Inside the academy pursuit of knowledge follows from a critique of that which forms the body of work around a subject, area, or artefact. In the monasteries, knowledge is transmitted from a teacher to a new seeker. I think about the nature of transmission that takes place and the quality and purpose of what is transmitted across these two modes. A graduate student immerses herself in the literature – it is some combination of monographs that focus narrowly on a small section

Promises flow in all directions, appointments are not kept; heavy snow fell through the long glowing night by morning it was all swept.

Asleep at last on a mattress of snow. Birth has now ended. While much was true while it lasted, all is fiction now that it is no more.

Few feelings leave more of a bitter taste than that of being used, squeezed dry of vitality and made a cog in some vast machine milking us dry and too blind us to our own misery, shoving in our mouths and minds a bone to chew on, intoxicated by the taste of blood from our own bleeding gums…