A few days after that interminable walk on the Heath, Natasha called to tell me that her mother had died. The illness had developed more rapidly than anyone had anticipated, finally proving fatal. Needless to say, Natasha would now be staying in Russia for considerably longer than she had intended. Towards the end of our conversation, she told me in a low, tired voice that it might make sense if I were to begin my ‘Nietzsche journey’ alone, and she would join me later on, perhaps in Turin.
At this point, just when it was most crucial for me to save money so that I could get away from the wretched Hampstead flat which had begun to feel like a tomb, or like the inside of my own skull, the philosophy tutoring work I had been relying on inexplicably dried up. Alarmed, I emailed the tutoring agency, but my queries went unanswered. I called the office but everyone I spoke to was vague and evasive, suggesting that responsibility lay elsewhere. The suspicion grew in me that this sudden, drastic diminishment in my employment (admittedly precarious at the best of times) was related to a regrettable and worthless story of mine which had been published a couple of years previously in a scarcely credible online ‘literary journal’. The story concerned a drug dealer who spent his days hovering on the fringes of parks and children’s playgrounds, often masturbating furtively in the bushes, or just squeezing his balls through his trouser pocket. By night he wrote hate-fuelled tracts about ‘redneck hordes’, ‘girly-girls’ and ‘demon queers’, which he posted to Bashar al-Assad, Gerry Adams and Kanye West, neither expecting nor receiving any response. In what I had considered a daring post-modern flourish, I named this hateful and charmless character after myself, though he had nothing in common with me beyond his addiction to salt and vinegar Pringles and an uncontrollable twitch in his left eye. The story, ‘Permanent Erection’, had been written and submitted in a single evening while I was hammered on red wine, and had afforded Raoul and me a night of fantastic cackling. However, as soon as I had sobered up I realised that publishing this story online, and framing it in such a way that the reader might assume it expressed my own true, shameful fantasies, or else was straightforwardly autobiographical, might not have been the wisest of moves. In a series of increasingly frantic emails to the journal’s editor, I attempted to retract the story and have it taken off the internet. None of these emails was even acknowledged. It dawned on me that the online journal had been abandoned after its first issue, and no one was going to bother taking the site down.
Now that my sole source of income had gone dry, and with Natasha on unpaid leave in Russia, giving no indication as to when she might return (‘we are a close family,’ she muttered frostily over the phone, implicitly criticising my own indifference to family), I realised that it would not be possible to leave London as early as I had hoped. After another long walk on the Heath, I decided there was nothing for it but to hurl myself into my Nietzsche project there and then, in our dingy flat in Hampstead, rather than wait till I got to Turin. Hurl myself into it, I repeated, standing before the mirror or lying in bed in the morning. Hurl myself into it. At first it was a kind of mantra, a declaration of intent and seriousness. Eventually, though, it was just a phrase I repeated to myself whilst doing absolutely nothing. The phrase even began to repeat itself, it seemed to me, of its own accord. This is difficult to explain, and no doubt it indicates nothing so much as my increasingly frayed nervous state during that strange, isolated period, as the summer set in outside my dim, dusty flat up on the fifth floor. But it really did seem to me that the phrase hurl myself into it had taken on a sinister life of its own. Sitting in the flat, immobilised by dread, I would hear the words hurl myself into it bounding through the dusty rooms and cramped hallway, alien and meaningless. And, whenever I needed to leave the flat to buy more coffee and instant noodles, it seemed to me that the phrase would continue to resound up there, repeating itself tirelessly and insanely, regardless of there being no one present to hear it.
After Natasha had been gone for two months, my fears and insecurities gained such a hold on me that I took to going to bed at night with her red shoes clutched tightly to my chest, under the covers. In truth, I would even have worn them on my hands, or perhaps on my feet, were it not that both my hands and feet were too large for those dainty red shoes, Natasha’s devotion to which I fully understood.
It was now the middle of summer. Having no job to go to, and with most of my friends out of town, I rarely left the flat at all. The sense of claustrophobia in the flat was surpassed by my fear of the world outside, which had never seemed more hostile and sinister. Crime in London no longer has any motive, I told myself, peering at the skyline through my binoculars. Hooded youths will emerge from the shadows and plunge a knife into your groin, or shatter your bones with iron bars, or beat you to a coma in a park at night, raping your every orifice, all for no reason whatsoever. This new breed of London thug takes pride in its absence of motive, I reflected; motive is shame to the contemporary London thug, a creature whose thirst for cruelty is without limit. I imagined that the filth and horror of London was a rising tide, and that soon it would rise right up to our fifth-floor flat and pour in through the windows, a black tide of filth and horror, drowning everything.
Oddly, such morbid and gloomy thoughts as these, while inhibiting me from leaving the flat unless strictly necessary, also had the effect of liberating me from the dread that had prevented me from doing any work at all. Start with one true thing, I told myself in sudden clarity, and the rest would follow. And so it was that, on a bright Tuesday afternoon, with the sound of children’s laughter reaching me from the courtyard, I wrote the following sentence:
Chief among Nietzsche’s virtues is that he is never boring.
On the one hand, I reflected, looking over the sentence I had just written, this was a stunningly banal point to make. On the other hand, it expressed an important truth. The fact is, I told myself, many of even the very best writers are frequently boring, and not only the philosophers. Take, more or less at random, Don DeLillo, a novelist who I revere: all too often he bores me, I reflected. I sit through his books, enjoying them immensely and yet bored out of my head, tempted at every turn to put the book down and do something less boring, like look through my binoculars at the London skyline. Reading, in fact, is a fundamentally boring activity — which is not to say it isn’t the most satisfying thing you can do with your time. In truth, all I did was read, and it’s all I’ve ever done. It was simply that, with so many writers, you have to trawl through the dull parts — sentences, pages, whole dull chapters — to get the hit you’re after, the flash of gold in the tilted pan. Ideally, a book would offer an experience of consistent, unrelieved fascination, charged and compulsive in every sentence. Nietzsche, far too impatient himself to permit a moment’s boredom, offers precisely this ideal, book after book of it, I reflected. Reading him is an unadulterated hit, with nothing mediating between the reader and the ecstasy of pure idea. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is itself a strategy against boredom. He knew that reading was boring, and that bad books constituted a grave offence, so he was insistent on not adding to the deluge of books that should never have been written, let alone read. Towards the end, I recalled, he had given up reading almost completely, preferring to walk in the hills and mountains around Turin, by the lakes, given over to the ravishment of his senses and the dance of his mind. Having reflected thus for several minutes, I wrote another sentence: