"He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own."
It's such a waste, because that's almost precisely the *opposite* of what a PhD should be for.
"Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs. Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well. My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me."
Alice starving herself and not eating real food for weeks; how she always mentions how thin Peter is; Grime's type being "underfed".
There is a disordered eating theme here.
Asceticism as a form of showing how you're truly focused on the life of the mind.
I'm reminded of Courtney Martin's "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters", which explores how post-feminist, driven girls struggle with eating disorders.
"They evoked ideals more than they did particular people. Uniform strong brows, eyes lifted upward, straight patrician noses. Mouths set in heroic, defiant frowns."
Make that *white* ideals, eh.
(Is Alice white? She's American and speaks classical Chinese - maybe Asian-American? Wouldn't that be too much of a cliché?)
My #thoughts on Babylon's Ashes, the sixth book of #TheExpanse series is up!
"Lines that are parallel
meet at Infinity!"
Euclid repeatedly,
heatedly,
urged
Until he died.
and so reached that vicinity:
in it he found that the damned things diverged.
—PIET HEIN, “PARALLELISM"
Hah. Hell in hyperbolic space, there you have it! If we were in a Greg Egan novel, they would go on to prove that geometry. But if this were a Greg Egan novel, academia wouldn't be dark enough for them to make this journey.
Just finished #Overscan, an anthology by @nantucketlit ! Featuring seven short stories written by humans, for humans.
I really enjoyed it! Took me a while to get to it lol
I have finished #reading #BabylonsAshes, sixth book of #TheExpanse series!
That was some really good stuff! Review coming soon enough!
"I have a theory about why you’re so stuck on academia," an old boyfriend of Alice’s had once told her [...] "You’re obsessed with gold stars. You never got over the high school thrill of an A+ at the top of your paper and academia will let you chase those little gold stars for the rest of your life."
The tragedy of academia is that it stops giving you gold stars in graduate school. Research isn't like that, and many people realize it far too late.
"Magick had been left behind. Magick was good only for dinner parties. Magick did not get you hired. And there was no magick without the academy."
I don't buy this.
Making stuff happen by strongly believing contradictory things seems like a skill that would be *loved* in business, and politics.
Jules
Joel 
