like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me,” Coates admits. “The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given.” Coates sees this as liberating: “Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. . . . I found, in this fixed and godless love, something cosmic and spiritual nonetheless.”34 The logic of that “so” eludes me, I confess. I’m not at all sure how it follows.
