W., doleful as we head back to the station. How much time do we have left? he wonders. A decade? A century? The trouble is, you can’t tell, he says. The conditions for the disaster are here, they’re omnipresent, but when will it actually come?
He reads book after book on the destruction of the world. Book after book on the apocalypse. He reads about the futures market. He reads about storm-surges and dry-belts. Then he reads my books, W. says, shaking his head. — ‘Your books! My God!’ The conditions for the end are here, W. says, but not the end itself, not yet …
W. is greatly susceptible to changes in weather, he says on the phone. He can feel them coming days in advance, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there’s a low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of England with rain and grey clouds and humidity, and another low front behind that. How’s he going to get any work done — any serious work?
It’s alright for me, he says. I’m in the east of the country, for a start, which means that the weather doesn’t linger in the same way. Oh it’s much colder, he knows that — he always brings a warm jacket when he stays with me — but it’s fresher too; it’s good for the mind, good for thought.
But W. can’t think, he says. He knows the Westerlies are coming. He knows low pressure’s going to dominate the weather for weeks, if not months. Sometimes whole seasons are dominated by Westerlies, which costs him an immense amount in lost time and missed work.
He’s still up early every morning, of course. He’s still at his desk at dawn. Four AM; five AM — he’s ready for work; he opens his books; he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He’s there at the inception, at the beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs on his window-ledge.
He’s up before anyone else, he knows that, but there’s still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months; not one. He’s stalled, W. says. There’s been an interregnum. But when wasn’t he stalled? When wasn’t it impossible for him to think? No matter how early he gets up, he misses his appointment with thought; no matter how he tries to surprise it by being there before everyone else.
W.’s reading a book of Latin philosophical phrases. — ‘Ah, here’s something that applies to you: Barba non facit philosophum. A beard does not make a philosopher’. Then he tests me: What does eo ipso mean? What’s the difference between modus tollens and modus ponens? — ‘Tabula rasa: I know you know that. And conatus—even you must know that’.
‘You don’t actually know anything, do you?’, W. says. ‘You’ve got no body of knowledge’. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course, and he can play classical guitar. And there are whole oeuvres with which he is familiar. He’s read his way through Husserl, for example. He’s not entirely bewildered by Leibniz.
Socrates knew he knew nothing: that was his wisdom, and the beginning of all wisdom, W. says. But there’s a difference between knowing nothing and knowing nothing, he says. There’s a difference between knowing you know nothing only to sally forth from your ignorance, and wallowing in your ignorance like a hippo in a swamp.
‘You don’t want to know’, W. says. And I’m drinking to forget what little I did know. There’s nothing left for me, he says. Nothing but the empty sky, and the Zen-like emptiness of my head.
I’m always overawed by Oxford, W. knows that. Overawed, and therefore contemptuous. I hate it, W. says, because I love it. It disappoints me, W. says, because I have disappointed it: wasn’t I bussed in from my secondary modern to see what a real university was like? Didn’t I apply to study here as a student?
‘What do you think they made of you?’, W. asks. ‘What did they make of chimp boy, with his delusions of grandeur?’ Did I think I would survive a minute in Balliol College? Did I think I’d be punting with the toffs?
W.’s dad, who was very wise, banned him from applying altogether. — You don’t belong there!’, he told him, and he was right. W. has always been free of any Oxford influence, he says. He’s free of the attraction to Oxford, but also of the repulsion from Oxford: he doesn’t hate it as I do.
Oxford brings out the Diogenes in me, W. says. I all but assault passers-by. Truth-telling, that’s what I call it. Drunken abuse, that’s what he’d call it, W. says.
The kernel is in Poland, we agree as we walk up the Cowley Road. The secret is in Poland. We run through our memories. Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? Didn’t it all come together there? Wasn’t it there that it all began?
There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, given a civic reception. Wasn’t it the mayor of Wrocław himself who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wrocław looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer?
‘And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes, over dinner’, W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted Freud’s primal scene, on the dancefloor. It’s a British dance move, we told them. It’s what we do on British dancefloors. They looked away from us, appalled.
But, in general, the Poles treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun — that’s what they called it, a grill party. There were sausages and beer. We British are a loutish people, we told them. Don’t expect anything from us. We said we’d disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but, after a while, they seemed to find us charming.
W. thinks we won them over, he says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were a race apart, like Neanderthals or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could hope for very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.
Yes, that’s where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts’ expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.
The Trout, overlooking the meadows.
Oxford: the very name is a blow to W. It strikes him on the head like a bludgeon. It sounds through him like a depth-charge. Oxford! Oxford!
Why do we come here year after year? W. says. Why, to our conference, and to wandering from pub to pub after our conference? Why, lamenting the intellectual state of our country, and our intellectual state?
Britain is not a country of thought, we tell ourselves every year. The Anglo-Saxon mentality is opposed to abstraction, to metaphysics, we tell ourselves. It is completely opposed to German profundity and French radicality, to Central European Weltschmerz, and to Russian soulfulness … It has nothing to do with Spanish duende, or the Greek sense of fate.
And above all, the British don’t understand religion, W. says. They don’t understand religious pathos. The British are too empiricist, W. says. Too literalist. They don’t see that religion’s all around them. Religion is about this world, about everyday things. That’s what the continentalist understands, he says. That’s what the new atheist fails to understand.