“Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American
institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge
if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from
8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness,
I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads
and courts- it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that
Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed.
Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements,
Madame Bovary, the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example,
with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls,
the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators,
and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled,
Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would
understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing
discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths
and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.”
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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