nathan’s Reviews > The Möbius Book > Status Update

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..

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.