's simple: the more people you have working in an academic field the faster it will change. A solid article or book in Classics thus goes a long way in time nowadays. My favourite example is the field of doxography, esp. Diels Doxographi Graeci (too much work to explain, but you can google it up for yourself), but there's plenty of other examples. Thus one's work in the field of Classics seemed less ephemerous than studies in other fields, where work could be outdated in a matter of months, of course simply because there s such a massive academic effort going on there. A cynic would add: that's right, and because so few people bother to take isssue with results in the field of Classics. Well....