Katabasis Quotes

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

She gazed at Peter and thought, 'I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.

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

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

Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.

Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.

Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.

I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.

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.

What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.

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

Being an idiot!” All four Shades shuddered; a quivering mass of jelly. “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!

What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

You’ve got that look about you.” “What look?” “Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once.

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.

Believe the lie - trust the lie - it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.

But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it. She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.

She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.

And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.

Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.

Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn't know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.

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

You thought people were giants, and they disappointed you by being so human.

I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.

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 to 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.

And over there—creative writing students.

Crying fits are to be conducted in private, that’s library rules.

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.

The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.

That one likes to remind folks that Dartmouth is in the Ivy League.

A weak body was just the same as a weak mind; either might afflict you, and both disqualified you from genius.

Loss of identity was a terrifying prospect.

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

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.

All her life, it seemed, she had run headfirst in precisely the wrong directions. It was not for lack of opportunity. She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.

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 priviliged 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?

all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced.

In all the stories, sojourners in Hell rarely perished there. It was in the world of the living where they met their tragic ends.

You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another.

Alice rolled her eyes. “Please don't insinuate I'm not clever enough to go to Hell.

All the stories were wrong - no siren's call was as alluring as the sea itself, and the quiet dark beyond the shore.

Did Canada even have universities, or did everyone just ski and eat maple syrup and run away from bears all year round?

This recurrent connection between Kybele, Hermes and Hekate suggest that there may have been other Mystery cults in which Hermes and Hekate accompanied Kybele on a journey, perhaps one of katabasis, with similarities to that of Persephone at Eleusis.

They passed a series of rooms overflowing with texts. “Book hoarders,” Moore explained. “Why would you hoard books in a library?” “To prove that you’ve found them,” said Moore. “To prove you know of them. To prove you have proximity to them. But reading them, that’s too much.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether— when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas. She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires. That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.

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?

My name is Alice Law. Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try - I will try very hard - to make it count.

Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.

Let us live, my friends, and in living, keep alive our hope for a world made better by our presence in it.

Read Russell, for Christ’s sake.

Birth rate’s gone down, they said.” “Has it?” “Postwar boom’s over, everywhere’s developed, and all the girls are taking pills—” “Oh, is that it?” “My word.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd—this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd - this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

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

Some people just are that cruel. There is no design. They are not giants. They don’t do it for any reason, they just like it. And the rest of us just have to survive them.

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

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

Hell's not so bad for the people who are in it. They're exactly where they wanted to be.

Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A cheese toastie is better than nothing. Shouldn't stand to reason, then, that a cheese toastie is better than eternal happiness?

She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time.

In the novel Fight Club, the character Jack’s apartment is blown up. All of his possessions—“every stick of furniture,” which he pathetically loved—were lost. Later it turns out that Jack blew it up himself. He had multiple personalities, and “Tyler Durden” orchestrated the explosion to shock Jack from the sad stupor he was afraid to do anything about. The result was a journey into an entirely different and rather dark part of his life. In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasis—or “a going down.” They’re forced to retreat, they experience a depression, or in some cases literally descend into the underworld. When they emerge, it’s with heightened knowledge and understanding. Today, we’d call that hell—and on occasion we all spend some time there. We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent. Until katabasis forces us to face it. Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego the harder the fall. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be that way. If we could nicely be nudged to correct our ways, if a quiet admonishment was what it took to shoo away illusions, if we could manage to circumvent ego on our own. But it is just not so. The Reverend William A. Sutton observed some 120 years ago that “we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.” How much better it would be to spare ourselves these experiences, but sometimes it’s the only way the blind can be made to see.

Pascals's Wager said that you could choose to believe in God or not, but if you bet wrong on God and didn't live as though as he existed, you were missing out on the infinite wonder of Heaven.

It was the absolute farce of it all, said Elspeth. One day it all seemed so silly to me, and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it's rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You're a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair's godson. Once you have a job it doesn't get better-do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean what's the fucking point? I couldn't keep up the charade, but I also couldn't see the value in anything else, so I put a stop to it all. I could not care anymore.

He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.

Now, she saw him more clearly than ever; in part because she was no longer so scared of looking, and in part because she only saw what he chose to show. Just an ordinary man, puffing himself up, daring around for any way out of his predicament.

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.

The night sky shouldn't be so dark," Peter had told her. "If the universe is endless, then starlight should fill all the empty spaces. Light doesn't stop until it hits a surface - so why the dark spaces? From where we stand on Earth, all we should see is light." "Maybe the universe isn't limitless, then," Alice had said. "Or the universe is expanding," Peter had said. "And the stars are too young, and all that distant light is still stretching to reach us. And until it does, the night lies dark.

It always went like this - it didn't matter what she intended, it all went to shit anyway because she was so stupid, worthless, she could not stop falling apart, she could not hold the thoughts inside, she made all the wrong choices and it hurt everyone around her.

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.

We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent. Until katabasis forces us to face it.

For I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?

You want me to pretend that I love you.” “It’s easy,” he said. “Just assume our wills are united.” “What does that mean?” “Well, that we want all the same things. That we want what’s best for each other. That we take one another’s ends as our own, and that our ideal outcome is one in which we’re together. Haven’t you ever been in love?

Mathematicians hated magicians.

Human minds were fallible, but hers less than most, and hers was now the only mind she could trust.

She reflected on the horrors of embodiment.

She took one glance and instantly her thinking mind shut down, as it always did when confronted with a lot of numbers. “You need to explain that to me like I’m five.

Hell is a writers’ market.

He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.

Wouldn’t that be nice, Alice thought. A cheese toastie here, at the end of the world.

She loved when he just rambled, effortlessly profound, without an ounce of self-consciousness. She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts.

paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

The Temple of Hekate at Lagina, Caria, Anatolia was the last major temple built during the Hellenistic period. The temple was constructed on the site of an older settlement, which may have included an earlier temple. Lagina is the largest known temple which was dedicated entirely to Hekate and is famous for being the site of a key-bearing procession. In this procession, a key was carried by a young girl along the Sacred Way, an 11km road which connected the temple at Lagina to the nearby city of Stratonicea. Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable information on the purpose of the ceremony. Johnston writes that: "None of our sources explain what it was supposed to accomplish, but if it took its name from a key that was carried, then that key must have been of central importance - it must have been used to lock or unlock something significant." [89] Johnston further explains that although we don’t know what the key opened, the number of inscriptions naming the festival indicates that it was a significant festival. We can speculate that it was the key to the city, the key to the temple at Lagina, or the key to another (unknown) precinct. Considering Hekate’s ability to traverse between the worlds of the living and the dead, it is conceivable that the key opened the way to some form of ritual katabasis. At Lagina, the goddess Hekate was given the epithet Kleidouchos (key-bearer), so it is also possible that the young girl who carried the keys in the procession represented the goddess in the ceremony.

I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and by not doing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important. I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through

this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her - made her doubt she was a good scholar. He's destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her own thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research and carry out an entire project on her own.

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.

The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man’s dark, lambent eyes met Sean’s, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that the stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life would.

Why wouldn't everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She'd like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt-if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep

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

Coitus and sleep—both relieving the discontinuity of spinal-priapic erection through collapse into horizontal submersion—represent attempts at ‘archaic’ regressions. During both, ‘the whole body assumes [a] spheroid shape’, recapitulating not just conditions in utero, but the morphologies of our pre-bilateral ancestors, the marine radiate. Ferenczi states, moreover, that the sleeper’s executive center, their ‘soul’, sinks back through nervous laminae, routing down from hibernating and deactivated encephalon into the proprioceptive spinal column. A katabasis of the CNS, sleeping is thus temporary decapitation: the somnolent ‘has only a “spinal soul”’, Ferenczi exclaims; evidence, then, of the sleeper’s ‘phylogenetic regression’ through neuronic layers. The ‘soul’ descends spinally from brain to thorax; a genuine recapitulation of precephalic existences. Dreams are spinal emissions. Sleep is time travel.

Besides, no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.

I never understood how right Socrates was until the moment of my death, when my soul was ripped free from my body, and I was cast violently from that mortal world of base appetites. The body is the enemy, is a hindrance in the soul’s quest for the truth. It is as the Zhuangzi claims: life is a swelling tumor, and death the bursting of a boil. We are slaves to the body! All it provides is distractions—fantasies, desires, illnesses, fears. We are bounded, and death is the ultimate freedom.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it. Nice libraries meant donors, meant support, meant the time and resources to accumulate the best collections. More important, nice libraries put you in a certain frame of mind. You could unpack the precise same set of archives in the Rad Cam or a nondescript warehouse, and still you’d do better work in the Rad Cam. The atmosphere mattered. You became the thinker the library expected you to be. Nice libraries whispered: Everyone who has passed through here is very important, and so are you.

Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. 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. Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain. Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?