"The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity"
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Life, for Mosley, isn’t a stable substance you possess; it’s a tense verb you perform. The line turns biology into a moral aesthetic: a living thing is recognizable not by purity or consistency but by its ongoing entanglement with contradiction. “Opposites (impossibilities)” is the pressure point. He’s not celebrating indecision; he’s naming the paradox that any organism must change to remain itself. The cell survives only by yielding - trading molecules, taking in the foreign, expelling the used - yet it persists as “the same” cell. Identity, then, is not a sealed container but an active negotiation.
That parenthetical “(impossibilities)” does sly work. It suggests that what feels logically incoherent in language is simply the normal condition of being alive. We want clean categories: adaptation versus integrity, openness versus boundary, flux versus selfhood. Mosley insists those binaries are fantasies that living systems routinely violate. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to any politics or psychology that promises wholeness without conflict: ideologies of purity, personal brands built on coherence, even self-help narratives that treat contradiction as a bug to be debugged.
As a novelist, Mosley’s stake is craft as much as philosophy. Fiction lives on precisely these “opposites”: characters who desire incompatible things, plots that force change while claiming continuity, narrators who both reveal and conceal. The sentence reads like a manifesto for complexity - not as ornament, but as proof of pulse. To be alive is to be unfinished, and to keep your name anyway.
That parenthetical “(impossibilities)” does sly work. It suggests that what feels logically incoherent in language is simply the normal condition of being alive. We want clean categories: adaptation versus integrity, openness versus boundary, flux versus selfhood. Mosley insists those binaries are fantasies that living systems routinely violate. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to any politics or psychology that promises wholeness without conflict: ideologies of purity, personal brands built on coherence, even self-help narratives that treat contradiction as a bug to be debugged.
As a novelist, Mosley’s stake is craft as much as philosophy. Fiction lives on precisely these “opposites”: characters who desire incompatible things, plots that force change while claiming continuity, narrators who both reveal and conceal. The sentence reads like a manifesto for complexity - not as ornament, but as proof of pulse. To be alive is to be unfinished, and to keep your name anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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