They’re martyrs, the British postgraduates, we agree. They’re anchorites, like Saint Anthony in the desert. They’re exiles from the world. They’re proletariats, Marx would say. They’re individuals, Kierkegaard would say. They waiting for the revolution, Marx would say. They’re waiting for grace, Kierkegaard would say.
We are worn out by the postgraduates. They’re too much for us! They’re too brilliant! It’s like looking in a terrible mirror. It’s like seeing ourselves, robbed of self-satisfaction, robbed of our pandering. To think that we, too, were once postgraduates! To think that we, too, burned with the same black fire! And to think that by some strange miracle, by some lapse in the logic of the universe, we actually found jobs! To think that we — we — found ourselves in academic jobs!
My hotel room. W. takes his seat once again on the Chair of Judgement. It’s time to list my short-comings! It’s time to examine where I’ve gone wrong! To bury down to the root-cause!
‘Would you call yourself a moral man?’, W. asks. ‘Would you call yourself a man of honour? Do other people look up to you? Are others moved by you, inspired by you?’ A pause. And then: ‘Do you think you’ve touched other people’s lives — in a good way? Do you see yourself as a man of thought, a man of profundity, a man who will leave a legacy?’
These are the questions that constantly circle in W.’s head, as he knows they do not circle in mine, he says.
‘How do you think you’ll be judged?’, W. asks. ‘As a serious man? As a man attuned to what matters most?’ And then, ‘Will you be remembered as a great soul? As a spiritual leader?’ A pause. And then: ‘How do you understand your failure? Who do you measure yourself against? What standards have you failed to meet?’
Gin! W. demands. He wants a respite from his judgement.
W. is soothed by the Plymouth Gin botanicals. He can taste the oris-root and the coriander seeds. He can taste the orange peel.
Plymouth Gin is our realitätpunkt, W. says. Our rallying point, our place of safety. Sipping Plymouth Gin is always a homecoming, W. says. A return to what is most important.
If only we had some Vermouth, we could make Martinis, W. says. In the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, they swill your glass with Vermouth, specially imported from America, and then pour it straight out. Only then do they fill the glass with Plymouth Gin and add a spiral of lemon peel, W. says. You need Vermouth only to pour it away, like an offering made to the gods, W. says.
More questions. ‘How many people do you think you’ve offended?’, W. asks. ‘How many people have you irritated? Have you angered? How many people have tried to sue you?’, because he knows that some have. ‘How many people have tried to run you out of town?’
W. begins again. ‘How many appetites have you spoilt? How many people have you put off their dinner? What would you say is your most irritating trait? Your most rage-inducing one?’ And then, ‘What do you think your clothes say about you? And your hair? Your shoes? Does the way you dress befit your role as a would-be thinker? As a would-be philosopher?’
Still more questions. ‘Do you think you have a noble face? A dignified bearing? Do you think you have the physiognomy of a thinker? An intelligent face? Do your rolls of fat make you uncomfortable? Do you think obesity gives you gravitas? Presence?’ He pauses. ‘At what stage would you consider gastric bypass surgery? Have you ever thought of liposuction? Do you think you come across as a happy fat man, or as a sad fat man? At what stage will you have your mouth sewn up?
‘Of what are you most guilty?’, W. asks. ‘What is your greatest source of shame? What is your greatest failing? Do you think you’ve failed? Do you think you should be ashamed? Do you have any real sense of guilt?’ And then, ‘What do you think you add to the world?’, W. asks. ‘What do you think you subtract? What is your net worth to existence? Do you think you’ve added to the balance of goodness in the cosmos, or of evil? Are you on the side of the angels or the devils?’
‘How do you think you can make amends?’, W. asks. ‘Do you think you can make amends? How do you think you can make reparations for damages to intellectual reputation? For emotional damage? For digestive damage?
‘Where do you think you stand in the great chain of thinkers?’, W. asks. ‘With what historical figure do you most identify? What philosophical figure? How would you rank yourself in a list of contemporary philosophers?’ And then, ‘Do you think you’ve understood your time? Brought it to expression in some way? Are you a diagnoser of your times, or a symptom of your times? Are you a cultural physician, or a cultural patient?’
W.’s exhausted, he says. The judgement is nearly over. A final round!
‘Do you think you fool people?’, W. asks. ‘Can others read your stupidity in your eyes, do you think? Can they see your idiocy in your gait? Your posture?’ And then, ‘Do you have a sense of your idiocy — a real sense? Do you grasp just how desperately you’ve fallen short?’
Dawn. Daylight behind the blinds. The judgement’s over. W. reads out a passage from Kierkegaard, which he copied into his notebook:
What does God want? He wants souls able to praise, adore, worship, and thank him — the business of angels. And what pleases him even more than the praise of angels is a human being who, in the last lap of this life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty, nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that God does it out of love.
If he’s cruel to me, it’s out of love, W. says. It is meant as the highest kindness, when he sits on the Chair of Judgement exploring the many compromises of my life, my betrayals and half-measures. Who else would have taken notice? Who else would have tried to teach me the meaning of sin?
Ah, would that he had a similar tutor! Would that someone had the same interest in him! But perhaps my ingratitude is, for W., only a version of God’s cruelty. Perhaps my moaning in protest, as he sits above me on the Chair of Judgement, is only a way for God to test the extremity of W.’s love.
Morning. The Royal Observatory, high on the hill. This is where the first international terrorist incident took place, W. says, reading from a plaque. A young French anarchist attempted to blow up the Observatory, to blow up Greenwich Mean Time …
To change time, to change the order of time: isn’t that the aim of any revolution? W. says. We have to recover the dimension of possibility. The dimension of the infinite!
Time touched by eternity: he’s always found this Kierkegaard phrase very moving, W. says. There is the time that passes, Kierkegaard argues — this instant, then that, which we merely endure, which merely carry us along. And then there is time touched by eternity, Kierkegaard says, which allows past, present and future to assume their true role in our lives, as phases of development. Once time has been touched by eternity, we no longer simply persist in time, but deepen and grow. We come to exist temporally, living towards a future that we earn by our deepening, by our growth: that’s what Kierkegaard argues.