The plenary speaker is silent. We need to say something else! Religion! What does our speaker think about religion? W. asks. Does he, like W., have a sense of the urgency of the question of religion? The plenary speaker says he has no particular thoughts about religion. What about despair, then? What does he think about despair?
Silence again. Do we drink? the plenary speaker asks us. He drinks, he says. He drinks every night. Do we drink?: we muse. Of course we drink! Whatever can he mean, Do we drink!? What kind of question is that? What are we being asked? Do we drink? we wonder. Have we ever drunk? Ah, but what do we know of drinking, and what could we know? And about despair, about religion: what could we know about those topics, either?
The plenary speaker falls back into silence. — ‘Marx and Kierkegaard’, W. says finally. ‘We intend to think the conjunction of Marx and Kierkegaard. They were born in the same year, you know’.
The plenary speaker’s feeling really ill now. The fog’s thickening. We need to stay close! Keep a head count! And it’s darkening, too. Are we really going to meet our God? Do you think we’ll receive the Tablets of Law? — ‘Go on, say something profound’, W. says to the plenary speaker.
The slow train to London.
‘We’re in the suburbs of a suburb’, W. says. ‘In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …’
I point out my old school as we pass. I had the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything: we didn’t know anything; our teachers didn’t know anything. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell W.
I point out the warehouse where I worked as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs, I tell W. No one spoke to anyone else. Nothing meant anything. Our jobs were a mockery of jobs. Companies employed us half-time, quarter-time, changing our hours week by week. Labour flexibility, they called it. Underemployment, that’s what we called it.
There are still bits of countryside left behind by the suburbs, we notice from the train. Forlorn horses in tiny fields. Rabbits hopping across a golf course. Rats crawling along a wall by the sewage treatment works.
W. pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the scrap of woodland fenced off by the Ministry of Defence, where solders used to come to train for future wars. He pictures me listening out for artillery fire, and hearing nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.
Like everyone else, I went to work in the hi-tech industrial estate. W. pictures me heading home from work, past the fenced-off patches of land between the company buildings of Winnersh Triangle. He pictures me looking over long puddles in the mud, after the gypsies had churned up the grass with their caravans. This was all that was left of the wilderness! All that was left of unused space!
‘So you went north’, W. says. I went north. — ‘Of course you did, where else were you to go?’ To the north, the very opposite of the suburban south! To the north, of decaying industry and terminal rustzones! To the north, of canal towpaths and broken girders! To the north of rain, eternal rain!
I went to Manchester, the city of eternal blight. I went to study in the city of mass unemployment and mass misery. I went to study philosophy in a city that had been left to fall apart like a Russian space station.
And did I find my people? W. says, knowing the answer. Did the Mancunians welcome me as one of their own? No! — muggers held knives to my throat. Junkies trailed after me asking me for money.
I found a cheap bedsit next to the curry house extractor fans, didn’t I? W. says. There’s a crack in the wall, I told the landlord, when he showed me the room. — ‘A crack in the wall, yes’, he said, and smiled. I could hardly breathe for cold and curry, but I took the room nonetheless, because it cost nothing and I had nothing. — ‘You were born for squalor’, W. says.
‘Staines — what a name for a town!’, W. says. And, a little later, ‘Egham — it’s unbearable!’
This is suicide country, W. says. He’d top himself if he lived here. He’d either top himself, or think some great thought, W. says.
To think against the suburbs. To think in the suburbs, hating the suburbs. What pressure of thinking you could build up! What a head of steam! — ‘But it didn’t work for you, did it?’
He sees why, W. says. The suburbs only gave me fear — the fear of falling back into the suburbs. The fear of crashlanding here, where I grew up. That’s why I’ve flung myself into administration, W. says. That’s why I’ve tried to lodge myself in the administrative work of the university, like a tick in an armpit. — ‘But they’ll find you in the end’, W. says. ‘They’ll smoke you out and recapture you. And there you’ll be, coughing in the suburban sun …’
We speculate about the lost geniuses of the suburbs. Bracknell’s secret Rilke (Coetzee lived in Bracknell, W. says) … Martin Heron’s hidden Leibniz (W.: ‘Martin Heron!?’). And Sunningdale’s own Solomon Maimon, drunk in Tesco’s carpark …
You’d have to go on the sick, if you lived in the suburbs, W. says. You’d have to stay unemployed, wandering the streets with the early-retired and the mothers pushing buggies. And you’d go mad from isolation. You’d go off your head. And then you’d top yourself.
Why do I always bring Hello! magazine with me on our train journeys? W. wonders. Why do I insist on leaving it in his study when I come to stay?
‘Who are all these people?’, he wants to ask me, when he sees me reading. ‘Why do they matter to you?’ Because they do matter to me, that much is clear, W. says. The way I read. The way I nod my head over the glossy pages, like a Jew over the Talmud, W. says. He sees, as at no other time, a look of absolute seriousness on my face. There it is: an intensity of focus that only the Husserl archives could warrant.
‘What are you looking for?’, W. says. What, in Oscar dresses and airbrushed actresses? What, in the photospreads of Queen Rania of Jordan?
In the end, I admire the great philosophers only as I admire the celebrities in my gossip magazines. Their brilliance is only the equivalent of a celebrity’s beauty; their integrity only the fervour of an ingénue’s rise to fame. My stupidity places them at an infinite and glamorous remove.
It’s different with him, W. says. He’s that little bit cleverer than me, that little bit farther ahead, and it’s enough that his non-intelligence, unlike mine, is commensurable with real intelligence; his non-integrity, with real integrity. At least he has the glimmerings of the faith of a Rosenzweig, a Weil and a Kierkegaard, W. says. At least he has an idea of belief.
When he writes of them, he leaves the great thinkers intact in their magnificence. They remain remote and brilliant in the sky of thought. But when I write of them? I make others doubt, W. says. I make others despair. Are Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard really so worthwhile if Lars is writing on them? people ask themselves. Can they really be so great if Lars is thinking about them?
He needs a tranquiliser gun, W. says, with a dart strong enough to bring down an elephant. How else is he going to stop me rampaging through philosophy, tearing up everything with my tusks?