Moses’ despair gave way to a divinely appointed task, W. says. Despair blossomed into hope. Will the same thing happen to us? W. wonders. Will our despair blossom into hope? Are we heading to the land of milk and honey?
I knew Reading would appal him, I tell W. The town itself is just like any other town, the usual shops, the usual new developments along the river. Except that it’s more like any other town than any other town. And here in the suburbs, the extent of its horror becomes very clear.
Blank-box executive homes, five to a plot. ’70s semis with barn-sized extensions. Driveways packed with Land Rovers and 4×4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows. Labyrinthine estates with roads named after flowers, after colours, after days of the week. Minor roads, thick with cars. Cars and car-parks and front gardens tarmacked over and covered in cars …
There are older streets, too, with great canopying trees. Villas subdivided into flats. Victorian houses with pattern-tiled paths and iron railings. The sun flashing on conservatory glass. And private schools, with their girls in boaters, with their boys in caps and blazers, and mothers at their gates in sparkling jeeps. W. is overwhelmed by class hatred, he says. He recites the names of Marxist revolutionaries to calm himself down …
The Reading yuppies are raising their young to be more rapacious than they are, W. says. More grasping than they are. They’re treating them to babyccinos in chi-chi cafés. They’re sending them to the best schools. And one day, they’ll get work experience and internships for them. One day, the children will find work in the corporations of Reading, and the children will start their careers in the suburbs of Reading. And the whole cycle will begin again …
Only the capitalism-hardened can survive here, W. says. Only self-marketers and self-advertisers. Only those who perform PR for their own souls …
As for everyone else?: Suicide! W. says. Exile! Despair! Terrible depressions! Derangements of the spirit! Half of the Reading young are starving themselves in darkness, W. says. Half of them are slicing up their arms in secret. Half of them think of death and only death. Half of them pray for the apocalypse.
The suburbs are so thick in Reading, W. says. So condensed. They’re almost real. They’ve almost managed to pass themselves off as reality.
W. reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s gnostic vision. For Dick, the world as we see it is a stage-set. It’s unreal. History ended in AD70, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, and destroyed the Temple. For Dick, this horror has never stopped happening, W. says. What we know as history is an illusion overlain on perpetual injustice. Jerusalem is eternally being sacked. The Temple is eternally being destroyed.
In Reading, history ended in the 1980s, W. says. In Reading, the council houses are eternally being sold off. Housing estates are eternally being built. Golf courses are eternally opening up. The corporations are eternally moving in …
Yew trees. A grassy expanse. Reading University campus.
To think there’s a university in the midst of it all, W. says. To think there’s a campus on the edge of such a town, like a mall or a leisure complex. Like a DIY superstore …
And to think there’s a department of philosophy in the midst of it all, W. says. To think there’s some pretence at thinking in Reading.
Welcome packs. Book flyers and publishers’ catalogues. A timetable of parallel sessions, and a booklet of presentation abstracts. Haven’t we vowed never to attend this kind of thing again? W. says, fixing on his nametag.
Professors like great walruses, in elasticated trousers. Swarms of young lecturers, looking to impress. Looking to network! Tweed everywhere. Wall-to-wall tweed. Tweed jackets and trousers. Tweed in the head!
We need a panic room, W says. A war room! And we need a general strategy. In the meantime … — ‘Keep your head down. Talk to no one!’
W. recognises the plenary speaker as an ally. Young academics throng around him. — ‘He’s drowning!’, W. says. ‘We can’t just leave him there!’
In the pub, we wait for our plates of sausage and mash. — ‘You know they hate you’, W. says to the plenary speaker. ‘They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too’. — ‘Who hates me?’, the plenary speaker asks. — ‘Everyone. Everyone here’, W. says. — ‘I don’t think they hate me’, the plenary speaker says. — ‘They do! They hate us, and they really hate you’.
‘They hate thought! W. insists. ‘Don’t you see? They hate thought, and want to drive all thought away!’ — ‘Why did they invite me, then?’, the plenary speaker wonders. It’s a mystery, we agree. Perhaps there’s still some instinct among the Reading philosophers concerning what they lack, W. speculates. Perhaps they feel some residual shame about their inability to think.
He feels shame, W. tells the plenary speaker. He’s been trying to teach me the meaning of shame, he says. But how can you teach a grown man shame? If only W. had known me as a child, what I might have been! Give us a child till the age of seven, and he’ll be ours for life: that’s the Jesuits, W. says. Give us a fully grown adult idiot, and he’ll be our scourge for life: that’s what he’s learnt, W. says.
Sausages and mash arrive on big oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree, but what can you expect for £3.95? Eat up! we urge our speaker. He needs to keep up his strength! After all, very soon he’ll have to go back to the conference! We’ll protect him, we tell the plenary speaker. We’ll flank him like the president’s secret service bodyguards. We’ll keep our sunglasses on and speak into earpieces. — ‘The package is in the building’, we’ll say. ‘The package is about to give his presentation’.
Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It’s as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God, W. says. Moses descended with the Tablets of Law, W. says — what will we bring back with us?
We’re hopelessly lost. The plenary speaker’s worried. What about the conference meal? He’s supposed to be sitting at the high table. — ‘Never mind the high table!’, W. says. The plenary speaker’s too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else, for one thing. — ‘You’ve a real appetite!’, W. says to him, impressed.
It’s a verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley’s known for its humidity. It’s very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma as a child, I’ve told W. that. And eczema. — ‘And lice’, W. says.
In the thick darkness: that’s where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. In the thick darkness: that’s how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It’s a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Cor blimey, guv’nor.
The plenary speaker feels unwell. Our ally feels unwell! What have we done to him? we wonder. How can we make reparation?
We tell him of our Kierkegaard project, our collaborative endeavour, for which we are compiling voluminous notes. We tell him about the intimate link we expect to discover between Kierkegaard and contemporary capitalism; about the Danish philosopher’s despair and our despair.