The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Academy

Dear Hitchhiker,

On your voyages into the farthest reaches of the galaxy we live in, you might someday happen to stumble over a remote corner of it referred to by its inhabitants as The Holy and Undivided Academy or simply as The Academy. The following guide through its labyrinthine mazes will hopefully help you on your explorations into its various layers.

The first thing to note about the Academy is that is a gigantic beehive with zillions of tiny cells, and each of these cells is centred around a King Bee who is surrounded by millions of worker bees. If you want to know why there are no Queen Bees there, do not ask further : it is simply that this species does not exist in any of the accepted taxonomies, and even if it does such Bees would be too emotional and unreliable to be placed in a seat of authority. Now you might perhaps also want to know how the King Bees got there in the first place, and to understand this let us focus on one of these cells. The King Bee that you shall meet there is usually a third or fourth-generation descendant of a Grandfather King Bee who had once shaken the foundations of the beehive with a revolutionary text whose repercussions had reached its distant ends. He was able to attract a number of worker bees who accepted his text as the absolute truth about the nature of the beehive, and who then reproduced this text into the next generation. Sometime around the third generation, however, there was an acrimonious split among these worker bees into three groups : those in group 1 claimed that they were maintaining the Pristine gospel of the Grandfather King Bee, others in group 2 declared that it was they who had finally excavated the True meaning of the Grandfather's texts, and the rest in group 3 complained that all the worker bees in the first two groups had got it horribly wrong.

Consequently, the original cell was now replaced by three new cells with three different King Bees, each of whom tried to ensure that the worker bees under Him did not transgress the boundaries of His cell. If they dared to do so, they would be excommunicated at once, and they would remain beyond the pale until they renounced their former evil ways and returned home like a prodigal child. To discourage such cell-hopping from becoming a fashionable enterprise, each King Bee has a standing army to police the boundaries of His cell and to constantly report to Him that no trans-cellular activity is taking place. Moreover, He keeps up a sustained campaign of disinformation to the effect that worker bees in each cell speak a language that cannot be understood by the worker bees in the other ones. No wonder, then, that so many of the worker bees do not even take the trouble of actually meeting one another.

This does not mean, however, that worker bees from the different cells never get together; most of them gather under the shadow of the darkness and some of them, a half-way and much-reviled breed called the comparative worker bees, even talk to one another openly in the day. Nevertheless, these worker bees are extremely sensitive about the solidity of the walls that define their identities, and would be gravely offended if you told them that these walls are permeable or, more scandalously, that they are illusory or non-existent.

One final word of caution. When you are inside one of these tiny cells in the Academy, you might be asked by the worker bees where you have come from. You are most welcome to reply that you are visiting them from cell number 56A or cell number ZRT2. But, dear Hitchhiker, please do not tell them that you have come from a place outside the beehive. They will simply not understand what you mean : trust me, for these worker bees, there can be no such place outside the beehive. For them, the beehive is The World.

Yours truly,

Your Man In The Beehive,

The Transparent Ironist