Late to the party...come on in!!

Having gotten through the graduate student approach to reading new material (an approach that assumes no one else knows it either, that it has been ignored, that calls for taking the new material seriously etc), I went into a more depressive mode (oh, this is already well mined, it's too time consuming to learn a whole new area, I don't know any of these people etc), I think I may have moved to a third phase, that of arriving at a great party at a welcoming place.

More specifically, it has seemed to me when I read in a new area (say, communist critiques of the Soviet Union, dissidents that remained communist and used that as their critical position against real existing socialism), that I am arriving rather late to a party that has been going on for quite a while. This can be disheartening at first insofar as I have little idea of the overall archive, the flows of the discussion, etc. The disheartening effect can intensify in that the initial feelings of new, exciting, open, flow into a new set of feelings of old, established, closed. At that poiut, it's easy to feel more secure in simply turning around and going back to one's own discursive habitat.

Or, one can feel like one has come home,  that is, arrived at a party that combines new and familiar in an exhilirating way, maybe even in a way that excites those who have been at the party for a while .  Those who arrive early at a party may not sense it's rising excitement level; they may be deeply engaged in a discussion, perhaps a little tired of waiting around, finding the snacks a bit stale or deeply, not quite ready to have another drink but not ready to go either; the arrival of some new people can stir more energy, the conversational groupings shift, everyone has more r0unds, and the excitement builds, the folks who were there earlier now feel like they have been part(y) of something cool, great, even better than they imagined--even if they have to backtrack, explain, hear or tell some of the same stories--the reiteration is an amplification, a building, a repetition with effects.