Elara Vance was a PhD candidate who had stopped believing in truth. Surrounded by towering stacks of biographies on Nietzsche, crates of translated Plato, and the dust of a thousand dead thinkers, she felt like a mechanic who had taken apart an engine but forgotten how to put it back together. Her thesis, The Modern Apathy of Ethics , was due in a week, and the cursor on her screen blinked like a dying heartbeat.