hrhwhitewidow
🎨 i read, i paint, i yap, i develop unhealthy attachments to fictional people 😎 will absolutely befriend you over a shared fictional crisis
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4.54 average · 12 reviews
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Katabasis
R.F. Kuang
Reaction: post-book brain dump
- wow. what a ride.
- FINALLY, an r.f. kuang book that does not end in bloodshed and an entire country collapsing. we survived somehow
- there is SOOO much theology in this book: gods, the existence of gods , what makes something divine, what happens when man decides he can play god, what happens when authority starts presenting itself as divinity and everyone else just accepts it
- also the horror of realizing how easily people take being alive for granted
- like you spend your entire life chasing achievement, recognition, approval, power, whatever—and then poof suddenly you are confronted with the fact that life itself was the thing you should have been paying attention to
- the horrors of becoming so attached to earthly things that you literally cannot move on to the next life and not even necessarily because you loved life too much. sometimes it is because you loved your ambition, your resentment, your unfinished work, or the person you thought you still had to become
- academic burnout as one of the circles of hell. groundbreaking. painfully believable. thank god I did not pursue push through w academe
- people-pleasing dressed up as obedience (what a call out)
- self-destruction dressed up as discipline
- exploitation dressed up as mentorship (rot in hell, grimes)
- being consumed by a system and then becoming complicit in that same system because admitting it harmed you would mean admitting everything you sacrificed for it was not noble
- patriarchy and misogyny eating women alive, obviously
- but also internalized misogyny. the specific horror of surviving by learning the rules of the system so well that you eventually start enforcing them against yourself and other women
- the “last woman standing” theme??? the loneliness of surviving structures that were never designed to let you survive at all???
- ableism and the way institutions decide which bodies are useful, respectable, or worth accommodating
- also: what happens when intelligence becomes the only thing you believe makes you valuable
- what happens when you are no longer the smartest person in the room? what remains of you after that?
- this book is basically asking whether your accomplishments still matter when you have built your entire identity around being useful to people who would replace you without hesitation
- deeply rude question to ask me personally, but okay
- the system does not only destroy people through punishment. sometimes it destroys them by rewarding them for being obedient enough to participate in their own consumption
- anyway i still need to sit with this because there are definitely more themes hiding inside it
- but my immediate takeaway is that katabasis is about theology, ambition, mortality, misogyny, academia, institutional violence, and learning that being alive might be more important than being exceptional
- miraculous ending experience because i finished an r.f. kuang book thinking about appreciating life instead of contemplating political devastation and mass death
- weirdly, this book put me in a better mood while i was going through creative burnout
- not because watching fictional academics suffer brought me joy. although, okay, maybe a tiny bit. misery loves peer-reviewed company
- but mostly bc it reminded me that burnout is not always a personal failure
- sometimes burnout is just what happens after you have held on for too long, performed competence for too long, and treated exhaustion like proof that you are still trying hard enough
- like maybe it is okay that i cannot immediately create the way i used to. maybe my brain is not betraying me. maybe it is simply tired of being converted into output
- academic burnout and creative burnout are cousins wearing different lanyards
- both involve taking something you once loved, feeding it into a system of deadlines, validation, productivity, and measurable achievement, and then wondering why it no longer makes you happy
- academia as capitalism, basically
- your curiosity becomes labor, your intelligence becomes currency, your self-worth becomes inseparable from how much you can produce
- and rest begins to feel like professional or moral failure because a person who is not producing is apparently wasting their potential
- deeply evil way to make somebody relate to literal scholars in hell, but it worked
- also: incompetent men cosplaying as untouchable beings
- mediocre men gaining enough institutional authority that everyone starts treating their opinions like natural law 🤮
- men constructing entire systems around their own egos and then acting shocked when the world people beneath them eventually realize the emperor is just some guy with tenure
- there is something spiritually healing about watching cruel men who built their power through fear, exploitation, and other people’s obedience finally discover that authority does not make them omnipotent
- apparently what i needed during creative burnout was not inspiration but fictional workplace justice
- not “believe in yourself 🥺”
- more like “the system was designed to eat you, your exhaustion is understandable, and the person responsible may eventually face consequences”
- beautiful. restorative. practically wellness literature w a side of occult mystery
- and maybe that is why the book made me feel better??? it did not tell burnt-out people (me) to become stronger so they could continue enduring the same conditions but it allowed them to be angry that they were asked to endure them in the first place
- 9/10. prescribed reading for anyone whose passion has recently been processed into labor by a deeply unimpressive individual w institutional power
- correction to my earlier point: it is not only earthly things that prevent people from moving on
- sometimes the mortal attachment is your own ego (what in the stoicism is going on)
- the version of yourself you have spent your entire life defending (again another call out)
- your inability to accept that you might have been wrong, complicit, cruel, or simply not as morally superior as your intelligence made you feel
- esp in the City of Dis(nuts lol), there is this horror of people becoming so consumed by intellectualism that they no longer understand morality (intelligence as a moral anesthesia)
- maybe they are kept there by the unbearable possibility that they were the villaijn
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