Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

“Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs. And they said it with a kind, patronizing lilt that betrayed what they truly meant: alt academia meant failure. The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.

Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

She reflected on the horrors of embodiment. In many ways, she thought, the Shades had it much better.

For Plato, the First Court punished those possessed of a timocratic soul—the soul who purported to love justice and honor and beauty, but who cared more about preserving the appearance of such things rather than making the sacrifices necessary to fulfill those things themselves.

As a child she had learned that white was all the colors wrapped in one, and she found this profoundly unfair; that one could have seen rainbows everywhere but instead, with weak mortal eyes, saw only plain light.

Everyone was so afraid of the Lethe—keep away, they said; stay dry—but why didn’t they understand it was mercy? All the stories were wrong—no siren’s call was as alluring as the sea itself, and the quiet dark beyond the shore.

Sex was not a noble desire, it was such an embarrassing capitulation.

a combination of traits that only talented men like him could be, for the world forgave them any number of transgressions so long as they dazzled.

how wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

“You’d like to find out where the boundary is,” said Elspeth, not unkindly. “You’d like to know when it goes from feeling pretty blue, to thinking you wouldn’t mind if a bus ran you over, to actively stringing a rope together and kicking off a chair. Is that right?”

People liked you better when they thought you needed them. The girls she met at conferences were like this too. You made some noises about harassment and condescension and the Plight of Being a Woman, and they’d flutter all around you, instantly on your side. Wounded attachments. The delirium of shared suffering.

Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience.

That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.

Alice, however, was still convinced by the impossible mean—the idea that there might exist some perfect line between femininity and subjugation, wherein if she could only wear clothes that were both perfectly attractive and perfectly modest, she could both enjoy the attention that being a woman in the department got her while also commanding respect as a scholar.

Oh sure—she’d professed disgust in public, and then in private wondered if she was pretty enough, delicate and thin enough, to attract that same attention.

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

“Hm,” he said. “I don’t think we compulsively seek death.” “Speak for yourself.” “I just think we got tangled up. But we’re still trying to face the light.”

Geniuses could be excused any idiosyncrasy. They would forgive an ailing body, Peter determined, so long as they were intimidated by the mind. And oh, what a mind he would become.

Peter was too astonished to explain that his particular illness rather never let him forget how embodied he was.

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 .

cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.

“If I die, I die,” said Alice. “But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough. You know that.”