Catarina | cat literary world’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

“There was this 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.”

“Everyone liked to pretend they did not exist outside of their research, that their earthly bodies had no wants at all.”

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

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

“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. You could do anything if you were delusional.”

“No one ever suggested that perhaps, in addition to doing his research, Professor Grimes should have been fulfilling his duties as a teacher.”

“Good jobs were vanishing rare in academia. (…) 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.”

as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. She was in no state to work, and she had not been for a long time. What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.
But missing the lab was not an option.”

“She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it. But she had also not slept properly in three months. She’d drunk so much caffeine that the world shimmered, and her chalk trembled in her grip. She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together

“One might find it reckless, foolish even, for a magician to leave his life in the hands of underpaid and overworked graduate students” - please open the floor for the queen! I feel I’m in for the greatest critique to academia