Life on a Möbius Strip: The Greatest Moth Story Ever Told, About the Unlikely Paths That Lead Us Back to Ourselves
Our lives are shaped by an inescapable confluence of choice and chance. “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her beautiful inquiry into how we find ourselves by getting lost. But the truth is that most of the time we don’t know or only think we know what is on this side of any transformative experience — we live much of our lives opaque to ourselves, lost within our own psyches, confused and conflicted about what we really want. Milan Kundera considers this the central ambivalence of love and life.
We tend to make sense of it all by deft mental acrobatics, deducing what we want from what we get, only to realize — and it is never quite clear whether this is a deep truth or a deep delusion — that the strange and unpredictable outcomes of life were what we desired in the first place.
That’s what cosmologist and novelist Janna Levin explores in what remains, in my book, the greatest story ever told on The Moth. It was later published under the title “Life on a Möbius Strip” as the opening piece in the beloved storytelling show’s inaugural anthology, The Moth: 50 True Stories (public library).
In this storytelling masterpiece, a testament to poet Mark Strand’s notion that life is “such a lucky accident … that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” Levin uses her scientific research into whether the universe is infinite or finite as a springboard for leaping into the infinitely complex, infinitely messy mysteries of the human heart — those largely arbitrary events we spend our lives arranging into a mosaic of meaning.
Jenna Levin: Thirty Seconds On Why We Should Care
Complement this exceptional installment in the altogether excellent The Moth, which features true stories by Adam Gopnik, Andrew Solomon, Sebastian Junger, Malcolm Gladwell, and Aimee Mullins, with Levin on madness and genius, free will, and the century-long quest to hear the sound of space-time.
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