It was a September day much like today.
The start of my first semester, my first day, my first break
in-between classes.
The campus still very much unfamiliar, I found myself in the
library, staring out an open window across the campus green.
This was the first time I realized my identity had been
stripped away from me.
Nobody here on campus knew me.
All my friends from high school were off having their own
college adventures.
Everything was alien.
It was also the first time that I realized I could now be anything
I wanted to, no past opinions or history hanging around me.
It was in that exact spot during the next fall semester that
that idea hit me.
This is what I was going to do, and the question was- how?
Not the why, not the expectations, or even what I might have
wanted, I had no plan for any of those, just the question of how.
I wrote a few letters, two got returned unopened, and one never
received a reply.
I followed one lead to the city, which just led to a dead
end.
The thought of going off on my own and just doing it had
crossed my mind, but proper channels, even if currently unknown seemed best.
A random thought.
Maybe I will ask my academic advisor?
We had each been assigned an academic advisor to meet with
each week to keep out studies on track. Part check-in, part what are you up-to,
part Q&A, my advisor was a Jesuit in the Philosophy Department.
Given the pedagogy of the campus, one would have thought is
office would be filled with leather chairs, stacks of books, and piles of papers
as opposed to the monastic simplicity of a desk, a pair of chairs and a lamp.
I had worked on how I was going to approach the question all
week, how I was going to time it, and in the moment all of that got put aside
and I just asked after we completed reviewing my philosophy paper.
He didn’t lose a beat, and my question seemed like a
perfectly normal one.
As if one was asking what color the sky was.
Alchemy.
I would start with alchemy as it was the most recement
manifestation in the West, and from there working back in time to the classical
world, eventually arriving to the ancient world and Egypt.
Naturally in true Jesuit tradition I was assigned a paper on
it, first draft due in two weeks.
That first door was opened when he arranged for my
permission to borrow some alchemical books from the University archives.
Not because they were rare, which they were, but because they
were forgotten and there was no University record of them.
Boxed away in storage to make space on some shelf.
My paper went though two revisions and was acceptable but embarrassing
for a first pass on the subject.
A necessary embarrassment.
About the subject it was not enough to research things, to
interpret them through a modern bias, or personal feelings.
One had to understand the view of such authors and writers,
the naturalness of how they viewed the world at that time.
Another paper was assigned.
Determined to continue, while there was no such major at the
University, there was a course load I could follow to help me understand how to
learn the subject matter.
Could I handle a dual major of sorts?
Courses in philosophy, history, art, a splash of religion, Latin
and classical Greek.
My mind was already made up.
