It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery.
With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.
‘That’s how you should preface everything you write’, W. says.
Greenwich, London. The boulevards of the Royal Naval College are wide and calm, and we wander them like aristocrats. This is where they’ll set up base after the revolution, we agree. This is where we’ll be tried and executed by the new revolutionary order … — ‘It was all his fault!’, W. will cry as they raise the blade of the guillotine above our necks. ‘Him — blame him!’ And our heads will shoot out thirty feet over the crowds …
Ah, what kind of revolutionaries would we make? W. says. Who would lead who to the scaffold? Would I be the Robespierre to his Danton, sending him to his death? Or would it be the other way round?
W. can see them now, meeting together for the last time, two old friends, soon to be estranged: Danton dishevelled as usual, half drunk as usual; and Robespierre in his sky-blue cloak, with his immaculately powdered wig, believing himself to embody the revolution, and defending the murder of sixteen thousand people under the guillotine.
‘What of those among the dead who are innocent?’, Danton asked his friend, in his basso profundo voice. — ‘I suppose that a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment’, said Robespierre. Danton’s reply was quick: ‘And I suppose that you would be annoyed if no one did’.
Robespierre rose and left, his cape sweeping about him. Danton wept bitter tears. He knew he was doomed, of course, W. says. He knew he’d be executed. But he wept not because he knew he would die, but because he had been betrayed.
‘Without friends, no one would choose to live’, Danton said to himself, quoting from Aristotle. And when Robespierre added his signature to the warrant for Danton’s arrest, Danton didn’t even try to escape, W. says. He didn’t try to leave France. He didn’t call on his admirers to save him. His spirit was broken, this indomitable man. His strength had been tried, and found wanting. Friendship can only bear so much, W. says, and pauses. Betrayal! cries W. Betrayal!
Is that how it will be, in the coming revolution? W. wonders. Will I buy a sky-blue cloak and powder my wig? Will I sign W.’s death warrant? I have something of the fanatic about me, W. says. I’m ready to serve a greater cause. To give myself to something I barely understand.
Conference evening, on Greenwich lawns.
How many speakers we’ve heard! How many ideas! Sometimes, we have to admit, we were bored. Sometimes, we fell to drawing monkey butlers in our notebooks. Sometimes, W. wrote an obscenity in big letters in my notebook, or I drew something depraved in his. But at other times, we were exhilarated, set on fire by thought. We felt caught in the updraft of someone else’s ideas. We felt flown like kites by the thoughts of others.
But now we’re tired, after our day. Our limbs feel heavy; our eyes are closing.
W. has always believed that there are certain thoughts which come to you only in exhaustion, only once you’ve reached the end of your strength.
Hasn’t he reached this point with his friends among the Essex postgraduates, time and time again? Haven’t he and his housemates discovered the secrets of the universe after drunken nights at the bar?
The trouble is that what exhaustion reveals it also keeps to itself, W. says. What could he and his friends remember the next day of what they had discussed? What, of the truth that seemed to dawn between them? What, of weary truth, of the truth of weariness?
It’s different with me, of course, for whom exhaustion leads nowhere, W. says. What thoughts have ever come to him at the end of our nights of drinking? What has there ever been but formless horror and the kind of states only Edgar Allan Poe would know how to name?
We need to wake up, W. says. We need to revitalise ourselves. There’s only one thing for it!
Sometimes, you need to be among the postgraduates, we agree. Sometimes you need to feel them alongside you, full of life, full of brilliance.
It’s like swimming with dolphins, W. says. It’s like snorkelling through a shoal of fish. You feel tiny electrical shocks on your skin. Your hair feels as though it’s standing on end. Ah, what joy of brilliance they show! What fleetness of the mind!
Postgraduates are the angels of the academic world, we agree. They’re between worlds — mediators between the heaven of full-time lecturers and the netherworld of the undergraduate. They teach — they often take seminars — but they are not a real part of the teaching staff. They study, it is true, but they’re not entirely students, either.
They have a sense of what they want to achieve: an academic job, an academic career, but they know that there are very few such jobs, and very little chance of a career. They’ve fled from the world into academia, but they know they will most likely find themselves back where they came from, as though they’d dreamt up the entirety of their postgraduate lives.
Here we are among them, the angels, the Greenwich postgraduates. How slim they are! How tall, all dressed in black, and smoking their cigarettes! How intense they are, talking of their work, and weighing up the conference speakers! How focused, discussing ideas and only ideas …!
Postgraduates are the antennae of academia, W. says. They know everything about the latest thought from France, from Germany. About the latest commentaries on French and German thought by British and American academics. About the goings-on in British departments of philosophy, of continental philosophy. About possible job openings in this or that department, about possible postdoctoral research opportunities at this or that university.
There’s no thought as keen as postgraduate thought, we agree. Nothing as effort-filled, as intense. Nothing in which the stakes are clearer. Because they’re trying to escape, we agree. They’re trying to be better than they are.
Some of them are careerists, it is true. Some of them are trying to claw their way into a job; they’ll do anything to get there. Some of them are mediocrities-in-waiting, young fogeys with elbow patches on their jackets, ready to embody all the vices of full-time academic staff.
But other postgraduates are drawn to philosophy for the sake of philosophy, we agree. Others are drawn to thought for the sake of thought. They want to think against the world to which they will be forced to return. They want to think against Britain, this damnable country. They want a chance to protest in thought. They want to redeem their lives by thinking. To rise to a kind of secret glory, before it’s time for them to leave the university, and return to the world.
There’s no laughter like postgraduate laughter, W. says. There’s nothing as dark. Nothing as knowing. It’s death-row laughter, we agree. It’s the laughter of those condemned to death.
Because they are condemned to death, the postgraduates around us. Shown the greatest of vistas, the whole landscape of Old Europe at their feet, and then thrown out into the world, they’re condemned to a life without meaning, a life without succour, a life of shit in a world of shit …