"Katabasis"

[fiefoe]

R. F. Kuang's journey to the hell really shows her strong feelings about grad school.

• Dante’s account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T. S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner’s account was under serious dispute. Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas—well, that was all Roman propaganda. Possibly there were more accounts in lesser-known languages—Alice could have spent decades poring through the archives—but her funding clock could not wait.
• Peter trudged into her circle, which was very rude. One should always ask before entering another magician’s pentagram. “I know what you’re planning.”
• And she had a volume of Proust, in case at night she ever got bored. (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.”
• No one saw Professor Grimes’s eyeballs stretch out of his face before popping like grapes; his intestines spooling out and around his body like a jump rope, crisscross applesauce;.. A piece of Professor Grimes later identified as his liver had, happily, landed square on that segment of the outer circle Alice had fudged.
• all the students and faculty were forced to attend mandatory safety workshops run by colleagues bused in from Oxford, who with every sneering comment made it clear that they never would have been so foolish as to let a researcher explode himself all over a lab.
• Every now and then a research paper surfaced on why male voices were better suited for magick, citing reasons of pitch, depth, or steadiness, and they always sparked a big hubbub involving outraged statements from women-in-magick societies and apologetic statements from journal editorial boards.
• * Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.
• * 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... canon, was that the natural laws of the world were set but fragile. You could cleverly reinterpret them. For brief periods of time one could even bewilder and suspend them, so long as you spun the right web of untruths. Linguistic trickery, logical conundrums, it all worked. All you had to do was find a set of premises that, even if just for a split second, made the world seem other than what it really was.
• * Over in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage. In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and poststructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound. But all the best magick was still done at Cambridge, and good, traditionalist Cambridge was dedicated to the bare bones of the art. Analytic magick. Chalk, surface, paradox... The paradox—the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.” 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.
• Everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall once again.
• Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired. She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward. She believed that department pettiness could not touch you,
• So this was the Viewing Pavilion. Alice had read about this: first in Penhaligon’s Primer on the Unitarian Hell, and then corroborated by most ancient Chinese sources. Here was the bridge that all souls crossed before they passed into the Underworld for good
• the idea is that the emotional attachments we invest in objects that have been around for a very long time are indeed quite shallow compared to their histories... Our particular encounters with that wood are fleeting in the long span of its existence.”.. “So your plaque might have put us in the proximity of every carpenter who’s ever lived.”
• “Hm? Oh, yes! He says we should make the dead come to us.” Peter slung off his rucksack and knelt to the ground. “He suggests a sacrifice.”... Objects have long histories, but foods—the particular ingredients that go into them in those exact ratios, and the routes they have to pass to get there—those are extremely temporally specific.”
• The literature on Shades and corporeality was scant and undecided. Some scholars thought Shades were preserved unwillingly as they were in the moment of their death. Others argued Shades had the agency to manifest however they liked. Either way Alice felt it rude to ask.
• The other Shades looked miffed. Alice could actually see the shape of their irritation, spiky wisps of gray miasma drifting about their shoulders.
• “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!” <> “But you’re dead.” This had gone too far; Alice had to intervene. Undergraduates did this often—they worked each other up over the wrong ideas, compared problem sets and confused themselves so much that untangling their thoughts took twice the work. Undergraduates were five blind men and an elephant;
• then she employed that most annoying of argumentative tactics, which was to agree, while making it clear they thought her reasoning was stupid. “All _right then.”
• but then all the sojourner accounts were from a period when the world was smaller, when a more manageable number of souls came and went. Possibly this wall was a recent development. A sort of postwar chthonic immigration control.
• A Shade had bumped past her, elbowing her so hard she nearly fell to the ground. He seemed to have invested all his corporeal memory into that elbow. It hurt.
• From this angle Alice could not tell how far they’d come, whether they’d reached the halfway point or not. All distance and texture were reduced to abstractions, lines on canvas, and all she could see on either side was an endless stretch of jagged white, then sky, or ground. There was no pacing herself to the finish. All she could do was ignore the passage of time, and the rapidly approaching limits of her own endurance, and keep throwing one arm up over the next. A watched distance never shrank.
• climbing: She was pleased by the tenuousness of it all. How quick the ground would rise if for one moment you stopped paying attention. If you loosed a breath, made your peace, and just. Let. Go. It felt good, knowing how to fall. Feeling out the worst. Knowing that was an option.
• Alice had no idea what gave her this confidence, except that none of the other sojourner accounts mentioned a carnivalesque fun house terrain. Everyone else had enjoyed a pleasant ramble of the standard Euclidean sort, and it just seemed fair that they should as well.
• * “We only need to get down,” she told Peter. For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school.
• She’d grown up in the Rockies. She had hiked Yosemite and the Appalachian Trail without help. This was what had convinced her she could make the trip. She’d done the White Mountains. How much worse could Hell be?
• “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.
• Of course one could demand why anyone would put themselves through such nonsense in the first place. But here most academics’ thought processes mirrored the logic of Pascal’s Wager... Similarly, you could choose to believe the job market would work out for you or not, but if you bet wrong and opted out of the cycle, you were missing out on the infinite miracles of the Life of the Mind.


• Peter had to pee, and Alice had to do the other thing, which she piled sand over like an embarrassed cat. She reflected on the horrors of embodiment. In many ways, she thought, the Shades had it much better.
• * “The river Lethe runs perpendicular to all eight courts and marks the boundary of reincarnation. So Hell looks less like a pizza anus—”... “And more like,” she continued without clarification, “I don’t know, a Möbius strip. ... He hummed as he flipped through her notes. “Where did you find all this?” “The Dunhuang cave texts.”
• “Suppose it’s less like a … what’d you say, a pizza anus? Less like that, and more of—well, a spiral.” He drew a diagram below hers to demonstrate. <> “Suppose we’re in hyperbolic space,” he said. “Take the parallel postulate out of Euclidean geometry, and assume we are dealing with negative curvature. Then we might visualize the courts as a twisted pseudosphere, bounded on the outside, but infinite on the inside—”... When you’re inside it, of course it’s going to look like a flat plane. We see the freaky coral because we’re three-dimensional beings visualizing two-dimensional hyperbolic space.
• * “Anyhow, since Hecate could not have predicted the innovations of Lembas Bread or Perpetual Flasks, we know we can survive for far longer than she supposed,” said Alice. “You shouldn’t take seriously anyone who’s expressed an opinion on food before the twentieth century.”... “Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?” “I mean, if the math checks out.”
• “Well, don’t bother,” she said, though she did feel a stupid flutter in her chest. Lab work used to be like this, she thought. Peter’s jabs, her rebuttals; two different methodologies clashing until, always, they settled on some compromise that was closer to the truth.
• * The recently deceased soul was disoriented by his tearing from life. Hell had to resemble the familiar, otherwise he could never move on. <> This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces:
• In the 1960s, the philosopher Michael Huemer argued for the plausibility of reincarnation on probabilistic grounds that most scholars have now come to accept. According to Huemer, we have reason to believe that time stretches infinitely into the past and into the future. If time is infinite, the probability that our singular lifetime happens at this very moment, at this very speck on the line, vanishes toward zero. So either time is finite, or we live more lives than one... Theologists and religious studies folks do not like this argument for the same reasons they don’t like Pascal’s Wager, which is that it seems to mathematically cheat to conclusions that religions have taken thousands of years to articulate.
• Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand.
• It was the absence of undergraduates, she decided. It was undergraduates who made a university come alive, with their clumsy hustle, their self-importance and newfound freedom. Undergraduates were fresh blood. They asked questions. They brought ideas, and when they couldn’t come up with ideas they at least brought problems.
• He had the slightly lopsided smile of lifelong pipe smokers
• * “That’s enough to put you in Pride?”... “That one likes to remind folks that Dartmouth is in the Ivy League... “Had more of a comment, not a question.
• Alice recalled then that very few of the affable pipe-smoking fellows in college were that genial through and through. The manners and smiles were always a veneer for something a bit rotten. Good old-fashioned misogyny, usually. Racism on a good day. Snobbery in most cases. Sometimes dementia.
• * “I am not dim. I am simply uncompelled by this syllogism.”... “Oh, it’s nonsense,” said Alice. “I’m shocked he hasn’t read Carroll.” <> “It’s a big problem for logic, actually!” Peter flapped his hands in the air. “Why should any two premises compel the conclusion, valid though they might be? No one has a good solution. You actually can’t prove modus ponens.
• The Lethe seemed an inverse of this principle. It was all darkness. But the moment you fixed your eyes on any one point it began to disambiguate, until you saw that what seemed like sheets of obsidian were in fact waves of color, and those waves of color formed memories.
• In most respects Heraclitus was a complete ass, and he was famous for bizarre proclamations like “Everything is its own opposite” and “All things in the universe are manifestations of an ever-living fire.” Despite this, 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. The Lethe, then, equated forgetting with rebirth. The continuity of one’s soul was tied inextricably to the persistence of one’s memories. When memories were gone, a new soul was born.
• “Why not?” Peter threw up his hands. “You think he’s too good for petty sins. You also won’t believe he’s done something really bad. So what, then, Law? What’s the Goldilocks mean of acceptable badness for dear Grimes? Where do you think he’s landed?”
• Those bones were, indeed, bonded together by gleaming, powdery chalk. Something or someone had stitched these bone creatures together by magick techniques too difficult to fathom—first because inscribing pentagrams on living things rather than a flat surface was still deemed impossible, and second because the inscriber, whoever they were, was not even present. No Magician alive could induce such effects outside a pentagram.
• The efficacy of chalk depends on where you dug it up. In England, the trusted standard for magick chalk is the Barkles brand, mined from closely guarded deneholes along the Thames. The most expensive chalk, used only in very important public demonstrations and dissertation defenses and the like, is Shropley’s Premium—
• Gabriel’s Horn: “It’s a paradox, Law! It’s all a bit abstract, I know. But I think if I can draw the right equivalencies, we might bound the infinite space of Hell into something like—a shortcut. A wormhole, sort of.
• Dante’s circle was full of lovers; mutually indulgent sops whose succumbing to their passions hurt no one but themselves. For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.
• 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.
• Desire was a student center. <> This greatly disappointed Alice, who despite herself had hoped for something out of those terrible Orientalist paintings—gilded sofas, hanging grapes, roast boars with apples in their mouths, and lute players in loincloths. Or even a deranged sight out of a Bosch painting
• He had confirmed his pentagram worked, and now he could turn his attention to jumping all the little hoops, the years-long process of publishing intermediary proofs before he could do anything useful with this result. Alice was secondary... And so Alice had to content herself with the mere knowledge that, among all his students, Professor Grimes liked her best. The evidence was written in her skin.
• She did not tell him how easy it was to lose herself in the wash, how it happened every time she let her attention slip. She did not tell him, I have to rebuild a staircase by the hour to keep in mind who I am, where I am, and what I am doing. He couldn’t help her, after all; he could only pity her,
• “I mean, we’re in Hell because of him.”
  “For him.”
  “Right.”
  They looked at each other with the brotherly fondness of foot soldiers, ones who had been on a very long journey, united by their love for a common general.
• He did this often over the next few years. Every failure of hers was cast in direct reference to Peter’s success. You’ve coauthored one paper. Murdoch has coauthored three.
• Surely no one else lived like this—burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences. Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety. Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.
• Alice did not like this. 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. And though she could not fit the Weaver Girl into her schema of Hell, she knew of every tale about bargains and wagers with the divine.
• “How else do we decide our dominant strategy, then?”
  “Just assume we are one person. Your ends are my ends and vice versa. What hurts you hurts me. Our goals are staying together, and pursuing what is best for ourselves as a joint unit.”
  Alice did not think this was how real relationships worked, at least not from the ones she’d witnessed, but it did sound nice in theory. “Where did you learn that?”
  “Immanuel Kant.”
  “Wasn’t Kant a virgin?”
  “He was a great philosopher! He revolutionized metaphysics!”
• * Peter did not belong to this genre. This was an entirely different type of feeling, and Alice could not consign what they had to the trash heap of romance. This was love, a love she had never known; At last, she thought, this is the real thing—this gradual unfolding of another soul, charting one’s course into privileged inner territory, making discoveries of which you felt you were the first. Alice loved her work for just this reason, so why wouldn’t she fall in love with people, too?
• it was a mere fog to her now. And even if she could remember, she suspected it would feel absurdly distant no matter what, like a life lived by two entirely different people—younger, happier, more innocent people. They were not the same people. Distant cousins, maybe. Passing resemblance.
• She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time. But without those hazy recollections, without the historical fact that she had once giggled helplessly with her head lolling on Peter’s shoulder, she had no significant relationship to the Alice Law who was falling in love with Peter Murdoch at all. 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? <> And if that was true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction.
• “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.” The silks hoisted Peter in the air and left him dangling there, twitching like some grotesque overgrown larva. “You’re all part of the same story. The same ending, every time. I know your script, and I can rewrite it. I am doing you a favor.”
• * The first rule every graduate student learned was that at the base of every paradox there existed the truth. That you should never fully believe your own lie, for then you lost power over the pentagram. That magick was an act of tricking the world but not yourself. You had to hold two opposing beliefs in your head at once. You had to know your way back. <> But Nicomachus and Magnolia had been living within increasingly complex webs of fantasy. It was inevitable—they had finally lost their grip on reality, had actually fooled themselves into thinking they had power over life and death. They were not magicians anymore.
• “You don’t reincarnate if you die in Hell. Hell already operates on another metaphysical plane. We’re all soul stuff here. When you die in Hell, it’s not just your mortal body that disintegrates—it’s your soul stuff, too.”
• Curry’s Paradox. Commonly taught in Introduction to Analytic Magick classes, this was a silly play on conditional statements and self-reference that could, just for an instant, make true any arbitrary claim. Consider: If this statement is true, then pigs can fly. Call this statement S. Statement S has the structure “If S, then P.” If you write it out as a logic proof, you will discover you do end up proving S true, for you do end up writing “If S, then P.” So the statement S is true, and pigs can fly.
• Banach-Tarski copies didn’t always work. For one thing they always seemed flimsier. If it was food, it never tasted as good; if wine, it lacked depth—as if it knew it owed its existence to a mathematical loophole. They had a bad habit of randomly vanishing on you—two decided to reunite as one—but Alice couldn’t do anything about that.
• “Why, the True Contradiction,” said Elspeth. “The Dialetheia.”
  Alice nearly dropped her plate with excitement. The power of a true contradiction—Contradiction Explosion—was the first thing anyone learned in logic class. Ex contradictione quodlibet—from a contradiction, anything follows. If you had a True Contradiction, then you could prove anything. Indeed, it exploded your boundaries of proof. She had been taught the silly, informal version: if you could accept the simple contradiction that one and two were the same, you could prove you were the Pope. You and the Pope are two. Therefore you and the Pope are one. More rigorously, once you had a logical contradiction in hand, you could inject any statement into a proof using disjunction.
• It’s only I barely know you, and all that. And it’s not like there’s dozens of True Contradictions to go around.” <> There was an awkward silence—not unlike that which descended on a room of scholars who realized they were all interviewing for the same job.
• Alice felt a fierce protectiveness then, though rationally she knew Professor Grimes needed no defending on her part. She knew he had flaws. She only didn’t want to hear it from Elspeth. It was important to her that Professor Grimes was no one’s demon but her own.
• * Let her believe that they were the same; victims in the same story. 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.
• “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.
• The problem with a blood-soaked pentagram was that it was very difficult to hide. Theoretically the size of a pentagram did not affect its potency—and indeed, in Roman history the Celts had drawn great chalk structures around entire hills and forests to trap their enemies. But it would take time, and more blood than they had.
• * “Well, I think the biggest misconception about Buddhism is that karma functions as this grand tally that you count up at the end of the day.” ... You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.”
• “Damn it.” Peter jumped down. He smacked a hand against the wall. “It’s Penrose stairs.” <> She recognized the patterns as soon as he said it. They’d been thrust into a nil-geometry space; they’d been spinning around an illusion. The stairs were never going to lead them out; for the stairs, impossibly, made constant ninety-degree turns in a continuous loop. They were stuck in someone’s Escher trap.
• She had only to ignore the stakes, and remain calm as she went through all the standard routine of undoing another magician’s handiwork. Find the pentagram, find its flaws—weak phrasing, awkward constructions—and then undo the unreality with another layer of artifice …
• * She couldn’t stand those screeching activists who believed the only politically just thing was to become a lesbian. Burning bras, trashing dolls, the constant invocation of that scary word discrimination—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. <> How hard could that be?
• 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. The chances this mean existed were vanishingly small, but still Alice clung to this hope.
• Helen leaned forward. “The difference between women like me and girls like you is that we always understood the battle was never over. Your cohort has chosen to live like the rules don’t apply to you. And it seems to work. I salute you girls, I support you. I wish I could have done the same. But you can’t just cry wolf when things don’t go your way. What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”
• 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. It was all such a fucking cliché.
• Small spells to send messages to their loved ones or to wish their loved ones peace in death, I don’t know. But I did see that one name kept coming up over and over again. Erichtho.”
  “This is a fantastic rabbit hole,” said Peter.
  “Quite.” Alice laughed sharply. “I know, I’m sorry. But you know how when you’re running yourself ragged on a research project and nothing sticks and then you find that one thing that holds promise? Like it’s glowing, calling out to you? Like a single star in a dark sky?”
• “But see, it works because you’re not trying to bring the soul back,” Alice said. The rest she said as quickly as she could; robotic, just reading out the summary. “You can dispense with the cosmological problems of life and death and reanimation and all that, because this version of Grimes doesn’t get to interact with the living anymore. He wouldn’t be properly alive. He’d just be a voice. An imprint. He’d be mine. All mine. My thing. Mine to play with, or experiment on, or interrogate,
• * the more I realize, I only want this because it’s what he would have done. It is such a perfectly Grimes solution, you know. Brutal, efficient, shocking. He never went halfway, he only ever went through. And some part of me, deep down, is actually excited. Because I keep imagining him waking up to see what I’ve done.” She gave a helpless laugh. “And I keep fantasizing he might actually look around and tell me good job.”
• He felt terrible about the way he’d left things off. Never before had he felt he owed anyone an explanation, because never before had he become so close to someone that his sudden disappearance could impact their life. Before, Peter had simply slid into the background, out of orbit. He passed in and out of friendships, always a prized acquaintance, never a constant.
• All this time, thought Alice. All this time they’d both been drowning, and thinking the other was gloating at them from the shore.
• * even Dante’s vision of Hell includes exceptions. The Underworld yields and bends. It is unpredictable—it follows no order but its own. It is just as Borges said—the certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, renders us phantasmal—and yet we are not phantasmal, not annulled, because nothing is fully written! There is no coherent set of axioms that explains it in full. Just like maths. Ergo, there will be some way out. And I will find it.
• “Very temporary,” said Peter. “I’m afraid this one is particularly flimsy. And against something like an Escher trap, there’s really no room for doubt.”
  “Then how do you know it’ll work on me?”
  He cast her a soft smile. “Because you’re not a very good logician.”
• “Stop it.” Peter flung up his hands. “Just stop. We are not fighting over who gets credit for his murder. Who cares about the details—”
• * Why couldn’t she ever tell Peter what she thought? Always they had been bodies hurtling just out of one another’s orbit, when all it would have ever taken was an honest word. But that was precisely what magicians lacked; there were no honest words, only puns and illusions and constructions of reality so convoluted that you couldn’t keep track anymore of what was real and what wasn’t.
• The principle we must accept if we want to go on with our lives is that no paradox makes the world stop functioning as it should. The laws of the universe get their say... No—the reason paradoxes trouble us is because their absurd conclusions make us rethink all of our premises.
• 肠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.
• At some point in the night, she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree. Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty fucked with you on purpose.
• There was no line in the sand, nothing that declared a hard and fast distinction between the cruel man’s blows and the tyrant’s cunning manipulation.
• But the question now—now that she was no longer motivated by the instinctive fear of death, now that she had no urgent reason to keep running—was what came next. She had a bigger problem on her hands now, which was the point of living. Living meant a future meant some teleological end, but Alice could not figure out what on earth she was going on for.
• her sins felt like they had been committed by someone else, for reasons she could not fathom, and the only defense she could offer was that along every step of the way, from start to finish, each next move had in that very moment seemed the only rational thing... She wanted to confess all, except every way she cast it made it seem that much flimsier, trite and convenient, as if her whole life story were beads knocking about an abacus. “I was just trying,”
• They obeyed the structure of a dissertation precisely—the flow of chapters, the slow development of arguments over three clearly delineated sections. There were footnotes, appendices, and even a dramatic conclusion, with stakes and implications for the field: “Why I Therefore Deserve Redemption, and a Ride Across the Lethe.”
• For whatever reason Lower Hell was full of authors justifying their sins, and from the looks of it, producing many failed drafts.
• At Cambridge it seemed the standard for a good dissertation was asymptotic. The closer you got, the more obvious it became that you would never hit the limit. Eventually what decided things were the restrictions of time—you turned work in on the deadline, perfect or not. But there were no deadlines in Hell.
• “But now this is exciting!” Gradus spread his hands, palms open. “A tragedy, a revenge story, a rescue, a race against time. Will you escape the Kripkes? Or will they hunt you down, before you can finish your fallen comrade’s quest?”
• His coat started whipping around both their heels, as if he could encircle her in a vortex of his irritation. “Aren’t you upset?” he demanded. “Aren’t you devastated?”
• “Laplace’s Demon is real?” <> “Oh, yes. He likes to wander the bazaar and talk people into thinking nothing is their fault. Sets them back decades in their progress.
• These Shades were delighted. They ran to the fire the way children would dash barefoot into an ocean. They raced toward the bazaar not to rescue their peers, or salvage the supplies, but to join in the fun.
• “Scared? Cerberus is the most exciting thing to happen down here.” Gradus looked so pleased with himself. “We hope he will trample us. We beg him to maul us.”
  “Why?”
  “Because it’s interesting,” said Gradus. “Pain is interesting, and you can bear anything as long as it’s interesting.”
  “But how—”
  “It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time.
• * 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.
• Always the sand forms a little peak. A mountain, reaching. Then the weight becomes too great, and the sand collapses outward, and the bottom flattens again. Time doesn’t build to a climax, you see. Only a little peak, always about to collapse. That is how time moves here in Dis. Tiny impulses forward, the illusion of a build. Then the cycle repeats, again and again, while all the time the bottom accumulates.
• For in a world where none of the rules were stable, why not believe in an apocalyptic reversal of the moral order? Why was that so unlikely? Wasn’t there a perverse beauty to it all? What conviction—to do wrong and stand by it—how much bolder it was than to do right simply because one was afraid.
• Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.
• * There was no end point, it didn’t count for anything. She could reach a state of transcendental calm and it would still count for nothing. When she woke up a hundred years might have passed, and there would still be a hundred years to go, and a hundred more after that. This bargain was terrible. All that effort, and no reward.
• this was the worst punishment of the citadel, of Hell itself. This punishment they had wrought themselves. If Aristotle and Leibniz were right, and time was just change, then time was done for them. But not for everyone else. They still had to feel it, chronicity with no telos. And to be placed outside of time—denied everything that moved in cycles, birthing and growing and aging and dying; denied ancestors and descendants; denied any place in the tree—while at once forced to feel every inch of its slow, inexorable progress—
• Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language. What are doors and windows? <> “Doors and windows keep you in,” Alice breathed, and raced forward without stopping. She did not even need to draw a pentagram for this, the illusion was so flimsy. She had been through it many times before; she had seen this trick at the entrance to her own department. “Doors and windows can be shut. There are no doors and windows, and so the way is not shut, and so there’s nothing in my way.”
• the sheer, flat wash threatened to erode her sense of self until she was just swimming in a bath of unstructured memories. Faces here; feelings there; but what did it all build up to? Who did those recollections make? <> The strangest effect of all this was that her memories stopped bothering her so much. Her skull no longer felt so painfully tight. Instead her thoughts were given space and time to spill outward; a flow from which she could step outside, pick and choose.
• it was the sheer grossness of the corpse. She had not been around this much living viscera, the moist and squishy components of life, for so long. Hell starved the senses. All was so clean and quiet down here, so sterile; but the cat’s stench was proof that life was messy, full of blood and guts and gristle. Decomposition meant life. She wanted to roll in that mess;
• It was the strangest thing. Here she was marching to her almost certain death, and it was the first time in a long time that she felt her life mattered. This urgency, this rush—like all of her, body and soul, was pointed like an arrow, taut with purpose. Something better than anger, despair, or vengeance. She could feel her heart beating, the blood coursing through her veins, from her heart to her fingertips, clenched tight around her blades. When she spilled it, it would matter... No, she did not want to fade into those churning depths. Refused to petrify into comatose forest. She wanted to crash brilliantly against something, and when she went she wanted to leave a mark.
• * You could do quite a lot with bones, it turned out. Alice extracted all the spiky bits—claws, vertebrae, the end of its tail—and gathered them in a handkerchief. She reasoned she could clutch them in her knuckles and, in a pinch, gouge at cheeks or eyes. The cat’s femurs were long and hard. She bashed them against a rock and found herself with a set of makeshift daggers. Delighted, she weighed them in her hands. They were lighter than her knives and better fit her grip.
• “I am not joking,” Gradus said. “Snort the chalk.”
• For a moment it really did seem like he was considering it. But it was so much less awkward not to. Goodbyes were worth the effort only when you meant to see someone again. Gradus merely dissolved where he stood, solid grays fading to a shadow.
• She swung her blade in the prettiest, most elegant arcs. The philosopher Zhuangzi once met a butcher who was so practiced in his arts that his blade never dulled; he slid his cleaver through the hollow spaces, where he met no resistance. This is the Way, thought Alice; I see those hollow spaces. She sliced so cleanly through their spines she carved them apart in one blow.
• Erichtho’s notes had warned of this. The soul is wrenched from the underworld and forced violently into a dead or dying body that is not his. Everything is wrong—every muscle, every bone and ligament—everything is too large or too small and so, so foreign, and he is in utter agony, every nerve in his body screaming, on fire. <> It was so hard to read tone in Ancient Greek, but Alice thought the witch must have felt some wicked satisfaction in writing this. Alice had chuckled too, upon reading the pages. I’ll give you a body, Professor, I’ll bring you back. We’ll see how you like it.
• the Lewis Carroll story. “Balbus’s Essay.” Such a funny tale. An item submerged in liquid will displace liquid equivalent to its mass, but when the liquid is displaced, the water level must rise, but if the water level rises, the item is submerged further, and so the water must rise further, and on and on, until a man at the edge of the sea, who even just dips in his toes, must soon be drowned. Shouldn’t he?
• the way he twirled chalk, the way he pinched his wrist when he had nothing to fidget with. The sound of his laughter. The crackling electricity of his thoughts. She put all these remembrances in a little box and locked it and held it at the forefront of her mind, as if she could keep it there with sheer force of will. Give me Peter—let me be a monument to Peter—if I am an otherwise empty shell on this desert, a broken record that plays one memory, that will be all right.
• * For a moment she found this prospect terrifying—that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill in the rest.
• * A Dialetheia: Alice heard Peter’s voice in her head. The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look.
• “Rules are so boring,” said Elspeth. “So is infinity. You can’t knock about a closed system forever; the possibilities run out. I think, then, sometimes the gods like to play. Just for the hell of it.” <> “Peter thought something similar,” said Alice. “It’s how he interpreted Gödel. There are always exceptions. There’s always something unexplainable, meaning at some level everything becomes possible.”
• Lewis Carroll had theorized this—how else did you conceptualize life and death, the membrane of passage, except as continuity?—but no one believed him. Take a strip of paper, twist it in the middle, and connect the ends. Very good. Now you have a ring, a three-dimensional object you can hold in your hand. But it only has one side. The inside is continuous with the outside. Now do the same thing with a four-sided handkerchief. Twist the edges, line them up, and stitch it all together so that the inside is continuous with the outside. All is external to the bag, which means all is also internal to the bag, and so the bag holds the world.
• But, Alice reminded herself, she had been through quite a lot in this past week. She had faced down the ends of time; had escaped from the Rebel Citadel; had vanquished the Kripkes; had ripped a cat open with her bare hands and eaten its heart and made its skull a shrine in the deserts of Dis. These sorts of experiences were very transformative. They gave her a bit more clarity on—well, everything.
• Looking at him then Alice was reminded of a line from The Greek Anthology, a text Grimes had asked her to mine for language puzzles but which Alice had lingered over much longer than she should have, astonished by its beauty. She gazed at Peter and thought, I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.