Clayton Clendenny’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

“Even the non-Intuitionists practiced what the Intuitionists thought, because why not? You did the work, you drew your spell, and still at the end, you closed your eyes and hoped. When it came down to it magick was a wish, a prayer, and a little, anchoring fiction. So was personhood, for that matter. So was a coherent subjectivity. And so was the courage to get up every morning and not plan to die.

“Chalk is made of limestone in turn made by compressed, tiny fragments of ancient sea creatures that died millions of years ago, and therefore possesses the curious, still-mysterious quality of manifesting magical statements. Chalk is, as wrote the magician-philosopher Aldous Huxley, a link to the abyss of the remote past, the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.”

“According to Huemer, we have reason to believe that time stretches infinitely into the past and into the future. If time is infinite, the probability that our singular lifetime happens at this very moment, at this very speck on the line, vanishes toward zero. So either time is finite, or we live more lives than one.”

“We only need to get down,” she told Peter. 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. “I’m sure it’s very nice below.”