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His hands were in fists. His face was like a fist. His legs flexed angrily, somehow also fistlike, under cargo shorts emblazoned with Fuxing Normal’s insignia, which looks like a city rising from the waves. Or sinking. Or maybe it’s just some buildings by the water. His strong chest filled out a faded black polo shirt. He looked more or less like his Gmail portrait.

“All time travel is essentially Oedipal.”

I reasoned that our difficulty with endings must have come from the same place—that she and I both tended to work with bottomless questions because we didn’t actually want to reach the end of our questioning.

Our trouble was a shared one: we were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle. It was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren’t exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative.

One subconscious touching another subconscious, I had tried to say, but it came out unsteadily: Our subconscious-ness-es? The plural wouldn’t cooperate with my tongue. Could you say, subconsci? We laughed. It was just language, which meant it was never enough, like all addictions.

it’s commonly felt: feeling speaking to feeling. Anything outside that communion falls away.

Language is always a translation of emotion; it’s possible for physical intimacy to be a push backward, a re-arrival to the pure meaning of love without its translation into words. The simplicity of kissing—something that does nothing, accomplishes nothing—estranges us from a need for language, and when such desire is commonly held..

When writing moves on its own authority, it has the same inevitability of good sex. Not much thought is given to what sentence comes next, to where to put this or that hand, to what to do with your mouth. My hands, when the writing is going well, seem to be animated by my subconscious, just as they do when the fucking is going well.

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage … You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself. - Gillian Rose

I was awake early that day, glad to be alone but also wondering how long I was going to be this glad to be alone. As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous mediation on love and death and sex and longing.

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving. The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this in her last complete book before she died of ovarian cancer..

In errata, Keats noted that one of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another. (One would suppose, he wrote, as if Keats was hesitating to be sure what Keats was truly thinking.)

We want to talk about something—something just beyond the material, something about love and trust, something about something we don’t have words for. We try to keep trying. We try not to laugh at ourselves. We are trying to find a way to meet each other somewhere outside of what we can see.

The word “spiritual” is an irritant in all this, not quite the right word but not quite the wrong one. We all suspect we need it anyway, though we don’t really like the word anymore, if we ever did, and we can’t say much more for its derivations—“spirituality,” “spirit”—as it seems they’ve all gone brittle from overuse or misuse around us.

Childhood is inherently mystical—we all agreed on this—a natural awe that comes with having more questions than answers, but that innocence is so easily flattened by the rigidity of religion. Most of us grew up going to a church or cathedral with varying degrees of intensity.

For a while all my conversations seem to keep returning to the word “spiritual.” How strange it feels to need that word now after rolling my eyes at it for so long.

In the winter I read the most wintery line by Sarah Manguso: Elegies are the best love stories because they’re the whole story.

I wondered if I stopped writing stories because living felt so fictional that writing fiction had become unnecessary—keeping track of a day was enough.

And there we were, two grown-ups prone to cynicism, two stubborn writers who’ve long tended toward doing everything alone; there we were holding each other in a dim apartment, admitting we really had no idea what the body is, what death is, what emotions are, how anything really works at all. I had to laugh, and he had to laugh, then we both had to stop laughing.

..religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.

Emotion, too, is invisible, and not reliably measured or quantified, but we are moved by it all the same.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

.. how proximity has a way of bleeding into invisibility.

In Swann’s Way there’s an aunt who can only seem to care about the troubles and tragedies of strangers, and the less she knows someone who’s suffering, the more she cares about that suffering, while those in her life get not an ounce of her sympathy. I’ve forgotten most of Swann’s Way, but I’ve always remembered the aunt and the question innate in her character..

I’m not sure if someone who chooses to suffer or is attached to his pain can ever be soothed away from it, and maybe any effort to comfort such a person is actually an effort to change them and therefore not a comfort at all, but rather a bid to shape them into the person you want them to be.

Cities permit a certain amount of suffering in plain view as part of the etiquette of proximity, the privacies we afford each other in order to bear the burden of human density.

Maybe pessimism is the assumption that you know something you don’t know in order to avoid disappointment, but if an optimist remains an optimist when the worst happens, then what is the cost of optimism?
…
.. it seems optimism is free and pessimism costs you something.

Friendship has a way of re-revealing the things you know in such a way that you can’t help but accept them. Books can be such a friend, too—shedding light on a feeling the reader has already felt in order for her to see it more clearly, or differently.

Obviously you wouldn’t be the person you are now if it hadn’t been for those years—and I tried to interrupt but she wouldn’t let me—and you wouldn’t be the writer you are, you wouldn’t have the perspective you have, the concerns you have, the anything. [deep cigarette drag] You can’t argue with it, can’t argue with your life.

But I didn’t want a metaphorical livelihood—I wanted a real one. I wanted (I still want) health insurance. And yet for the majority of my adulthood, jobs or windfalls have arrived as soon as the bank balance gets precarious..