Ingrid: What is an amazing life?

Aaron: Life is gonna be amazing. Like, unavoidably. Amazingly something. Because each person’s life is their own narrative, and the only native prism through which they can experience being. The question is if it will be amazingly good, amazingly bad, amazingly confusing, amazingly tragic, you know? But nothing can seem more vivid or complete, or therefore amazing to anyone than their own life. Some physicist once said that he had a perfect model of the universe, but that it was unfortunately life-sized. Get it?

Ingrid: The idea of viewing life as a whole through the prism of one’s life in particular is really interesting to me.

Aaron: Do you ever feel the parts beyond our existence? Sometimes an astonishing grace, sometimes utter damnation, neither of which belong to us, and both of which account for I think all religious experiences.

When you’re moving through your mind and you reach the threshold of some such region, well that has its own feeling. Feels like when there’s an eclipse. and there’s beauty and the world is bathed in indirect light reflected around the interloping body, but the animal motivation in you is screaming that unless the offending interloper moves we will all surely die.

Ingrid: What is the best thing about loving someone?

Aaron: At the spiritual level, [the best thing about loving someone] … lies in each partner’s new found reference point in the other. We can better chart the chaos, and there is comfort there. … We receive in a loved one a new point of reference against which to posit virtual axes.