St Hilda’s College, looking at the river. Capitalism and religion, W. muses. He hasn’t got much further with his thinking, he says. His notebook’s nearly empty. I flick through it.
Where there is hope there is religion: Bloch, I read. Sometimes God, sometimes nothing: Kafka, I read. I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room: Celan. Beautiful! But there are few thoughts of W.’s own. He’s going through a dry period, W. says.
Maybe he should try his hand at poetry, like me, W. says. He could write haiku: ‘Half ton friend / in trouble again’. ‘Fuckwit in a vest / Friend I love best’. Or he could draw some pictures. Study for a Divvy. Landscape with Idiot.
Here’s his favourite quotation, W. says. They should put it on his gravestone. It’s by Hermann Müller, he says. It’s called ‘The Luckless Angel’:
The past surges behind him, pouring rubble on his wings and shoulders and thundering like buried drums, while in front of him the future collects, exploding his eyeballs, strangling him with his breath. The luckless angel is silent, waiting for history in the petrification of flight, glance, breath. Until the renewed rush of powerful wings swelling in waves through the stones signals his flight.
Sometimes, W. thinks it’s fallen to us: the great task of preserving the legacy of Old Europe. It’s our task, he thinks, our allotted mission, to keep something alive of continental Europe in our benighted country, W. says.
Ah, how was it coupled in us, the fear and loathing of the present world and the messianic sense of what it might have been? W. wonders. How, in us, are combined the sense that our careers — our lives as so-called thinkers — could only have been the result of some great collapse, and the conviction that we are the preservers of a glorious European past, and that we have a share in that past?
How, in us, was joined the sense that our learning — which is really only an enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophy, for literature — is of complete irrelevance and indifference, and the mad belief that our learning bears upon what is most important and risky of all, upon the great questions of the age?
We’re delusional, W. says. He knows that. We’ve gone wrong, terribly wrong, he knows that, too. But don’t we belong to something important, something greater than us, even if we are only its grotesque parody?
We’re hinderers of thought, W. says. We trip it up, humiliate it. There’s thought, flat on the floor. There it is, drunk as we are drunk and throwing up over the side of the bridge …
But thought is here, right here, very close to us, that’s the thing, W. says. Thought’s here, it must be desperate. There must be no one else for thought to hang out with. We’re its last friends, W. says. We’re the last friends of thought …
In his imagination, W. says, our offices in our cities at the edges of this country are like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, keeping the old knowledge alive. In his imagination, our teaching is samizdat, outlawed because it is dangerous, the secret police infiltrating our lectures and preparing to take us away. In W.’s imagination, the enemies of thought are tracking us even here, even in Oxford. Especially in Oxford. They’re watching. They invited us here to keep us close. To press us close to the bosom of Oxford. To suffocate us. To suck the life out of us …
But in reality, W. knows no one is watching. No one cares anymore, that’s the truth of it, W. says. No one’s on the look out. There was no guard on the door of St Hilda’s College. There’s no one who could regard us as interlopers.
It’s like Rome after it was sacked by the Barbarians, says W. They’ve come and gone, the Barbarians, the wreckers of civilisation. And now there’s no guard; there’s nothing to protect. We’re inside — yes; but that is only a sign that there is no longer a distinction between inside and outside.
We’ve got away with nothing; our stupidity is in plain view. It doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant to everyone. No one’s worried about our credentials, because there are no credentials. There’s only luck. And opportunism. Were we lucky? I ask him. — ‘Undoubtedly’. And were we opportunists? — ‘We were too stupid to be opportunists’.
He sees it, W. says, like an enormous fact. A great fact, like the wide sky, that says: it doesn’t matter. Over the Bodelian Library, it says: it’s all over. Over the college quadrangles, it says: it’s finished. You’re too late. Over the gowned academics, it says: Gibt sie auf! Gibt sie auf! Gibt sie auf!
The gate stands open. It’s nearly falling from its hinges. And beyond it, other doors, or gaps in walls where there were once doors, or rubble where there were once walls, or mounds of dust where there was once rubble. And beyond that: empty space without stars. Nothing at all.
Rolling thunder. Lightning flashing in the summer sky. There’s trouble at his college, W. says.
The rumour is they’re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialise in sport instead. They’ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says.
Oh, some staff will be kept on, they’ve said that. The college needs some academic respectability. They’ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He’ll probably be teaching shot put metaphysics …
But everyone will have to reapply for their jobs, that’s the rumour. They’re going to cut the workforce in half. It’s Hobbesian, W. says. There’s going to be a war of all against all.
How peaceful it was, his college, when he first arrived! Colleagues greeted each other warmly. They sat out in the quadrangle, taking tea and discussing their scholarship. No one taught for more than a couple of hours a week.
Then the decline began. Teaching hours went up. Colleagues became busier; there was less time to talk. Scholars worked alone, with their office doors closed. But still they waved at one another across the quadrangle. Still, when they had time, they visited each other’s offices for tea.
But things fell further. Colleagues did nothing but teach, W. says. No one spoke. No one took tea. Scholars — what scholars were left — worked alone, talking to no one, keeping their insights to themselves. The quadrangle was silent.
And now? Colleagues have forgotten what scholarship is. They’ve forgotten anything but teaching, endless, remorseless teaching. Former scholars snarl at each other in the college corridors. And there are rumours that the library will be torched, and that they’ll set up a gallows in the quadrangle. It’s like something out of Dante, W. says.
The war is beginning, W. says. The armies are assembling. It’s as though the awful Hindu stories I tell are coming true. He feels like Arjuna in the great battle of the Mahabharata, W. says. He feels like the leader of the Pandavan armies on the Kurukshetra plains, facing his friends and relatives on the opposing side.
Uncle was set against nephew, that’s what I told him, isn’t it? W. says, pupil against teacher, friend against friend: the battle had torn families apart, old friendships asunder … Arjuna threw aside his bow and sank to his knees, I told W. Why should he fight? he cried to his friend, Krishna. Why should he go on? And that’s what W. wails when he’s with me: why should he fight? Why should he go on?