The Lives that Argue for Us

there is so much fiction out there about anxieties, about crises….climate anxiety and capitalism anxiety and technological anxiety and so much is good but…….so little of…this, which functions as commentary on societal anxieties about an unknown unimaginable future but told not as much an internal negotiation with this anxiety as much as a vision of a different way of being. this brutally merciless respect for human dignity. the idea people can and must scrounge up the agency to exercise their right to fucking deal with the truth when it’s dumped at their feet.

the first book of Sehhinah is focused on how every single person knows about and has access to theurgy, a staggering amount of power to conjure phenomena and material from their very souls, but which is made so boring-sounding and normalized in their society that even a philosophy major hears about it and goes "why bother?" the concept of the holy are a thing that – if it was in the horror-genre – would be a late-stage twist that’s supposed to be assuming you will react with horror about the horrific treacherous nature of reality and g-d, but here has been taken for granted and dealt with for thousands of years in the first scene of the series: there's a whole lifetime after doing that. and then we get to explore the whole society that takes for granted these assumptions! sehhinah is not the kind of utopia that’s a fake mask built upon a tortured kid in the basement who the Powers That Be have secretly put there which would definitely collapse otherwise. it’s a utopia built (incidentally, only by the lack of knowledge to do otherwise) upon a sleeping girl (nam'ir) who hid herself and took herself out of active existence because she convinced herself her Being would destroy the world. and g-d would NOT have had a total horrorstricken psychic breakdown about realizing someone did this and thereby that person subverted the knowledge of everyone like her and gave Them 6,000 instead of merely 1,000 years’ worth of insufficiently informed arguments for the covenant!!!!!!! in this setting, the truth-suppressing world-controlling ‘evil’ that was holding the society in place was scrupulosity…??!!!

before the cataclysm when a god (teśena) subjects another god (g-d) to the revelation of a whole theology-foundation-shaking upending of what is possible in the world, the characters who don’t know what they’re really talking about say, about all the delightfully bizarre things about sehhinah: "it's fine." but they’re not saying 'it’s fine :)))))’ about a horror. the truth is not 'it’s horrible’, because 'horrible’ is not the only negation of 'fine.’ 

(a line very throwaway and tangential, but also emblematic: "yenatru's pretty sure fine is the last thing tamar would say about it. worth it she has said more times than he can count.")

my favorite book ever? one of. 

This is actually among my favorite books I've ever read. It's full of a rigor of self-truthfulness in order to produce the effect it has: every path of least resistance is nonexistent, nearly every possible lazy turn into a well-treaded, trope-adhering plotline or message, from the broadest themes and plots events, to every choice about narrative order and pacing, to the smallest observations and turns of phrase, is struck out and resolutely avoided. What remains in the book instead is only those possibilities that no other writer explores. The personal, contrarian convictions and in-betweens.

It would be hard to enumerate them here. I'll pick one example: The fact that the word 'god' is even attempted to be defined (while its definition applies to a) not everyone b) multiple people who are not God-the-character AND YET c) is based on the paradoxical, infinitely deep, riddle of an identity for God used in Judaism (ehyeh asher ehyeh), might give one indication of the way statements and ideas are treated here.

I saw another review elsewhere say The Lives That Argue For Us was like staring into the soul of a fierce and burning-sharp creature whose patterns I could trace forever, like Tamar the very first scene in the first book of this series[The Stars That Rise At Dawn], and the climactic scenes as his heart has been lost long ago, that he cannot lie to himself or deny his love, his desire, and his truthfulness to those things that are of him, any longer, not even in the face of an unknown irrevocable sail over the edge of the known world, forever, with no idea what is in store for him ...... then, the second half of the same scene (a microcosm of the structure of the book!), when he experiences that tip-over-the-edge-of-the-world...This person phrased it more poignantly than I could.

Main characters: a god (moon drowned in salt ocean, tsunami, rip in spacetime), God (big bang fire, covenant-maker, inviter-seducer to existing), seafarer (of oceans, of souls, of infinity, doom-laden), another god (gentle, protective, soft, just as Much), yet another god (ancient Beast of the book of revelation but who who sealed herself away and kept herself a secret, to avoid causing the end of the world).

Minor characters: casts of books 1 and 2 in the series, old drunken mentor, aging punkrocker holy bartender, waiter angel (Wormwood), fallen angel similar to sufism's Iblis.

Favorite chapters: "and the last question", "is agony, an infinity".

Favorite epigraph: The one to "is agony, an infinity," which is a spoiler. Runner up: to sift my | self the horizon | of my self

This is one of the Most books of all time. It is the conclusion of the trilogy and puts forward an answer to the questions that are posed over and over again throughout the series: Is it wrong to be yourself? Can your soul be wrong, be something that shouldn't exist?

And at every turn it replies back: it wouldn't be right to hold it back.

Teśena is one of my favourite characters ever. I loved aer arc, how ae grows in confidence, and how aer nonverbality is treated as simply how ae is and no one gives aer shit for it. And shoutout to God, for being endlessly delightful, silly, yet penetratingly wise (…at points) at the same time.