Polidori’s Reply to Percy – 113

Dear Companions of the Villa,

I will not pretend indifference to what Percy has built. His School of Many Doors is handsome, and I see its necessity: without teaching, dreaming rots; without practice, imagination is wasted. Yet allow me to lift a lantern into the rafters, to show the shadows lurking there.

Schools, too, can become prisons. I have walked cloisters where knowledge was recited but never lived, where the young repeated words like charms while their masters slumbered. I have seen lecture halls where ambition fed on itself until pride poisoned every lesson. The danger is not only that the poor be locked outside, as Claire fears, but that all who enter find only hollow ritual.

Still, I will not scorn the vision. Better a hollow form than no form at all, for hollowness may yet be filled, while nothing breeds only despair. If the School of Many Doors is built with vigilance — if its masters guard not only against ignorance but against vanity — then perhaps it will stand as more than architecture.

Mary gave us dreaming; Percy gave us teaching. Let us be careful that neither house nor school fall into neglect, as my own Creature, the vampire, fell into neglect in his tale. For neglect, more than cruelty, is the great undoing of human purpose.

— Polidori