Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Aristotle does not use the term “celestial space worm,” but it is a nice way to visualize his physics.

Peter never crowed or condescended, he was just guilelessly better than, and that made everyone feel so much worse.

Lembas Bread (stale, cardboard-y nutrition strips popular among graduate students because they took seconds to eat and kept one sated for hours. There was nothing enchanted about Lembas Bread; it was just the extracted protein of tons of peanuts and an ungodly percentage of sugar).

But her funding clock was ticking, and certain body parts were rotting in a basement. There simply wasn’t time.

you know how it is with grants

She was in no state to work, and she had not been for a very long time. What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

they all fell away, they seemed so irrelevant, for why would you study static truths when truth had just exited left?

Just two weeks later an enchanted harp recovered from Assyria put half of Harvard’s department into a paralyzed slumber, and this greatly overshadowed the Cambridge fire on the conference gossip circuit. (No counter-spells were effective; the cure at last involved enormous amounts of amphetamine, which a surprising number of grad students had in ready supply.)

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

She filed these words under “platitudes from adults who think they know better than you,” and then she promptly forgot them.

He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.”

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

The atmosphere mattered. You became the thinker the library expected you to be. Nice libraries whispered: Everyone who has passed through here is very important, and so are you.

Her tranquility cratered.

tried not to let her despair creep. Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. 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.

There was the question of whether all this was character-building asceticism or simply the demands of poverty, since none of the graduate students made close to a living wage. But nobody liked to talk about that.

The point was that Professor Grimes hadn’t tormented just anyone. He’d tormented them. Because they were strong enough to withstand it. Because they kept the faith. Because they were special, and worth the effort, and because whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling.

The Weaver Girl in her simpering giggles reminded her of the heroines from Chinese dramas her mother liked to play when she was a child—scheming, nefarious creatures who were always trying to shove their rivals down wells.

scylla...

There were no thoughts they could not share. They reached that rare state of comfort with another person, in which speaking out loud was just the same as thinking in your head—nothing filtered, nothing hidden.

And really that was the happiest Alice had ever felt—how wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

It was too lovely to watch a mind at ferocious work.

Here she belonged. Here she could utter things, could be honest about where her mind had drifted, and they wouldn’t look at her like she was mad. All her life she had bumbled through social contact like the only actor who’d forgotten to look at the script. She had been the weird one, the troubled one, the one no one wanted to sit with. But they were all the weird ones here. And here no one punished you for caring too much, thinking too deeply. Here you could jump down any rabbit hole you liked, and everyone would tunnel down with you.

There was something compelling about water; its ability to absorb, and make nothing and whole both at once. And the Lethe, by comparison—oh, the great, enveloping Lethe. Less a river than a wound in space.

The Lethe is all the memories that ever were. The Lethe is infinite. The Lethe is all the colors on the palette mixed into black. The Lethe doesn’t erase, it only absorbs.”

only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it. You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once.

How could she explain it? What was devastating was not the touch—he had hardly been violent with her. No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.

This is the source of our unease. A paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

She sensed its inner sin—a biting, evil thing; that force that poisoned bonds, turned friend against friend and kin against kin. She could only describe that feeling as a violation; the sharpest, severest pain, that which pierced in her inner depths where she felt most safe.

“But this isn’t at all a confession,” said the monocled Shade. “This is just a manifesto.” “Well, I’ve nothing to confess.” “Oh, why do you think you’re in Hell then, you idiot?”

“I’m not sure the Furies have read Foucault,” said the chairman. “You must consider your audience.”

“It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time. Time crawls here. You do anything to feel.”

Oh, God, she thought frantically, why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars . . .

For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.

This did not dissuade the bad thoughts. They were always playing in the forefront, in bright colors, on full volume. The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to full volume as well, so that the airwaves canceled each other out, and the cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.

this works until things start shutting down

She had never before felt the high of sheer entropy. Indeed it felt so good to just make things fall apart.