Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

and so for reasons of both moral obligation and self-interest—for without Professor Grimes she had no committee chair, and without a committee chair she could not defend her dissertation, graduate, or apply successfully for a tenure-track job in analytic magick—Alice found it necessary to beg for his life back from King Yama the Merciful, Ruler of the Underworld.

her funding clock could not wait.

“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”

She would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything,

Take, for instance, the Sorites Paradox.

She believed that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain.

Lmfao

“Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!”

This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.

“Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs.

Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

complete happiness was some form of study.

syllogism.”

She was so tired of the contents of her mind. Her thoughts were so loud; they pounded her skull, it never stopped, it was all too much.

Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn’t afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life’s work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend.

She couldn’t come up with a single research question that motivated her as much as he expected it to. In that moment she couldn’t remember why her research, tedious little projects into linguistic puzzles, mattered

Why don’t you like me anymore? Why don’t you want to be my friend? Questions for the playground; pathetic utterances. She would not say them, she would not confirm for him that she was too dull for his attention.

How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts?

It was this simple: Alice loved her work.

There came a point with almost every research project where you understood it was time to stop trying—that all that time and effort sunk into a once-hopeful hypothesis were simply leading nowhere. And maybe you could try to forge ahead, but once that seed of doubt was lodged within you it only kept spreading, its tendrils growing through your lungs so that you couldn’t breathe or think, and that the more you tried to scrape some positive result from your efforts the more the threads of the project kept coming

The whole endeavor of graduate study was clinging to vanishingly small hopes.

Alice could bear any amount of pain. But she could not bear that shame. It still mattered to her, above everything else, that they respect her as a scholar.

life only had purpose if he was constantly pushing himself past his own limits.

amenable

She always felt so stupid in their advisee meetings, when her mind couldn’t keep up with his racing thoughts. Always she needed clarification; always she lagged three steps behind.

A crack had opened in the world. The door swung open, and Peter Murdoch stumbled out.

his eyes fell upon her, and his face split into that bent, beautiful grin.

How good he smelled. Like fresh pages. Like pencil shavings. Like reading in springtime under a weeping willow, sunlight on her face, grass between her toes.

“Go on,” said Lord Yama. “Be careful you do not look back.” “Really?” asked Alice. “I’m only joking,” said Lord Yama. “Look however much you want. Go on.”