You mentioned that drift wrote a dissertation. What was that on, if you dont mind me asking?
To hear Ratchet describe it, (airquotes) “Something something something hermeneutics.” But that’s downplaying Ratchet’s understanding of Drift’s work and the role he played in bringing it about.
With the Lost Light grounded and the prospects of another mission like it looking dim, Ratchet knew Drift was going to need another path. The kid was too bright and too restless to teach jiu jitsu for the rest of his life, too wildly syncretic to take the cloth, and too eccentric in his presentation (to say nothing of his resume) to be considered for most other kinds of employment. He needed company more erudite than Rodimus or Riptide (or Ratchet, for that matter) to help him mine the lodes of thought and speculation that veined his unusual mind so deeply. In Ratchet’s view, there was only one place where people like Drift – bright people, curious people, fundamentally unemployable people, people with a knack for words and a high tolerance for bullshit, who inhabited a world of theories and ideas and breathed its rarefied air – could happily thrive.
It took no small amount of urging on Ratchet’s part to get Drift to apply -– he could see the hunger in Drift’s eyes but also the doubt: a lack of credentials, starting in his thirties what most people began a decade earlier -– but once in motion, his momentum built unchecked. He blazed through prerequisites in religion and philosophy at astonishing speed, rode a wave of funding right through a Master of Theology, and launched without stopping into an ambitious doctoral project analyzing the Tractatus Luteus, a Spectralist scripture of notorious impenetrability, in connection to the cult of the Circle of Light, of which Drift was one of the few surviving initiates. His personal involvement in the topic gave his work an anecdotal liveliness and a certain whiff of brimstone (did he really believe in half the things he documented?), but his research was groundbreaking and caused a sensation in the department.
It was Ratchet who helped him prepare for his defense, for though he didn’t know or care what “meontology” meant, he could latch terrierlike to weak arguments and shake them to bits, and he loved the way Drift lit up when prodded to explain what he meant by this or that concept, practically vibrating with the excitement of articulating it. By that point Drift was already teaching, and his undergraduate Survey of Mystical Traditions had a waitlist of a dozen or more. It was partly his reputation that attracted an audience; most students knew who he was and would sit riveted through an hour and a half of ruminative digressions (Drift lectured as if working out a problem for himself), waiting for the mischievous flicker in their instructor’s eyes that meant a story was imminent. (His graduate seminars, when they came, carried an even greater allure, not least because his seminar in Varieties of Spiritual Experience included the consumption of peyote as part of the capping exercise.)
Drift got tenure. He continued to teach. And he wrote. He wrote prolifically, feverishly, a torrent of articles and lectures and books, all of it in some way informed by the desolation and fructification of his own spiritual life. Never in his life had he felt so fulfilled, so driven by a clarity of purpose. His third book, Quests and Questioners, became something of a bestseller, being one of just two published firsthand accounts of the voyage of the Lost Light, and the only one dealing with the metaphysical aspects of that mission. He was sought after to give public talks. Other universities courted him, offered him attractive posts, but he turned them all down. He’d wandered too much in his life and didn’t like the idea of pulling up roots again. Besides, Ratty wasn’t well.
So Drift stayed put, continued teaching, was widowed, passed under a black shadow of grief and wrote nothing for a long time, and when he began again, his work was tinted dark by a preoccupation with loss and dying and the migration of the soul. He continued to lecture and publish into middle age, into old age, into advanced old age. As Professor Emeritus he proved as difficult to get rid of as Ratchet had been as “retiring” CMO, and when he moved between classes, groups of students parted to make way for him, an ethereal old man with a patterned face, muttering to himself, grey and unsettling as a curl of smoke.
