"…fighting about Steely Dan is both how we came to love one another as well as the form that love found for itself, one mode of its enactment, its nurturance, and its renewal. There is nothing unique in this. It is what you do when you are young, but not only (I think) when you are young: you love things (songs, records, books) and in the abundance of that enthusiasm you talk, you measure that love with and against others’. You mix your words and your delight up with those of another person, or of many people, and you feel out what’s provoking, or disquieting, or otherwise pleasing about how those words and enthusiasms rub up against one another. What you forge together is a kind of idiolect, a semiprivate argot of appreciation and critique, ardor and invective. This is one of the things you do when you fall in love: you and your beloved make a language together—with words, theories, your bodies—a language that you refine and refashion over many years, and that eventually comes to carry within it much of your history together."