The Magicians

Classes have started. Quentin attends a lecture by Professor March, in which March pontificates on how “magic is a craft” (48). Professor March asks Quentin to demonstrate some magic to the class. Quentin makes a marble disappear and reappear around his body. Professor March then asks Alice, another student, to come to the front of the room and give a demonstration to the class with her marble. Alice proceeds to heat up her marble and reshape it using her fingers, giving it four legs and a head. She then animates the object into walking across a table, until it falls off and crashes onto the floor. The demonstration impresses Quentin, and he begins to view Alice as healthy competition.

Quentin and the other students are required to study the history of magic, the different languages used in spells, “complex finger and voice exercises” needed for “spellcasting” (55), and how each spell is to be “modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors […]” (55).

Quentin notices that with the start of classes and the return of Eliot’s friends,