Is 'The Dark Enlightenment' An Oxymoron?

When young and unsure of yourself, a cult, or secret society, or movement can do the heavy lifting of ‘adulting’ and give you a sense of purpose. My 1st year at Columbia had me feeling lost, surrounded by the kind of hyper-independent, career-obsessed, and sure-of-themselves crowd that made even casual social interactions feel like a job interview. We had all gotten into college, some of us working part-time. I ambled from friend group to friend group, student club to student club, and thought for a hot second that fraternity life might be for me (it wasn’t). During this existential crisis, a team of editors and I came face to face with (what I thought at the time was) a cult that would later turn out to be a covert movement, building in influence well into the years after my college graduation.

My editorial team at the college’s unofficial digital publication got anonymous tips all the time. This one, however, was from a library staff member, alerting us to an odd discovery: deep in the university’s collection of novels and monographs and other academic texts was a volume hollowed out with weird paraphernalia. Columbia’s main library: Butler, like many a research university’s book collection, has an area called ‘the stacks’ where most of the volumes are kept in a catacomb of bookshelves and small study alcoves. Behind the circulation desk, a student takes the small elevator through 13 floors of books.

Columbia employs around 400 full-time staff members who maintain the university’s massive collection. Still, it was unbelievable at the time that one stray volume was spotted on floor 12 section H12 bookshelf R. I changed my mind when I saw the big book: An oversized, distressed, leatherbound edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Ubervilles loomed over the other books with an almost theatrical sense of authority – an apt metaphor given further developments.