Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try.

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

Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust,

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.

I have crossed oceans of time, said those eyes. I have seen the hidden world.

An unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates tells us. Therefore to seek reincarnation is to gamble with overwhelmingly bad odds on a life not worth living.

A watched distance never shrank.

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

Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

“No way out but through.”

The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand.

The best libraries were like the best churches: old and musty, preindustrial.

As Aristotle put it, complete happiness was some form of study.

to wander back down into that red mortal chamber, to billow among the dust. So they say.”

Heraclitus had made the profound observation that one could never step in the same river twice, because it wouldn’t be the same river, and one wouldn’t be the same person.

“Here there be dragons!”

When it came down to it magick was a wish, a prayer, and a little, anchoring fiction. So was personhood, for that matter. So was a coherent subjectivity. And so was the courage to get up every morning and not plan to die.

“Success.” She fiddled with her glass. “I want a job, and a lab of my own, and several books to my name. I want your office and my name on the door,”

She wished she could lie down quietly and dissolve in the storm.

Magick was ephemeral. You fooled the world for a breath, and then everything went back to the way it was before.

There was a kind of virtue in that ability to withstand extremes. Proof of character. Something like that.

You couldn’t be mad that someone didn’t rate you.

But humans—you live for a breath, you die, and you spend your whole lives wondering how you might stay together in the afterlife, when you don’t even know if that’s what you truly want.”

And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?

happiness was comparative, not absolute.

One should never cower.

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

but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging. What greater pleasure could there be? What else was life for?

the nostalgia you got looking inside brightly lit windows along the street at night; peeking into lives you might just have had.

The difference between greatness and mediocrity was only ever about following through.

it was all so embarrassing, it felt less like a revolution than a tantrum.

It seemed the best way to prove women were not inferior was just to not be inferior.

Girl enters into the academy, and the lads get rough.

he was only interested in doing the hardest possible thing.

here at Cambridge, the scientists came to dream.

“Welcome to Cambridge, Alice. We’re going to take apart the world.”

A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.

And Alice, well accustomed to placating volatile men, knew only to await her punishment.

“Socrates was put to death for being annoying, Socrates’s opinion doesn’t count for anything.”

for all books, like wine, had a readerly aroma that ripened with age, which was why bookstores and libraries smelled so good.

There’s a million things to keep a soul from writing, all in the service of making you better at it. Remember that, Alice Law. Hell is a writers’ market.”

All finely attuned to beauty, and convinced that beauty could be torn away from the divine.”

Why toil, when you could rest in peace?

“Go now. Find your peace.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language.

Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all.

that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but

Stop barreling toward the end point, start lingering in the process.