[...] he didn't want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he'd been living in.
[...] Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly clasutrophobic; a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jack…
[...] I hold my liquor enough to hear--from the mouths of poets--work I'm itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.
[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.
[...] There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer's broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense [...]:
The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.
He m…
