R. F. Kuang

Katabasis

elly

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." 

Comparing climbing to SI in burnt out academics. What a way to describe this. That’s real

Sophia 

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.

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

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.

It would be rational to set limits on yourself before you begin, for example. Or it might be rational to have a friend cut you off. But Cambridge gives you none of these. It just keeps you turning up the dial. Up and up and up. You start getting tunnel vision about it all. All that exists is the payoff and the dial. Until one day my dial broke." She shrugged. “That's really all there was to it. One day I stopped being able to feel anything at all. There was no difference between pain and pleasure. It was all just the same wash. Nothing mattered. And it was only once I got here, once I was fucking dead, that things took on importance again." 

She stopped eating; everything she put in her mouth made her stomach roil. Her hair started falling out. Her skin turned gray. People called out to her, people tried to help. She barely heard them; she did not answer. She heard a strange buzzing in her ears all the time. The world felt muted and distorted, as if she were moving underwater. Still she kept going. She didn't know what else to do. Her plan, if she could call it that, was simply to be an automaton until the center could no longer hold; until she fell to pieces against her will.

"But don't you care about anything?" "I suppose I should." How could she explain to him this numbness? It wasn't that Alice didn't care, it was that she had cared so much, and a thread had snapped. Some fundamental capacity was broken. She felt hurled out of the world of meaning, feeling, attachment. She couldn't bleed anymore. She was drained already. Scripts were all she had now, and they were enough to keep her walking, but not enough for her heart to start beating. "But you're alive,” said Gradus, as if this were the answer to everything. "Against all my desires. Yes."

smile??

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

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

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