The train south. County Durham. Open fields. Hamlets nestled into the countryside.
W. speaks of his Canadian boyhood. Things seemed so simple then, among the forests and the lakes! His body and soul were one. He lived in fellowship and harmony with the world. He would never have needed to think, had his family not returned to Britain, W. says. Had they not fallen to earth in this ridiculous country. He would have had nothing to think against. To read against!
Wasn’t it in Britain that his first intellectual adventures began? Wasn’t it here that he was dazzled by the bright orange dust-jackets of the Schocken edition of Kafka? The Canadian has no need for Kafka, W. says. A Canadian Kafka-reader is a contradiction in terms!
W. tells me the latest research on cow intelligence. Brighter cows network, W. says — they go from cow to cow, nuzzling their fellows, licking them, reminding them that they exist. Soon they become sought after, even dominant. The other cows rush to meet them. More stupid cows never network, never approach their fellows, W. says. Eventually, all the other cows stand with their backs to them. — ‘Is there a lesson here, do you think?’
I can’t feign friendliness, W. says. I can’t feign interest. In the end, the art of conversation is entirely alien to me, W. says. The art of greeting people. When he did try to teach me, it led to disaster. I bellowed. Hello!, I cried in my loudest voice. — ‘You scare people’.
Sometimes, the power to speak deserts me altogether, W. says, and the other person has to guess what I want to say. It invariably happens when things are most urgent, and I need to be most succinct. There’s a great stuttering and stammering. A great foaming at the mouth. — ‘You can’t get a word out, can you?’ W. has to intervene in such situations. ‘Gesture!’, he says. ‘Mime! What is it? More food? Something else to drink?’
Still heading south.
He can see my lips moving as I read, W. says. It’s not a good sign in a scholar. And I read too quickly! I read like a maniac!
You have to linger over the page, W. says. You have to annotate as you read. Write notes!
I have no real idea how to read, W. says. No idea how to approach the oeuvre of a great thinker, head on, as he does, reading the primary text in the original, line by line, looking up difficult words in a dictionary. I have no sense that I should come at an oeuvre from upstream, as it were, gaining a knowledge of the tradition of which it is a part, of the thinkers that influenced its author. I have no awareness of the importance of context, of the centrality of history.
I rely on secondary commentaries, on idiot’s guides, W. says. In the end, I am only a ransacker of books, a kind of reader-marauder. My reading is a great pillaging, as if by a Viking raiding party.
This has to be our last lecture tour, W. says. This has to be the last time, the last dog and pony show. Why do we bother? What do we have to say to others? To teach?
W. feels the hatred of past generations, he says. Of our ancestors who thought something good might come out of their struggles. Of our forebears who lived and died in the hope that life in this world might be bettered. We’ve betrayed them! W. says. We’ve stamped on their dreams!
And W. feels the hatred of our descendants, of the ones who are not yet born. We’ve stolen their hope, W. says. The very grounds of their hope. We’ve stolen their world! He hears their cries, W. says. He hears their wailing. They’re not yet born; they’ve yet to appear on their scorched and burning earth: but he can feel their hatred even now.
W. wants to see how it all ends, he says. He wants to see how it will all turn out. But this is how it ends: him on a train, travelling with an idiot. This is how it will all turn out …
‘The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves’, W. says, reading from his notebook. To hate ourselves: what a task! He’ll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he’ll move on to hating what I’ve made him become. What I’ve been responsible for. Then — the last step — he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.
This step, for him, will be the most difficult. He can hardly remember what he was like without me! He has no idea what he might have been, what he might have achieved. I arrived too early in his life. The blow was fatal.
It’s a relief, of course, W. says. He can blame me for everything. It’s all my fault, his failure, his inability to think! In fact, that’s probably why he hangs out with me, W. says: to have a living excuse for his failure, his inability to think.
The Thames Valley. Villas on the hillside. Barges on the river. Stations flashing by.
W. fell into a four-week depression when he received his letter of redundancy, he says. Day after day, he stared out of the window, like the guy in the opening scene of Tarr’s Damnation. The contingency of it all! His manager had put his name forward to be sacked. That was it. The cursor had blinked over his name. And he received his letter: ‘We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your years of service …’ But it might have happened otherwise. His manager might have selected someone else for redundancy. The cursor might have blinked over a name other than his.
We live insignificant lives, W. says. We live like ants. Like cockroaches. He’d give anything to believe in fate, like the ancient Greeks, W. says. Or to believe that God willed our sufferings. That our sufferings matter: that’s what Kierkegaard thought, isn’t it? W. says. He remembers the line from Kierkegaard that he copied into his notebook: ‘Suffering teaches us the great lesson of dying to the world, and to worldiness’.
Does the contingency of my suffering bother me? W. wonders. He knows about my years of unemployment and underemployment, W. says. He knows I’ve lived my life in a succession of rooms, each more squalid than the last. He knows I’ve lived my life beneath the pavement.
But W. wonders whether I ever really experienced my despair, he says. I’ve never grasped my despair in its philosophical dimension, W. says. In its political dimension. I’ve never asked myself about the conditions of my despair, W. says. About the forces that constitute it. I’ve never asked myself about the whole, the totality, the order of things. I’ve never railed against the haphazard nature of my despair. The fact that things could have been otherwise.
He’d like to think that our despair calls us, W. says. That it singles us out. That despair is like a beacon shining upon us, calling us to a new destiny. That despair, in some sense, is like the voice of God, summoning us to our vocation. Here I am: that was Moses’s response, when God spoke to him from the burning bush. Here I am, who would pledge himself in service to you.
And God told Moses that He knew of the pain of his people. That He knew of their tribulations, and had heard their outcry. — ‘And I have come down to rescue you from the land of Egypt and to bring you up to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey’.