Jun 3, 2025 11:56 AM
This feels like a book that’s impossible to review after having just read through it linearly. It isn’t a linear book. It very much reads like excerpts from a journal that were taken out of context and pasted together to be categorically continuous. Because that’s exactly what it is: notes collected by a dear friend and novelized out of love and fascination. This means that, as far as I can tell, it’s a book that’s made to open up to you in a nonlinear way. For me this means it felt like a short story collection, where fatigue sets in during the initial operation, but a rich set of references has been added to my mind’s library.
I’m sure you’ll catch me talking about this book in the future when a momentary emotion tugs at the index in my memory of one of Gravity and Grace’s aphorisms. Perhaps the fugue in which this book left me is part of the point. No assertion is full, reality only exists as orthogonal axillary lines dropped between two dialectical poles. The finite and the infinite. The profane and the mystical. As above so below. And on down throughout creation from Catholicism to Buddhism to labor rights.
3 Comments
6 months ago
damn I'm a dumbass I thought that lyric was "writing" Always sort of strange to have these cut-up aphoristic type philosophical works. Similar to The Will to Power I suppose in that it's hard to tell the full intention behind a passage in a notebook. Her Iliad essay is great and I've always wanted to read more of her. If I can find The Need for Roots at some point I might cop that.
6 months ago
Hmm your use of “cut-ups” has me thinking lol
6 months ago
I remember when I read this the aphoristic nature really rubbed me the wrong way, feels really hard to pull something substantial out of it. I do agree it is very emotionally compelling though.