Descent

Solemnity in the darkness, postgraduates. It suits us, the darkness. We’ve even fallen silent. It’s even stilled our chatter.

Do we have nothing to say in the darkness? All the better.


Descent is the only thing left to us, postgraduates. Descent from such a world! Escaping such a world!

Comes a time when you have to give up on the surface. When you can only go under. When you can only submerge yourself – stay  with the shadows.

Comes a time when you need to rest in darkness. To close your eyes in darkness. To take deep, dark breaths below the surface of the world.


Thought has been driven into the earth. To hide in the earth. To feel the rich moist darkness of the earth.

Thought likes to sink. Thought descends. Thought’s on a katabasis, too – of course it is. Thought wants to go down, only down. And it’s forced to go down. There’s no place for it in this world.

Just as there’s no place for us. It’s inevitable that we descend. That we go down. In search of a place we can be. A place we can bear.

Whereas really what we want is to find the other of all places, postgraduates. The final shadow. The final darkness. The final secret, where we can lay down our heads.

A tomb: isn’t that what we’re looking for? Somewhere to be buried?


What is study ever but a descent, postgraduates? But a journey downwards, in the darkness? What has study ever been but a journey into the unknown? A plunge? A voyage into oblivion? What is the scholar but a mole?


A descent into death. But we’re familiar with death. We know death inside out. Do we need any more death? What can death do to us know? Where’s death’s sting? We can’t feel it.

Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to flinch from. Death, doing its death thing: we’re used to that. We even revel in that. We feel comfortable among the shades. What have the great European philosophers been to us but shades. What was reading their work for us but a descent to be among the shades?