Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain.

A grin split his face. “Alice Law, you naughty girl. You’re trying to go to Hell.”

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

(To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.)

“Half my remaining lifespan,” she said. Entering Hell meant crashing through borders between worlds, and this demanded a kind of organic energy that mere chalk could not contain. “Thirty years or so, gone. I know.” But she had hardly struggled with the choice. Would she rather graduate, produce brilliant research, and go out in a blaze of glory? Or would she rather live out her natural lifespan, gray haired and drooling, fading into irrelevance, consumed by regret? Had not Achilles chosen to die in battle?

Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.

The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion.

All the ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.

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

As always, mathematics induced in Alice the acute urge to weep.

If Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad.

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

This was after all the trick of magick. There was a camp of analytic magicians called the Intuitionists, who argued the following: When it came down to it, magick was not really about how much complicated maths or logic or linguistics you had. Rather, the final push to make a spell work was just the power of belief. It wasn’t about the algorithms at all, it was about self-deception. You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world.

And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?

“You’d think more often it’d be the man. But it’s always the girl. She’s always afraid. She wants to believe him, but she can’t. He’s let her down too many times in the past. She knows he’ll do it again. And in the end, she has to look out for herself.”

It is as Heisenberg said, dear Alice. That modern physics has decided in favor of Plato, that the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but forms, and ideas. And when you have complete mastery of these ideas, when you can hold them in your palm and twist and tease them at will—then you will have stepped closer to God.

He was Nietzschean in the broader sense that he felt life only had purpose if he was constantly pushing himself past his own limits.

No—the reason paradoxes trouble us is because their absurd conclusions make us rethink all of our premises.

The only thing that came close was the Classical Chinese phrase “斷腸,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” 腸 meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.

Hell is a writers’ market.”

“Pain is interesting, and you can bear anything as long as it’s interesting.”

Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all.

Here was the Gordian knot: her memories were perfect, but she could only sort through impressions as they had first occurred to her. And the day of Professor Grimes’s death was so jumbled and confused that, months later, and after a million times of reviewing the evidence, she still had no idea what to think.

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.