Do it Wrong and Do it Stupid... But Do it.
Katabasis and Our Immortal Hope for the Direction
It’s got to make sense eventually. We’re both looking at the world here, looking at history as it’s played out, and hoping it makes sense eventually. Something-something, “and so do all who live to see such times.”1
Katabasis felt a little like RF Kuang was trying to show me her view of the world.
We’re not friends, of course. But this book felt like a post-work drink with friends, while we sleepily explain why we believe what we do.
We’ve got to act like it’s going to all make sense eventually.
That’s the biggest takeaway from Katabasis, a story that follows two PhD students venturing through Hell to find their advisor and finish their degrees. This hell isn’t what any one person would think of theologically. Instead, it’s a combination of various folklores, mythologies, and threads that weave between them, all set on a University campus. To quote The gem,2 “in the end it’s Kuang’s hell—which is basically academia.”
[At this point in writing the essay, I proceeded to go nearly two months without putting a pen to paper—Or fingers to a keyboard. My apologies for my months-later impression of the book]
As well written as the story was, as relatable the characters, the author wants things to make sense. She’s studied tartarology (The study of death) and consulted with MIT’s philosophy department. There is a distinct search for meaning in Alice and Peter’s journey through Hell. Even the characters, named after Alice-in-Wonderland and Peter Pan, call back to a childlike questioning of the world.
My largest issue with the book is that while Kuang attempts to critique every worldview by putting them all in Hell with each other, there is no real conclusion to her analysis. The best we get comes in the last, hopeful line, a callback to Dante’s “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle/ thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”
Perhaps Kuang just wants to remind us that there is hope.
The book creates a dichotomy of reasonings, logic, and backing for worldviews and beliefs founded in very academic theories and philosophers. (In fact, in the Pride “level” of hell sits Newton and Galileo, spending so much time in thought they’ve turned into statues.) It’s intellectual in every sense of the word.
Katabasis falls into the trap it warns us about: Sitting too long with the hypotheticals and never actually reaching a conclusion. That’s not to say there is no conclusion to the book. Alice and Peter make it out of Hell. They overcome. And they push through that awful, depressive urge to give up on everything. Alice exceeds her fear of failure. She sees the stars.
So maybe Alice did what Katabasis cannot. Or maybe that’s the whole point of things. Kuang would argue that we don’t know how the story ends, and we should keep going, pursuing, and striving after beauty and hope anyways. I would argue that we do know how the story ends, but would ultimately agree with her pursuits.
So get out of bed, get off your phone, and make something of your life. Do it kicking and screaming, through the pain and the depths of darkness. But by golly, do it.
Gandalf in LoTR. This is me doing it wrong and stupid. I don’t know what the page number is. Google it.
