The school, as always, seemed such a strange place. It was both gay and
depressing, and hummed with a kind of unnatural industry. It was gay in
the intervals between the lessons, and extremely tedious during the
lessons.
The subjects of study were most singular and useless. They concerned:
folk, who had died long ago and did no good while they lived, and whom,
for some unknown reason, it was necessary to recall after all these
centuries, although some of the personages had never even existed;
verbs, which were conjugated with something; nouns, which were declined
for some purpose or other, though no use could be found for them in
living speech; figures, which call for proofs of something which need
not be proven at all; and much else, equally inconsequential and
absurd. And there was nothing in all this that one could not do
without; there was no correlation of facts, there was no
straightforward answer to the eternal question: Why and Wherefore?