Philip Roth, Period. posted by Richard Seymour

"You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl--you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? The night she took the tampon out. The necessary aesthetic separation collapsed not while you watched her bleeding--that was all right, that was fine--but when you couldn't restrain yourself and went down on your knees. And what the hell compelled you? . . . Drinking her blood . . . constituted the abandonment of an independent critical position. . . . Worship me, she says, worship the mystery of the bleeding goddess, and you do it. You stop at nothing. You lick it. You consume it. You digest it. She penetrates you. What next . . . ? A glass of her urine? How long before you would have begged her for feces? I'm not against it because it's unhygienic. I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open"