Page 46 of Katabasis

Sometimes she would jolt, and feel suddenly that she was standing still on a spinning plane while abstract shapes swirled about her, calling to her, revealing themselves in full.

The mundane world faded away and she was alone in a field of black, except for the brilliant spots—revelations, directions, connections—dancing in the corners of her vision.

Everything else was so insubstantial! The world of the college; of chairs screeching on classroom floors, spoons clicking in cups, umbrellas trembling under constant rain—it was just a front, she realized; only a flimsy glamour.

Blink and it was gone. It was in the hidden world where truth resided and concepts begged to be understood.

She only had to reach for them, and they would come to her.

Yes. She only had to listen, and she would hear the music.

In her freshman year, Alice had a professor whose lecturing style was defined by deep, spontaneous sighs.

You could tell those weren’t preplanned sighs.

Some professors sighed as a performance, obnoxiously, to inject profundity where really there was none, but no—this professor was simply so overwhelmed by the moment, by the tangled thoughts waiting to be undone and then articulated, that he would stare off into space and look deeply bothered and tap his fingers together until he figured out in what order to convey it all—and then his spindly shoulders would shake and he would rock back and forth, as if he were a mere vessel, and his body an imperfect tool to convey a message from the gods.

Alice’s classmates found it funny. They would imitate Professor Eklund in the cafeteria, the way he sometimes lifted his entire knee onto the table as he rocked back and forth.

What a dork, they said. What a poser, who does he think he is, who does he think he’s fooling?

But Alice knew it was not a front. Professor Eklund was in that dark, spinning plane, hearing the music.

She could see it in his eyes. She wanted to follow him there.

No, prestige wasn’t the point. Elspeth was wrong.

Elspeth had invested all her hopes in the wrong symbols.

The symbolic order—the paper publications, the applause, the job postings, the grants—was not the point.

Even the Oxbridge credentials, which Alice’s ex had assumed were solely what she was after, were not the point.

Those were only instrumentally valuable to secure what Alice really wanted, which was unhampered time and access to the necessary resources to think .

This was why she kept at it for years. This was why every graduate student she knew didn’t mind the low pay, the exhausting teaching assignments, or the nonexistent health care.

They were all doing their best to extricate themselves from their bodies because they’d been told this was simply what they had to do.

The whole system could be broken, and it wouldn’t matter.

They’d put up with anything, only for the promise of access to that abstract plane.

Peter understood. She’d seen the pure, serene bliss on his face as he stood at the blackboard, copying out equations so quickly she feared his wrist would cramp.

That mode of concentration so deep you couldn’t snap him out of it if you tried, and nor would you want to.

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

Anyhow, it wasn’t just pretentious asceticism.

There were the good nights, too. She remembered an end-of-term social her first year, when they’d all congregated at the local pizza shop and ordered a massive sourdough margherita to share.

Even Peter had come that night, and everyone, Alice included, was too delighted by his presence to ask why he’d stood them up a dozen times throughout the semester.

They’d started arguing about dialects and the reliability of regional studies, and from there moved on to debating what it meant to do close reading versus distance reading, and whether it made any sense to impose a third criterion called middle reading.

Alice had never been so fond of her classmates until that night.

It helped that the faculty were not present, and it helped that everyone was a little drunk, and no longer speaking to make the right impressions.

They had the freedom to be wrong, which meant the freedom to get silly.

And they got very silly. What was the difference between Kant’s noumena and Plato’s forms, they wondered.

What was the precise definition of a sandwich, and was it still a sandwich if you ate it vertically?

Was the horizontal definition sufficient to exclude tacos?

Also, where were the aliens? From aliens they moved to Aristotle’s schema of cosmological physics—earth, water, air, the stars expanding outward from the center like shells, and above it all a celestial body—a “celestial space worm,” Michele called it, because it was more fun to think of this enormous, rotating, writhing being causing all the motion in the lower shells because it was thinking so hard about God, the unmoved first mover.

At some point Peter and Michele started debating Michele’s rather dubious theory of personhood, which entailed that people died when they fell asleep, and woke up new versions of themselves that were related to, but were not quite , the person they’d been before.

Consciousness can’t take breaks, Michele argued; when you fall asleep that’s it for you.

“But what about dreams?” Peter asked. “Who is having the dreams?”

“A half consciousness,” Michele insisted. “A soul neither living nor dead. An imprint. An eidolon.”

Peter found this absurd, and Belinda found it romantic, and they all had a go at dissecting its implications before the conversation turned abruptly to the question of whether it was all right to have sex with trains, particularly if it violated Aristotle’s teaching that things should be used for their given functions (“Then what about people who use toothbrushes to masturbate?” Michele wanted to know, which made Belinda blush), and then under what particular circumstances one could , if one wanted, have sex with trains.

For whatever reason this hit a vein, and their voices grew louder.

At one point Belinda and Michele stood up, shouting over the table.

Alice sat watching, cradling her beer, and she was so happy she could have cried.

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.

And no, perhaps their pub debates were not in the field of pure truth that Professor Grimes liked to go on about.

Perhaps these were not the discoveries that would change the world for anyone except for people very sexually attracted to trains.

But was it not at least training for something similar?

To rejoice in the acrobatics of thought—not as Stoics did, which was to manipulate language for mean and personal gain, but to sharpen their tools in preparation for the real digging.

What greater pleasure could there be? What else was life for ?

There was a time when she felt this energy everywhere she went, with everyone she met.

She lived the Platonic ideal of the university back then.

She was purposefully na?ve about it, because a na?ve mind, open to childlike wonder, was the happiest mind in a place like Cambridge.

She liked to drift across conversations in hall, listening along, absorbing the excitement, asking simple questions, and receiving dazzlingly complex answers.

She loved all her interlocutors. The comparative literature scholar meticulously describing E.

A. Nida’s translation theory of dynamic equivalence, and its resonance with traditional Chinese translation theory.

The paleontologists going on about the complete dinosaur skeleton they’d just found in Surrey, and whether it was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs after all.

The dear boys in the maths department cackling with delight over things called knots and manifolds.

Sometimes the shining faith of the scientists rattled her.

For here they were making things, changing the world.

It was the era of endless discovery. The physicians had made an artificial human heart.

The astronomers were peering at the rings of Neptune; the geneticists were eradicating smallpox and stemming hepatitis B; the physicists were working out string theory; the geneticists were decoding human DNA.

It seemed the whole world was spinning faster, growing more complex and exciting, and yet the field of magick seemed stuck in the mud, scholars driving themselves down increasingly tiny rabbit holes over minute disagreements rather than exploding the boundaries of what they could do.

She turned once to Professor Grimes, seeking reassurance.

It’s all sand, she said; it’s fake, it’s just words, just momentary glimmers of an illusion, what’s the point?

And it was one of the rare moments in their relationship that he gave her exactly what she needed.

He was a good teacher, after all; he knew how to mesmerize.

“Schopenhauer argued that all art is merely representational and allegorical except for music, which is the closest thing to pure will,” he told her.

“But I find in our pentagrams something akin to music. Not in its total abstraction from everyday phenomena, but in its ability to pierce through to the center of them. That shining, cloudless plane of truth on which nothing else matters. 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. It will feel meticulous, yes. Petty, fleeting, pedantic. But all the more reason to double your drive, and clutch at every precious wisp of truth you glimpse.” And this sent her away spinning, delirious, enraptured by the hidden world.

It was this simple: Alice loved her work.

It was only the social world, the institution, that got in the way.

Yes, it was aggravating; yes, it was a world of hurt.

But unlike Elspeth, she was not ready to give up on it all.

Elspeth was wrong. It was not devoid of meaning.

There was something still worth fighting for.

Alice had located something in that cloud of symbols, a value that was not nonsense, and she believed in it with her entire being.

She believed in it still. She only needed to survive the rest.