JORDAN FOGLE

No Hill to Die On; Or, The Ascent of Judges Hill 

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. 

                                                     —Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

PROLOGUE

The economic boom of 2027 brought an unexpected financial comfort to my husband and me. That, in turn, allowed us, the following year, to buy a recently renovated Tudor Revival home in a historic district of Austin, Texas.

One evening, while taking a break from unpacking, I ran my fingers along the basement's restored paneling. Wedged into a shadowed fissure, I found, among crumpled envelopes and faded photographs, the following chapters scrawled on brittle parchment.

The document is signed by one Perth Glasscock. I can find no record of someone by that name ever having lived in this neighborhood. However, I'm convinced that the author's wife Laura, who he refers to, is the young woman shown in the photographs. Equally important was my astonishing discovery of a golden, serpent-shaped bracelet in one of the envelopes, an object of particular significance and intrigue in the narrative. Its spirally twisted strands and incised crosshatch design are reminiscent of artifacts possibly seen in an ancient Roman goldsmith's cache at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The handwriting on the parchment is scribbled, yet its legibility implies that Mr. Glasscock expended a considerable amount of time and effort. I can't be sure which of the events he related actually took place, and which have been fabricated in some way. In the process of transcribing the document, I've altered neither the text nor the sequencing of the chapters. I offer it to others for its breadth of subject matter, intensity of expression, and undeniable strangeness. 

A.N. Strawn
October 31, 2028



1. The Mockingbird

The sands of time chafed my mind as if passing through the neck of a white-matter hourglass. Every morning, without exception, I was startled awake by the ardent meows of my tabby cat, Clio, begging me to serve her the specific brand of fetid wet food she favored above all others. After complying, I'd give my wire-rimmed glasses a thorough cleaning and begin shambling around the small block at the top of this hill. Circling overhead like turkey buzzards, surveillance drone helicopters followed me as I walked.

The merry crepe myrtle blossoms pirouetted out of view in rhythm with my steps down the sidewalk as if I were marching through a parting troupe of ballerinas. They seemed to ridicule me with their Pollyanna-ish exuberance. I felt morbidly amused remembering that, in autumn, they'd sprinkle their petals across the American South like pink confetti, only to be swept up later, discarded, and forgotten. Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree? 

For many years, this hill was the object of my tormented affection, the terrain into which my reveries absconded. Beneath the edges of the sidewalk along my familiar route, the street gave way to the fathomless cosmos itself, dusted with its taunting speckles of glimmering gold. As I floated along the Milky Way, giving chase to stars reflected in the glossy clear coats of parked cars, I often experienced vertigo, as if looking out from a lofty peak. 

The richness of the sensory world cloyed me. Although burdensome, this very sensitivity to the penetrating sights and sounds of life on earth opened the floodgates of my mind. The wearier I got, the steeper the slope of the hill became. When the afternoon shadows grew long, I felt as if the scorching sun was setting not only upon the day, but upon the wretched era in which I found myself. Like Leonard Mead in Bradbury's "The Pedestrian," I cursed the blue glow of TV screens streaming through windows as I walked the empty streets at dusk. 

When I returned to my home at the top of the hill, gasping for breath in the stifling air, I thought only of the cruel paradoxes of mechanistic Nature, the incessant, violent alternations between pain and pleasure, and all the other godforsaken, Manichean opposites. Nature's hired mouthpiece was the mockingbird—our state bird, unfortunately—perched outside my window on the bough of an orange tree. Long into the night, Clio and I were subjected to its lovelorn trills, the songs of senseless Creation. Only the unmated males sing after dark. While I sympathized with its adoption of others' tongues and customs as a cultural appropriator of the Internet Age, to literally kill a mockingbird would've been quite satisfying. Peering out the window from her couch arm throne in repose like the muse of history herself, Clio certainly seemed to agree. 

Dear neighbor, you've likely already noticed I'm a Nature-with-a-capital-N kind of guy. Though still insufferable, at least I'm no longer the miserable asshole I was before the events I intend to recount here.




2. Vale of Tears

We fall into matter from a purely spiritual condition—confined in caskets of flesh. Like the craggy, wooded hills just outside the city, here in the Texas Hill Country where the West begins, humans huddle beneath the horizon—longing to meet along the Edenic shores of spring-fed waters, to transcend the agony of separation. In this realm of pseudo-individualism and income inequality, our egos proclaim themselves like innumerable Olympuses against the smoggy sky. 

This region was periodically covered by seawater during the Cretaceous Era, when dinosaurs roamed the land. As the sea level rose, the land was covered with ocean silt. Shells from the marine life deposited the calcium carbonate sediment that makes up the hard limestone stratum still seen today along the walls of eroded cliffs. Much later, this area was inhabited by members of the peaceful Tonkawa tribe, who surely must have appreciated the region's abundant game, relatively mild weather, and clean water. They bent the trees along the banks of a nearby creek of muted emerald in the direction of its current, water striders dancing across its gentle rapids. 

The creek has since been dammed up and reduced to a rocky bed of stagnant pools, the color of yellow ochre and frosted with an oily sheen. The trees battle for access to the sunlight as they lift their arm-like branches in dramatic tableaux like characters in some Flemish baroque painting. 

In response to the harshness of our natural surroundings, we Texans have become defensive through and through. To counteract this trait, we lace our personalities with hospitality like the sweet fragrance of the native mountain laurel. Oak trees here shower us with their allergy-inducing catkins. Endless armadas of mosquitoes lay siege to our skin. Ever-present, the land asserts itself through smell, even during the most intimate moments between lovers: the musk of decomposing zebra mussels, the scent of cedar planks on charcoal grills, the sulfurous odor that wafts from oilfields. 

The deafening din of cicada cries is like a thousand fluorescent bulbs all buzzing at once. Each male cicada's song crescendos and diminuendos like a wooden roller coaster car gliding past on rickety tracks. In a kind of antiphonal response, fallen pecans crunch under truck tires, train whistles resound through the hills, and striking clock bells clang to remind weary walkers, such as I was, to turn in soon. In the evening twilight, lightning bugs dart like fairies around the blue-grey ball moss clinging to live oak branches. The moss emits a soft, radioactive glow, like something once enchanted but now petrified. 

The first Anglo settlement was founded in the 1830s by cattlemen who came in search of good, free land. Colonizers who were skilled at ginning, milling, stock farming, lumbering, and well drilling soon followed. Here's something I find hard to believe: around the same time Franz Liszt vowed to become the "Paganini of the piano" on a far continent, those colonizers, those pioneer settlers, were fearful of crossing that nearby, now dried-up creek, since native folks traveled along its western bank. It's obvious that the settlers used categorization in ways that dehumanized the natives. In itself, our tendency to categorize stuff is ethically neutral; but when we gloss over important bits of identifying information, it can work to our disadvantage—and even negatively influence how we think about and treat others. Prematurely passing judgment on others is almost always an act made out of fear. Among the countless Tonkawa-vilifying stories dating from this period, one claims that a brother and sister were bringing in their family's cows for milking when they were captured. The boy was held captive by the Tonkawa for eighteen months, and the sister was scalped and left behind because she wouldn't stop screaming. 

Other than to grab groceries, the only reason I left the neighborhood was to occasionally visit the creek. Searching for arrowheads along its banks, I often wondered whether the Tonkawa kidnappers were themselves the fathers—maybe mothers too—of children. As they looked eastward from the western bank, what dangers did they sense? What dreams did they have? Ashamed, much as that old Greek river god Achelous was, I'd wade into the choked creek to temporarily disabuse myself of my ancestral linkage to the colonizers, to cleave myself from a past of mishmashed facts and fantasies. In a functioning democracy, those who unjustly deny others their freedom to live also deny their own descendants' freedom from cultural shame. Cultural shame gives way to a fundamental sense of homelessness, and isn't it this very feeling that compels people to steal land from their neighbors in the first place? Whenever I resumed my walks with soggy sandals, the reflection of the moon on the surface of the water would accompany me like a pitying friend. 

In 1856, the settlers killed a thousand buffalo for their hides, exhausting the Native Americans' food supply. Perhaps this fact is an oversimplification. I suspect my romantic notion of indigenous Americans always living in harmony with Nature doesn't account for their participation in market hunting. Regardless, the white-skinned hide-hunters were responsible for the decline of the buffalo, along with changes in climate and cattle-borne disease. 

Anyway, the first house was built up here around that time. It was of stone, and situated on the edge of a bluff overlooking the creek. Antebellum-style mansions and magnolia trees soon cropped up on the surrounding plots of land. Lawyers, militia captains, and cotton plantation owners built their homes here. They all married their cousins and owned slaves ...that sort of thing. Once the city's grid plan was laid out, the neighborhood came to be referred to as Judges Hill, so named for the concentration of judges who resided in the area. After the Civil War, freed slaves were given homesteads across town. In the schoolhouse nearby, teachers hoped to make forty dollars a month. The townsfolk kept a lumber pile in the schoolyard for the purpose of making coffins when teachers died. 

By the 1890s, the gristmills had closed. The creek's declining flow could no longer power them. As the cedar, lumber, and pecan industries gave way to those of banking, real estate, and oil, Judges Hill became peppered with everything from Greek Revival dwellings to Victorian mansions featuring widow's peaks, gabled attics, inset balconies, porticos, wraparound porches, carriage houses, and gardens. The front facades of this era are so well hidden from the road, they almost always go unnoticed by passersby who don't know to look for them. Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations can nearly be heard reverberating off the blistered paint of weatherworn clapboard walls and ornamental plaster moldings. Since their construction, many of the mansions have been renovated by men with American Indian ancestry, descendants of those who laid claim to this territory long before the Anglos arrived. Although the land has been arbitrarily rent in two, this place is their birthright. Lo, the hands that preserve our decadent crypts belong to the rightful stewards of this earth! 

Following World War II, houses of the post-war ranch and mid-century modern styles were added. The streetcars tore free from their umbilical-cord cables, evolved combustion engines, and multiplied. The city grew and continues to do so at such a quick pace that the urban planning engineers can't keep up with population growth. As a consequence, many of the historic homes have been converted into professional offices or replaced by modern apartment buildings. Nowadays Judges Hill is known for little more than its historic architecture. To me, the abraded bas-reliefs on the pediments resembled the scowling brows of grumpy geezers. 

3. The Trespasser

On the afternoon the specter arrived, I was out for a walk. I happened to be gazing through the window of a historic home as I imagined Laura descending its grand staircase with hand-carved newel posts and wooden balusters. Then I pictured her stepping out onto the extensive porch for some air after she drank a glass of her favorite wine. Distracted by a sudden hush that fell over the chorus of buzzing cicadas, I expected this friendly vision to dissipate. I was shocked to perceive that it had transformed instead. In the very spot I'd imagined Laura leaning with her back against one of the porch columns, I saw before me a cloaked female figure. 

Her aura of mystery remains impossible to capture in words. The atmosphere around her was stricken with death, much like what I'd sensed in the dark passageways of Newgrange Tomb in County Meath while traveling abroad many decades ago. She wore a black headscarf. Was it a veil, a tichel, a hijab? I couldn't identify which religious tradition she belonged to, since I stopped attending church when I was eleven, and I've never paid much attention to that kind of thing. She also had on what looked like a rust-colored habit. 

Deciding she must be a displaced nun from the nearby convent that had burned down during a recent protest, I watched her recede around the corner. Could this stranger in fact be Laura, inexplicably returned after all these years as a deranged ragamuffin suffering from untreated mental illness? I hadn't entertained such a pitiably wishful thought in months and quickly dismissed it as nonsense. I thought of Orpheus who, attempting to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the underworld, died at the hands of the maenads who'd tired of his mourning. 

I began to regularly encounter this otherworldly visitor on my walks. I considered offering food or money, but she didn't strike me as someone experiencing homelessness. She appeared as incongruous with her surroundings as would've been a hooded flagellant from the Middle Ages performing apocalyptic rites, or a cynic fortifying herself against desire by choosing a life of poverty. Had she received revelatory visions like a modern Joan of Arc? Did she pose a threat to the safety of this community? 

Once, I could have sworn I saw her prostrating herself in an alley between two converted office buildings. Another time, concealed in plain sight, without a doubt I witnessed her rummaging through a dumpster and collecting bottle caps into a dirty drawstring bag. Was I alone in noticing her? And if so, why me? 

4. The Condo Project

Laura and I lived in a condo project hidden away between the mansions. Clio, too. Then it was just me and Clio. Its rotting beams rested upon the rubble of old-world decadence, concentrated power, and uncirculated wealth. Inhabiting an environment filled with so many historical markers, I felt like an out-of-towner perpetually touring some derelict Warner Brothers backlot. Our unit originally belonged to my family with whom I'd lost contact many years ago. It was purchased at a time when housing in the city was still affordable. 

A while back, the businessman who owned a unit on the level above ours began offering short-term rentals. The loud music his guests played resonated through the floor and bothered the old lady in the unit below his. Instead of knocking on the door and politely asking them to quiet down, the old lady banged on the ceiling and blared an air horn until it ran out of pressure. She lived alone and simply wanted some peace and quiet. Reaching a certain level of agitation, she'd shriek in a tenor that only sensory processing disorder or severe mental illness could justify. 

Many nights, I woke up to the sound of cops announcing themselves upstairs and informing the guests that they'd received a noise complaint. The old lady attempted to get the HOA board members to demand that the businessman include language in his rental agreements about quiet hours, but they failed to issue violations or enforce rules. Direct negotiations broke down when the old lady begged the businessman to put a stop to the rentals, and he threatened legal action, claiming he was well within his rights to do as he pleased. 

From what I knew of the vindictive entrepreneur, he was a typical tech bro with a pouty demeanor that betrayed a self-conscious desperation to be perceived as high-status. As if it came with the territory of being a successful man, he actively disregarded the feelings and preferences of those who called the complex their home while constantly asserting the inviolable sanctity of individual freedom. In reality, he was just a little boy lost in make-believe. 

Caught in the crossfire of their misdirected hostilities, I felt trapped in the middle of a sandbox spat. From my perspective, the music was almost imperceptible. By far, the most disruptive sounds came from the old lady herself, between the blaring air horn and the banging, not to mention the yowling stray cats she insisted on setting out food for in the foyer. Things went on like this for some time, with her outbursts getting longer and more demonic. Every barely audible high-frequency overtone resonating beneath the creaks of the building, like the hum of wires in the walls, I mistook for her hushed screams, the beginning of another psychotic episode. 

One day, she snapped. I'd been out on a walk at the time of the attack. When I got back, the building was swathed in police tape and flashing lights. The authorities said that after boring holes into her ceiling with a broomstick, showering herself in plaster, the old lady had grabbed her longest kitchen knife, ambled up the stairs, gained entry with a gentle knock on the door, and mercilessly stabbed the young couple staying there. 

She then hurled herself off the third-floor balcony into the planter below and died  on a bed of bougainvillea. One of the cops said that it'd been a grisly scene upstairs. The woman had been scalped and murdered. The man, mutilated and bleeding out, was found alive. They weren't certain he'd survive beyond the eighteen minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. I'm pretty sure that, to this day, the businessman still rents out his unit. 

5. Truth Reigns

When it rained, water flooded our parking lot, rushed along the street gutters, down the hillside toward the creek to the west, and toward government buildings to the east. From my balcony, reclining like an attendant of Tlaloc, the rain god of pre-Colombian Mexico, I watched large raindrops pelt the thin soil and inhaled the evocative scents of petrichor and wet asphalt rising up from below. I imagined thunder as the voice of some great spirit speaking in the clouds, or the beating of its enormous wings. Still, I tried to resist the temptation to translate my emotive responses into words. To passively observe the rain as it falls is a practice far more rewarding than writing fancy rain metaphors. Alternative ways of knowing beyond those that American society overplays emerge when you sit still and clear your head. What if we let all experiences exist in their own right, to wash over us like rain without rushing to entrap them in the net of intellectual interpretation, to taxidermy them and present them to one another as trophies of our beingness? 

Although I speak of gaining wisdom by allowing your experiences to pass over you like falling rain, I was never any good at it myself. Watching the rain only became a fascination of mine because it embodied a process I couldn't undertake: allowing Laura's life to pass away and fade into history. Hanging on to the past is like trying to grab hold of a Gulf Coast hurricane. In truth, I envied the rain that fell so remorselessly and the water that so carelessly flowed toward the sea. 

Many old-growth trees that stood when this neighborhood first cropped up—back when there was such a thing as open space and time to think—are still standing today. I enjoyed imagining an era when they commanded over the landscape, wielding a power both boundless and benign. Pecan. Bald cypress. Walnut. Live oak. Sycamore. Resting my gaze upon the trembling leaves and overflowing birdbaths, perhaps I could dimly discern the same glints of truth as the humans who lived here before me. From this vantage point on the hill, did they also contemplate the starry sky at night, posing unanswerable questions? Are notions rooted in the physical landscape available to be harvested by anyone perceptive enough to pluck them? How can I coexist contentedly alongside the unsolvable riddles of life? 

Looking back through time, we often suspect that historical figures’ lives were solely shaped by their cultural milieu. However, we shouldn't discount the discernment of the individual mind unhinged from its particular social surroundings. Universal truths exist whether or not we can apprehend or articulate them. They can leap into our minds from any scaffolding, including that which cloaks the now decaying structures on this hill. While scooping our hands into societal tributaries polluted with the customs of the dead in hopes of stealing a sip, we forget that the waters of Immortality burst forth from hidden springs within ourselves, pure and soul-quenching. In other words, we mine far more wisdom from within ourselves than from without. 

Though we're relegated by history to unwittingly participate in atrocities we don't yet know how to name, we have to trust ourselves and proclaim Beauty when it reveals itself to our eyes. Chances are that others will behold it as well. I regret not having done this more often when Laura was still with me. In her absence, when the humidity lifted after a sun shower, I saw vapors dance like vanishing ghosts summoned from beneath hot pavement. Since there no longer was anyone to share instances of Beauty with, I'd turn my thoughts toward a passage in the book of Ecclesiastes, the one about how all is but vapor and vanity under the sun.

6. The Mandell House

From a distance, I saw her looking over her shoulder. She was waiting for an opportunity to dart through a gap in the chain-link fence around the Mandell House, which stands down the street from the condo on the corner of 17th and Parnassus Avenue. I assumed she was using a porta potty that hadn't been removed from the property after one of the many thwarted renovation projects. But, no. She descended through a crack in the foundation of rusticated stone. Was she squatting in there? For a while, the police had been arresting folks in the area for that sort of thing. 

The building had been abandoned for so long that the locals had developed an absurd prejudice toward it. Parents warned their children not to stray too close after dark. Viscous fairies living inside, the parents said, might kidnap them and take them to a faraway place where they would forever miss their earthly friends. The children obeyed, not because they believed in fairies, but because of the fear they sensed in their parents' voices. Walking by, I often thought of that song "Cypress Hill" by Van Morrison, the line when he says, "I may go crazy before that mansion on the hill." 

The Mandell House was originally built for a judge notorious for his harsh sentences. A Tudor Revival, it had tall, trellised windows like narrow slits that reminded me of Clio's pupils, and a physique of leaden-hued walls, imposing turrets, gabled dormers, and soaring chimneys. In the early 1900s, it was owned by a famous writer named Philip Drew. An important figure in state and national Democratic circles, Drew sold the property when he moved to D.C. to become a senior advisor to President Wilson, and to serve as a propagandist on the Committee on Public Information during World War I. A prolific writer, he published many short stories under various pseudonyms. These were famously criticized for their gimmicky reliance on plot twists and surprise endings. 

Drew's sole novel, which he composed while living at the Mandell House, was a parable of compassion and reason winning out against pervasive political corruption spawned by avarice, paranoia, and spiritual deprivation. It was rumored he was quite fond of sharing his novel with the politicians he met. Given that it's not fiction writers who capture readers' hearts, but their characters, it could be said that Drew's protagonist was more influential in shaping the course of American politics than Drew himself was. The man died of consumption after having suffered from a persistent cough his entire life. 

A minor fire damaged the house soon after Drew's departure, and it remained untouched for years, aside from a fraternity down the street using it to conduct unauthorized initiation rites. As a college student, Walter Cronkite supposedly belonged to this fraternity, and even rented a room here on Judges Hill. This residency, of course, was long before he embodied journalistic integrity. Nearly one hundred years later, I roamed a deteriorated media landscape of political polarization and eroded social trust while dreaming of Cronkite sneaking into the Mandell House as a young man, one who would later help us to agree upon a baseline of common facts. 

Renovation projects always end in failure and the place defaults into a state of dilapidation. While living here, I’ve repeatedly watched construction workers toil away in the hot sun, only to abandon the structure partially completed. Leaded glass panels within its mullioned windows remain pristine, despite the house around them oscillating in and out of disrepair. Its Jacobean-style door glowers from beneath a wide, pointed arch. Virginia creeper hangs in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves. Carnivorous bog plants line its front path. Construction, once again, has recently begun. 

One evening during a heavy downpour, lightning struck a mimosa tree in the front yard and its branches fell against a power line. The oil-filled transformer exploded, the power surged, and all the lights in the neighborhood went out. By candlelight, I waited hours for a city energy crew to repair the damages. Who was I to complain about being inconvenienced by the lightning’s strike? Since the beginning of time, this feral forebear of our precious electricity has sought the most efficient route down into the equalizing ground. Like us, it too is enticed by the tops of hills, and we're foolish enough to stand in its path and thus risk our own obliteration. 

7. Apollo Kills Python

If each of us, upon dying, is doomed to be chopped up into our archetypal aspects through the violent process of memorialization, I'm afraid my story will merely chronicle the sad life of a fool who wanders around his neighborhood, trapped between eras, hungering vainly in his heart for an unobscured past he can be proud of, a past of his own he can learn from. 

Some peoples' lives stream by in an unbroken chain of seemingly significant events. The sequencing of their experiences prepares them to recognize a peculiar synchronization of earthly occurrences. Consequently, they become believers in predestination. Though there have been periods of my life during which the sacred flame of faith flickered in my soul, it's safe to say I was never a believer, and my life wasn't an unbroken chain. I wasn't an advisor to presidents—or anything close to it. I used to be an English teacher at a public high school to the south of the hill. As you might suspect, I believe our society neglects its teachers, its most precious protectors. Becoming a teacher in this country requires committing yourself to anonymity and plunging your head beneath the deep flood of time. 

For me, education wasn't about standardized tests. I recognized that a teacher shouldn't simply fill up students' heads with information. The goal of education is to foster wisdom. I cared about my students. I tried to create opportunities for them to enjoy successes, but also to learn from their failures. In essence, I made them do stuff. Through the careful structuring of learning situations, I endeavored to refine their capacity to evaluate their own application of knowledge and skills across a variety of contexts. I fought to instill a reverence for human dignity. I mustered the courage to model the lost art of listening and civic debate. I arranged the desks in a circle. I sought to cultivate their critical thinking skills, compassion, poetic genius, and intellectual humility. I frequently issued clear and accurate feedback in an emotionally neutral manner. I urged them not to overly rely on adverbs and begged them to avoid the passive voice. I encouraged them to be critical of their own blind certainty about things. I cautioned them against seeing the world solely through the lens of the self. I lent out books from my personal library knowing I might never get them back. I tailored my teaching strategies to each individual learner's needs. I strived to practice congruence, empathy, and unconditional positive regard. 

Then, Laura was gone. I could no longer derive fulfillment from my profession. I became cynical about what impact I was having as a teacher. I was no Seneca, after all, and even his tutorship couldn't temper the tyrannical tendencies of humankind. My district began purchasing massive curricula developed by universities and companies. Then they  pressured admins to pressure us to fit it all in, which  not only stripped my students of time to thoroughly process anything, but also compromised my wherewithal to seek out professional development opportunities. I was stuck in a holding pattern and could discern no conceivable path forward. 

What good was it to teach after I'd forgotten the utility in applying lessons learned from the past to an unknown future? The very nature of effective teaching relates to understanding how learners, often unconsciously, draw upon their past experiences in order to achieve desired outcomes. Suspecting that my efforts were futile, I no longer appreciated the elegance of Dewey's principles of Continuity and Interaction. 

O Metis! O Athena! How are we to construct a postmodern paideia? If truth is like a campfire at a party, the wise person quietly tends to it, always approaching it with caution. She knows that others won't truly learn to revere its awesome heat until they've experienced it for themselves. She keeps her eyes fixed upon the glowing embers, observing how the fire behaves, and how others behave around it. Conversely, the clever fool, hoping to amuse the party guests, swiftly waves his hand through the flames without burning himself. The guests may be initially impressed by the fool's party trick, but their interest soon wanes. They know intrinsically that fire isn't something to be handled carelessly, or as a means to an end. As it stands, our education system is designed to produce clever fools. 

Although no course of study is singularly complete, I wouldn't be the first curmudgeonly educationalist to surmise—maybe with an unintended air of aristocratic pretension—that studying the humanities is a tried-and-true method for people to thoroughly cultivate their mental freedom. Unfortunately, public schools force teachers to rush students through either a cursory liberal education or a watered-down career-technical education. The repercussions of insisting on a sharp division between these curricular areas aren't minor: excessive social class stratification and the hindering of interdisciplinary innovation. 

Affluent, college-bound kids go on to get white-collar jobs, and they're afforded not only economic opportunity and social mobility, but also metacognitive skills useful for adapting to a broad range of professional contexts. That said, the emphasis in Platonic culture on disinterested intellectual appreciation is misplaced, since thought and action ought to remain intimately linked throughout the educational process. Maybe it's the curriculum's failure to distinguish between discursive knowledge and wisdom that results in clever fools' persistent conflation of the two. Long after the aforementioned party is over and all the guests have left, the clever fool continues to wave his hand through the dwindling flames, secretly questioning whether fire, or anything for that matter, is sacred. 

For many shop class kids, instruction in the humanities is subordinated to specialized, industrial training. In addition to being stigmatized for their blue-collar aspirations, they're robbed of learning experiences critical to promoting their continued self-actualization after graduation, effectively disinviting them from the campfire party altogether. We don't want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and another class to forgo its privileges in order to learn to perform specific manual tasks. 

If we're to have any hope of fulfilling our nation's practical needs, technical education has to be suffused with a liberal spirit. Liberal education is aimed at developing students into engaged, informed citizens who enjoy their work. It accomplishes this through presenting them with experiences from which they may learn how to learn, how to think and speak with precision, how to pay attention, how to appreciate aesthetic Beauty, how to effectively retain, recall, and revise memories. Once students' foundational academic powers of initiative and creative invention are in place, only then should we allow them to decide whether to pursue certain specializations. 

Brought about by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics, the age of labor automation has arrived. The toiling millions watch as their jobs are displaced, casting them further into the depths of financial and spiritual poverty. Without a sufficient liberal education, how will former fossil fuel workers distill meaning from their lives in an increasingly secular world? How will they extract creative enjoyment from unfamiliar endeavors? 

The educational system itself sets cycles of generational poverty into motion. The socioeconomic inequalities that arise between social groups don't reflect hierarchies inherent in Nature, or even the complexity of our technocratic society. Through the establishment of institutions, the unconscious biases of privileged individuals are chiseled onto organizational structures and promulgated like self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Instead, we need an education that doesn't shy away from discussions about class struggles, moral virtues, or scientific facts. The more stratified a society, the more its governing elite feel a need to lie about the past, to teach bad history, to propagandize. Only an insufficient education would let persist the immoral belief that poor people have no one but themselves to blame for their condition. While conniving blue bloods and plutocrats sit around leisurely revising the past and shaping the future, the rest of us are forced to work. We are deprived of time to open our windows to the full illumination of wisdom or to enact a world in which work is play and play is life. Until we radically redistribute intellectual wealth in this country, we won't be a land of free human beings, but of ignoramuses, or of clever fools waving their hands through campfires, hungering for something more. 

8. The Axe of Hephaestus 

For the first time in many years, I felt motivated to get to the bottom of a novel situation. I was living again. I began to go on more walks in hopes of crossing paths with her. Almost without fail, I'd catch sight of her concealing herself behind the patio furniture of the vacated historic structures. One evening, I saw her burying what looked like handfuls of orange peels beside an "Office Space for Lease" sign. A leather-bound tome was tucked under her arm. On another occasion, I saw her mending a tear in her gown with a needle and thread. More often than not, I came upon her in the vicinity of the Mandell House. A sense of foreboding gradually pervaded my spirit as her inexplicable linkage to the place became more and more apparent. 

About a year ago, I heard shuffling footsteps in the condo's foyer that neither grew louder nor softer. I checked to make sure I'd locked my door. Then I pressed my eye to the peephole. Fright crackled up my spine. Her hunched figure stood inches from me. As if viewing myself from the outside, I unlatched the bolt and burst into the hall. I thought I saw her robe trailing down the steps, so I called after her. Had she vanished in some clichéd turn of events, this encounter would've been far easier to dismiss as a paranoid hallucination. I did so anyway. I collected myself and hoped no other tenants had witnessed my loss of composure. For once, I was comforted by the improbability of any eyes drifting far from the screens they were often tethered to. Oddly, after this occurrence, Clio stopped sitting on the couch beside me or even under the kitchen table. Soon she refused to eat. And when I tried to pet her, she would recoil and hiss. Her lurid eyes fixed as if on a distant object. 

It wasn't long until I found Clio's lifeless body on Laura's pillow. I took her into my arms and cradled her like a baby, resting her furry head against my collarbone. When I was ready to say goodbye, I placed her inside a cardboard box, along with her favorite toys and a few unopened cans of that awful wet food. I couldn't help but smooth out every last air bubble in the tape I'd carefully stretched along the flaps of the box. I felt guilty burying her in a spot as man-made as the planter, but I couldn't think of anywhere else. Looking skyward, I implored Coyote, who sometimes ventures into the city in search of a quick bite, to let my companion rest in eternal peace. 

After this burial, I fantasized about the relief that only the axe of Hephaestus could bring to the excruciating headaches unleashed by my intrusive thoughts about Clio's decomposing body. 

9. American Nurture 

Staring out over rooftops strewn with satellite dishes, I often saw our state office buildings tattooed with graffiti art. Although this country remains an unmet promise, in my pocket of it the wholesome hills at sunset reminded me to be patient. 

Long before I met Laura, I dreamt of riding like Kesey or Kerouac or on the bench seat between them. Unfortunately, I never hit the road. I never even saw the national parks. I don't regret it much, though. Socrates, Vergil, and Seneca all suggested that travel is no cure for discontent because your faults follow you wherever you go. I think about that when I think about space travel and how we’re looking for life on Venus now. Then I think about the Space Shuttle Challenger breaking up over Cape Canaveral, and how Christa McAuliffe would've been the first teacher in space. 

When I entered college in the early seventies, I was probably too young to be considered a proper "hippie." I lived in student housing near the New Yorker Hotel where, just three decades before, Nikola Tesla had spent his final days tossing breadcrumbs to pigeons while finalizing the blueprints for his death ray gun. I'd gone to NYC looking for Whitman's Manhattan, but only found Lorc's and Lou Reed's. I retaliated against the glitzy, futurist brutality of it all. I got pretty good at making bad splatter paintings. I melted into Dionysian ecstasy alongside flower power freaks, poets, and student rebels. For a time, I was a staunch psychonaut, espousing all the dogmatic mumbo jumbo that comes with the guru trip. I took a shortcut to certain understandings, but that was only a transitional phase meant to carry me into adulthood. Exploring the furthest frontiers of human perception doesn't change statute or substantively address the real-life hardships of the 99 percent. 

I passed the acid test, so to speak, got my teaching certificate, and hung up the phone. I eventually returned to Texas. With my transfigured spirit still suspended somewhere between the collapsed utopias of Haight-Ashbury and St. Marks, I always felt as though I never truly came home. 

As the cultural revolution of the sixties crashed and receded like a tidal wave, it was severed by the sharp bow of a U.S. destroyer called The Digital Age. My generation became intoxicated by the information revolution's potential to expand human consciousness, just as it had with psychedelic drugs. In a similar fashion, it merely engendered widespread perversity, irrational behavior, and spiritual illness. Imperialism, in the guise of free-market capitalism, ruined the Internet, just like it ruined every other pure thing this country has ever produced. Social conditions online have proven far more suitable for the propagation of hatred than the fertile American soil itself. 

The rate at which information is exchanged is accelerating. Tributes on Twitter pour in before the souls of the dead have even had time to transmigrate. It's as if humanity now worships the instantaneous generation of history. There's no greater testament to this new deity than the twenty-four-hour news cycle. In our frenzied pursuit to produce discrete bits of data on, and commentary about, historical events as they unfold, we inhibit our ability to effectively process new information, or to form and store useful memories—in essence, to learn. We don't give ourselves enough time to suffuse our reconstructions of past events with moral prescriptions regarding behaviors most conducive to promoting our survival in the future. And there's no more convincing a substitute for truth than information—look how seamlessly it conforms to the void in our hearts. 

To our credit, our history hasn't sufficiently prepared us to confront the social ills of modernity. That’s bad teaching on Nature's part. If our culture wasn't so fanatically consumerist, push notifications wouldn't be as irresistible as opiates. If ads didn't effectively influence our purchases, their use wouldn't constitute a lucrative business model. If we actually valued the truth over a sense of belongingness, foreign interference in our elections would be inconsequential. 

In the same manner we stress the importance of children's active engagement in their education, our young nation as a whole needs to identify its learning difficulties, take charge of its development, and remain humble about its memory lapses and successes. We're our own teachers, and we have to meet our fellow countrymen where they are. 

They now say that one in ten Americans have lost the will to survive. It's no wonder, then, that we expel toxicity and hatred into our politics, discourse, and online interactions. The advent of social media has enabled the rich and powerful to peddle their propaganda—and to benefit from prevailing ideologies—as never before. As is usually the case, it's all Reagan's fault. It started with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine of 1949, which required radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues. Pandor's box is open, and there's no reversing disinformation's pandemic spread. Propaganda isn't insidious because it twists the truth, but because it muddies the mental process of constructing moral meaning from our experiences by inserting manufactured memories. Mnemosyne the Titaness, mother of the Muses, no longer allows us to drink of her nourishing waters. 

This country has yet to provide its citizens with an education sufficient to allow them control over what and how they think, to resist being indoctrinated by for-profit conglomerates and corporate advertisers via biased media outlets and public relations firms. Our evolutionarily advantageous sense of repulsion has been co-opted by propagandists, stripping us of our most precious freedom to select what we pay attention to. To learn is to refine your capacity to attend mostly to those aspects of the environment that will best inform your successful prediction of the optimal course of action in a given moment. Thus, attention is central to both learning and the attainment of wisdom. Thoth, the Egyptian god of learning, shakes his ibis head at us like a disappointed parent for forgetting his doctrines and losing the benefit of his discoveries. In the end, will humanity's cooperative nature overcome American nurture? 

Staring out over those rooftops littered with satellite dishes, I saw our state office buildings tattooed with graffiti art and heard the chanting of peaceful protesters and felt the sun's warmth as it set over the Hill Country. A sense of patriotism somehow welled up inside me. Dozing off by the window on her couch arm throne, sweet little Clio couldn't have cared less. Part of me was jealous of her indifference. 

10. Triumph of Death 

For months, I recognized certain coincidences as evidence of Laura's spirit attempting to make contact, such as the sound of scratching against the door at night. Once that stopped, I settled into bellyaching sorrow. I entombed myself within the hallowed verses of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." I quickly grew accustomed to conversing with Laura's disembodied voice as I wandered the streets alone. Even now, I regularly consult her with my questions, my insecurities. Even though my mental reconstruction of her is only the crude invention of my pining heart, I feel that to keep her voice alive is to keep her alive. 

Toward the end of many summers, when the temperature first dipped below ninety degrees, the inherent novelty of seasonal change had ceased to cue my memories of past selves or fresh possibilities. My circannual cycle was subsumed by a singular season of gloom. Only one recurring feature of my environment retained the power to stir me: the blooming of bluebonnets in spring. Laura looked forward to their arrival all year long. I hated how she'd never again see the hills ablaze with their blueness. 

In retrospect, our memories of the dead become framed like portraits within the borders of the destinies that ultimately awaited them. Are the tragedies that befall our loved ones random accidents, or are they pre-written narratives? Taken as a whole, are the flashes of urgency to accomplish this or that simply Nature's way of having us complete whatever it is we need to do before we die? 

I've personally known a handful of precocious souls who soared through the same realms of tortured inspiration as did Franz Schubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Charlie Parker, and Sylvia Plath. Ravaged by prolonged periods of mania, they too departed this earth in unwrinkled skin. I guess they were in a hurry because they were going to lose their lives. Perhaps Nature sets the proper span for every person's life, giving long roads to some and short roads to others. Maybe it calibrates your rate of output and accelerates you on your trajectory toward whatever end it's chosen for you. 

The existence of Laura's soul had to have been for a purpose, which must be so for all people who perish before they reach old age, little babies included. Although it may be that some people truly have short roads to begin with, the only kind of death that's easily acceptable is when a very old person goes to sleep and fails to awaken. Such an end shouldn't be regarded as dying, but rather as awakening in the afterworld. My Laura deserved to awaken. 

Young people think that as you get older, your opinions ossify. Or, they think you become less capable of processing new ideas and assimilating them into your belief templates. Really, aging is a process of further familiarizing yourself with your own personality, and consequently better prioritizing activities you're certain will contribute to your immediate well-being. As a result of growing old myself, what I once saw as a reduction of open-mindedness I now recognize as a defense mounted against a false perception of waning time. Granted, it's a noble response. Yet it points toward an irrational fear of death. 

People who cease to think of time as a linear phenomenon no longer fear the deaths of themselves and others. When loved ones die, even though the ache of losing them never subsides, your ability to compartmentalize the grief you feel will improve as a function of your continued survival. Young people have little practice adopting the voices of the dead into their minds. They don't know what it's like to keep acres of memories alive like a farmer during a grasshopper plague. 

We never had kids, Laura and I. She wanted them. I thought I didn't, since I was already in the business of parenting others' kids. I retired soon after her departure. Back then, teachers still got a good pension. I crossed the Rubicon of my flesh with great armies pointed inwardly toward my crumbling Roman soul. How could I outwardly express the gnawing dread I felt, given the subversion of all that I deemed beautiful, sacred? 

I felt jilted, as if she'd left me for another man. I had compunctions about suicide, which likely stemmed from some deep-seated, teacherly affinity for the future. I now believe this affinity is what kept me walking, despite the mental and physical exhaustion it cost me. I believe it rescued me from the horror of an existence devoid of memory. Deep down, I've always wanted to become the man Laura hoped I could be in her absence, the ideal man she fell in love with and married. I do wonder whether she'd love the broken man I am now. 

Clio never stopped positioning herself beneath the chair from which we would reach down to pet her. I believed she could still sense presence there in ways I couldn't. We root ourselves in the soils of others' souls. When we're severed from those soils like San Pedro cacti, our wounds callus over, and we take root in the darkness. This has been my life without you, my dear, etiolating toward the tremulous light of your memory. 

11. Trial of the Heart 

In O. Henry's "Unfinished Story," he employs the "ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-judgement theory" to satirize store owners who hire working girls at slave wages. He asserts that "there are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say." Bearing this in mind, and without fear of your denying my reliability, dear neighbor, I'll now allow the fictive dream not only to furnish my theme, but to absorb it. 

As if we'd dropped Google Maps pins on the astral plane to mark their locations, dreams sometimes lure us down immediately recognizable, though long forgotten, side streets and through the entryways of houses or apartments in which we slept and dreamt as children. We revisit well-known hallways, bedrooms, porches, and backyards. The familiar facades of our dream structures shelter us from the blank sleep of death as we consolidate memories and process emotions. Throughout our lives, the features of our subsequent homes may be added, but the original masonry remains intact. 

Some months ago, Laura awaited me in my scrambled sanctuary. I hadn't dreamt of her since her departure, at least not during sleep. She woke me from a deep slumber, ushered me into the bathtub of my childhood home, bathed me with suds from the bulb of a yucca plant, and rubbed me with black cornmeal. When she'd finished, she fastened a golden, serpent-shaped bracelet around my upper arm. Suddenly, the scene changed, and I found myself standing before Clio's grave. Laura's voice sounded from behind. "To heal yourself, dig here and discover the secret buried beneath the Mandell House." I nodded as though I understood. 

I was transported again, this time to the interior of a long, subterranean tunnel with smooth walls. A line of masked female dancers emerged from the darkness holding lanterns and figurines of string, feathers, and paint. They each wore skirts woven from their own exposed entrails. 

Just then, the vaulted ceiling overhead began to cave in. Looking up through a widening fissure, I recognized Clio peering down from its edge. A cloud of Mexican free-tailed bats issued forth from her gaping jaws. I awoke with a start. Somehow, the bracelet was still clasped around my arm. 

I couldn't resist my immediate urge to visit the planter. I knelt down and pushed away the dirt and wood chips covering Clio's cardboard box. In its place, I found an enormous rounded ston—like a gate to the underworld. I grabbed a shovel from the condo project's utility closet and pried the stone away, which released a pungent odor of mildew and ammonia. In disbelief, I made my way into an unsealed cave down a gentle slope. The temperature plummeted. Many-legged insects, those ghastly monsters forged in the furnaces of eternal night, scattered in the sunlight, cowering behind small stalagmites. Soon I found myself looking down a tunnel identical to the one in my dream with the same vaulted ceiling overhead and smooth walls extending into darkness. I heard the muffled whooshing of cars passing on the street above, and maybe the fluttering of wings. With a clang, the stone rolled back into place behind me, sealing out any sliver of perceptible illumination. Every cell in my body shuddered. 

I felt a great heat emanate from the bracelet. Its squeeze slackened as it came to life and slithered down my arm. As it wriggled into the shadows, its golden rattles radiated a faint glow, revealing colorful pictographs of eight-headed serpents on the corridor's granite walls as it went. Snakes were once common in this area, before the degradation of their natural habitat. In this suburban diorama of a world, our frightened, lonely imaginations also settle for hunting in lawn grass and basking in overly pruned treetops. Every now and then, you'll nearly step on one of these relatable creatures. 

In the blackness, the features of the veiled visitor flickered into view. At that moment, she was Cybele, the Phrygian goddess of caverns. The snake climbed up her rust-colored garment and coiled itself like an ouroboros around her arm. Its scales dimmed and stiffened back into metal. Spots of light continued to spin around the walls of the room as if reflected off a disco ball. My vision wavered like a camera with its autofocus broken. 

Beneath her veil, I caught sight of a cadaverous complexion, wizened like a sage's and dotted with the sores of a meth addict. Though sunken, her eyes were large and lustrous like the rose windows of a Gothic cathedral. I was stunned by the presence of this terrible phantom, yet I felt a sense of heroism, a strong desire to at last confront her. 

Beckoning me with her bony hand, she turned away and proceeded in the direction of the Mandell House. After a moment, we arrived in what appeared to be a sepulcher occupied by gilded wooden shrines as well as by funerary objects like those found in a pharaoh's tomb. Around the perimeter of the reliquary stood forty-two empty school desks and chairs. I felt as an explorer might at having discovered the Seven Cities of Gold. 

She gestured toward my feet. Then, with her ragged fingernails, she tapped on the empty plate of an antique golden scale near the center of the chamber. From her drawstring bag, she produced an ostrich feather quill pen and rested it on the opposing plate. I gathered that she wanted me to remove my sandals and place them on the scale. As I did so, the amusing thought occurred to me that only the winged sandals of Hermes could be as light as feathers. Mine were just tattered Tevas, which had accompanied me countless times around the block. The scale groaned as it accommodated the additional weight. Miraculously, the objects attained equilibrium. After a brief pause, the robed phantasm solemnly bowed, removed the pen, and handed it—and only it—to me. 

Up earthen stairs and through a crawl space, she led me to where I am presently: the basement of the Mandell House. Somber tapestries adorn the walls. Rats gnaw and scratch in the beautifully carved wainscoting. I'm surrounded by remnants of the innumerable failed construction projects: shrink wrap, cinder blocks, splintered wooden pallets, corrugated cardboard, roof tiles, empty cement sacks, stretch bands, sawhorses, plastic buckets, pipe fittings, bricks, wrought-iron handrails, screws, shredded sandbags, crushed water bottles, marking flags, chicken wire, and foot ladders. 

In addition to the pen and ink I've used to write these words, she has provided me the paper you now hold, dear neighbor. With each passing moment, I can feel my consciousness fusing with the house's moss-grown foundation. A pile of lumber and a partially constructed coffin in the corner silently suggest my fate. 

12. The Cosmic Nous 

It's a wonderful thing to learn how to die because there's no education without death. For many years, I condemned all people as mad and sought for myself a hiding place. I was unwilling to live, yet I didn't know how to die. I now know that the art of learning well and the art of dying well are one. In recovering my ability to control what I attend to, I'm finally ready for whatever comes next. 

Do I believe that my story will inspire the fallen angels of the future to make sense of their surroundings, to learn from their pasts, to successfully overcome the challenges of their present moments? Pish-posh! I'm 100 percent content to become yet another forgotten name, another wraith roaming among buildings of bygone eras. All people are eventually forgotten. Our stories get erased like stray chalk marks off an old green chalkboard. They go wherever digital files go when no one cares to access them anymore. That's why you should cherish those you're intimate with—they're the primary authors of your ephemeral legacy, both before and after you die. 

Dear Student of the Future, whose soul dwells in the house of tomorrow, and whom I'll never have the privilege to teach and learn from: Balance your curiosity in worldly affairs with a healthy level of detachment. Guard your identity within the realm of the spirit without letting it get bogged down by the intricacies of Here and Now. The highest good to be discovered by the soul is within itself. Therefore, to the extent possible, seek refuge in the privacy of your soul as humanity undergoes the unhurried process of cultural evolution. 

Dear Parent of Future Student: Calibrate the events of your children's lives in such a way as to fortify their delicate soul, to inoculate their blood with trace amounts of the world's ills without having them succumb to the fevers of despair. It's hard to stomach the fact that mistakes, memory lapses, and intense emotions often drive a child's most meaningful learning and their trajectory toward self-realization. (This point is true for young nations as well.) We can't and shouldn't always be there to deflect every blow dealt to them or to revive their every dashed dream. 

Be a role model for your child. Remember that it's those role models who embrace an everlasting gospel—a moral code that transcends all times and places—whom we regard as the greatest of teachers. Humanity's pathological loneliness is an inexhaustible source for inventing new methods of inflicting pain and suffering upon the natural world, which  is why we look to role models for a singularly reliable remedy that will deliver us from the constraints of history's humiliating humanness. However, caution your children against idolatry of any kind. Assure them that those who've previously uncovered the Nature of Things aren't their superiors, but their guides. Through learning, the truth lies open to us all. 

The emergence of DNA constituted the emergence of learning, since the random errors in replication that sometimes contribute to an organism's flourishing, in essence, is learning. Eons later, the emergence of language allowed us humans to learn in real time, to share our memories, and to live on in myth long after we die as individuals. To create myths, those curious symbol-laden stories we tell children when they ask us questions we can't answer in strictly rational terms, is the telos—the objective—of life for humans. 

Our myth-making minds were made to fill in memory gaps, which is the reason that all history, in time, becomes myth. The ongoing process of mythologizing the past requires a continual modification of how we think about and treat the world around us. It's only when we allow moral sense to seep into our stories that we gain access to a body of shared insights that can be drawn upon to more accurately predict the future. And our ability to predict the future promotes the survival of our species. In the annals of history, all eras of enlightenment are interleaved with epochs of ignorance. And while history is discontinuous, subjective, and governed mostly by chance, mythic truths and archetypes remain immutable. 

The onus, dear neighbor, now falls on you to keep my memory alive. Soon, my organism will no longer share the task. The sound of my voice may very well change as it echoes across future years and ears, but it will sound at just the timbre and pitch you need it to at the moment it's heard. My spirit, through the mental and physical artifacts it leaves behind, will continue to leak out and influence the course of history in unknowable ways. Even though I'm the last of my lineage, I'm fortunate enough to have you as my connection to the future. This thought alone sustains me. As my body wastes away, my soul awakens. My Laura deserved to awaken. 

Flipping back through these humble pages, I'm tickled. I wasn't exceptional at any of the things I did during my lifetime, but it certainly can't be said that I didn't take the opportunity to do them. More importantly, I did them wholeheartedly. The earlier you can content yourself with such achievements, the less harrowing your final moments on this hill will be. 

The police came around and told me to get gone by the end of the day. Through a cracked basement window, I can feel the brisk chill of autumn coming on. 

13. The Ascent of Judges Hill 

My spirit retraces its familiar route around the block, up steep sidewalks through archways of drooping trees. Wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk, Hathor hides in the foliage of a sycamore tree with bark like molting snakeskin. She holds bread in one hand and a long ladder in the other. I can hear the scrape of a trowel against the rim of a grout bucket—not unlike a Bowie knife being sharpened against a whetstone. 

May the Mandell House never reach completion, its ruin a triumph against modernity's unmemorable architecture. It looms atop the marble-covered slopes of Judges Hill like the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. I sign my name to these pages as if inscribing it upon the disintegrating columns of this neighborhood. All order that humanity imposes upon this world only temporarily wards off the inescapable encroachment of historification. So long as this monument of moss and mold thrusts its turrets toward the heavens, there will exist a visual reminder of all things beyond the narrow wavelength of the living, a reminder of that kingdom of blankness where death and the future reside. 

Perth Glasscock

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