May Be

“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 had 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 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 naive about it. Because a naive mind, open to childlike wonder, was the happiest mind in a place like Cambridge. She liked to drift across conversation 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. Kneaders 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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis