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A mountain of skulls

Once I'd read a tale about a Buddhist monk who had a dream. It was about climbing a very high mountain, entirely made of skulls. And suddenly he realized those were but his own skull across all his past incarnations.
Travelling between all these universities, big and small, I've often had the sensation of climbing a painstaking mountain, where the great bulk lies below, crass and inert, while the lofty, crystal pinnacles dancing among the clouds have no mass whatsoever. And suddenly I am not alien to it, I am one with it, from the very bottom to the loftiest of the pinnacles. All brains long consumed, those empty skulls are but my own skull across an infinity of incarnations...
​Nothing to despise, thus, and no ambition to feed. 

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University of Amsterdam

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University of Leiden

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Oxford University

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University of London

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University of Vienna

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Trinity College Dublin

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University of Warsaw

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Jagiellonian University

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Taras Shevchenko National University

Certainly one of the strangest universities of the world, not only for its facade painted to match the color of the Ukrainian borscht, with all its architectonic details enhanced in black. On approaching it for the first time, one unavoidably thinks about the Orwellian Ministry of Love, or perhaps an exquisite central bordello. 
Similar pomp is to be found inside, not only in the ceremonial halls, but also in the tiniest seminar rooms, all of them containing a wooden rostrum. Basic piece of furniture without which many a Ukrainian colleague would never think of presenting his or her paper. 

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Marie Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin