Dear friends,

Antoine Roquentin stared at the roots of a tree and thought about his own superfluity, denied and generated simultaneously the concept of existence. My own mind is a little limited in comparison; I stare at something I hope to understand and, over time, my thinking degenerates. I wonder how my dog with his crippling separation anxiety was doled out a life of sleeping with his head on a satin pillowcase and end up staring at the page in my middle school science notebook onto which I copied the ecological pyramid, moving bottom-up from producer to quaternary consumer. But, I suppose, the struggle is all the same—to get to the end of a line of thinking.

At the end/on the edge, which is to say back at the very beginning, on some Möbius strip, here we are. Endeavoring to understand complexity, only for the object to return the clay from which it was formed, only for the tree to show you its roots, only for someone to tell you, “That is just who I am.” This week, the Nass writes to the brink of understanding; wonders until the past and future amalgamate to form a conceivable continuum; asks questions until there are no words left unused in the asking to be used in the answering; 

Sartre: “Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things.”

Wordlessly,

Sasha Rotko, EIC