Marsha’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

There was a camp of analytic magicians called the Intuitionists, who argued the following: When it came down to it, magick was not really about how much complicated maths or logic or linguistics you had. The final push to make a spell work was the power of belief. You have to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way. As long as you could trick yourself, you could trick the world.

She had always delighted in starting a new term at a new institution--elementary, middle, high school, college and at last Cambridge. She liked learning her way around the buildings, getting library access, nestling into tucked-away study nooks, finding her favorite shortcuts between her department and the dormitories. She liked becoming a person that befit the institution.

The previous year she had applied for the prestigious Cooke Fellowship for dissertation research. The Cooke Fellowships, founded a century ago by a widow of one of the founding theoreticians, were incredibly prestigious. They offered not only ample funding for summer travel to anywhere in the world, but also a procession of dinners and cocktail parties before and after with the Cooke family descendants.