Meaningful additions to human knowledge

For the first time, I have read a reference, in a work written by another person, to my own research. It feels good. It feels like I've done something real and of significance. It feels like maybe I am actually attached at some wispy peripheral spoke to the great web of human knowledge.

I wish I could keep this feeling and recall it in times of grad-school-induced despair, in "dark places when all other lights go out." But this delight, and that despair, will fade as all things do, back to my baseline curiosity about the world. And yet now, for a moment, it is good.


This post's theme word: countervail, "to counterbalance or to neutralize."
This post is written like: Vladimir Nabokov.