We pass the time before class, translating the brochures. Never manage to launch (graduate back in childhood bedroom). Earn nothing like the living wage (graduate eating discount sandwich from Boots). Never settle anywhere or at anything (graduate with backpack, trudging city streets). Join the intern nation (graduate at the photocopier) …
The failure to launch. To leave your house. To leave your room. To leave your bed. To open your eyes in the morning. How easily it could happen! One mistimed bout of depression and that would be it — the rest of your life, in your parents’ house, on soul-rotting medication.
We are nymphs, yet to shed our bodies. Yet to ascend fine-winged into life. But how easy it would be to slip and fall. How easy, to end up half-employed, underemployed, unemployed …
We feel as though the future were rummaging through us. Who knows what the future will find?
Wittgenstein, mystical today.
The kairos is coming, he says. The end is coming.
Time is gathered into itself like a wolf poised to leap upon its prey, he quotes.
He speaks of a new vocation of philosophy. A revocation of philosophy.
He speaks of philosophy practised without philosophy. Philosophy no longer subject to its own law.
He will have to reawaken philosophy, he says. He will have to conjure up all of its ghosts.
Philosophy must be reborn, he says. But without itself—without its substance.
He speaks of the time when we will have joyously forgotten philosophy. Forgotten what philosophy was for. A time when we will play with philosophy, like gods …
We will not recognise him, after the end of philosophy, he says. We will not recognise each other!
Everything we have known, we will have forgotten. And when we remember it again, it will be in a new way.
You will leave Babylon with joy, he quotes. You will be let out of the city in peace.
After philosophy, no one will read, Wittgenstein says. And no one will stop reading. It will be impossible to distinguish reading from looking, from glancing, from letting your eyes rest on one sight or another.
After philosophy, no one will write, he says. And no one will stop writing. The merest gesture will be a kind of writing. A cough. A hairstyle. The flight of birds: all writing.
And after philosophy, there will be no more teaching, only learning, he says. No more studying, only encountering. No more classrooms, only walks along the Backs …
Walking home. Okulu ahead of us on the path, massive headphones over his ears. Faint strains of Mozart. A one-man protest against Cambridge superficiality.
We disappoint Okulu, we know that. He wants something from us. Seriousness. Depth. He wants to discuss ideas. But we let him down.
Okulu is like a reverse missionary, we agree. Like one of those Anglican priests, come from former colonies to reevangelise us. Only it’s not religion Okulu brings, but culture—old culture, high culture. Okulu is a high priest of old culture …
Okulu is a man of taste. Of cultivation. And Okulu knows things — about current affairs, about the latest philosophical and scientific theories. But about the past, too. He’s been seen in the library, with piles of old hardbacks …
But who needs libraries? Who needs books? We have them on our e-readers. Or rather, we could have them. We could have anything at all. Everything from the past can be called up in the present. Everything can be here — everything that was ever thought, or written, or composed, or painted. We can commune with all the ghosts. We can wake up the dead. But who wants to wake up the dead?
Library hardbacks should stay closed, their secrets hidden. Their spines should stay turned to us on their shelves. Keep them asleep. We won’t disturb them. They’re not for us, after all. They were not written with us in mind.
And they reek of the past. Their pages have the musty smell of the past. The smell of old forgotten things. Of things that should be forgotten. Sun-browned pages. Date-stamps from decades ago. Annotations in a tiny hand. Underlinings. Whole passages marked in yellow highlighter. Tan-brown stains from coffee and tea. Evidence of squashed insects. Dried-up tear splashes. Curly strands of pubic hair. Traces of wiped blood. Mementos: an old train ticket, a cinema ticket … Old things! Old things!
The old world is passing. Worlds and worlds are vanishing. A whole civilisation — that was once our civilisation — sinks into the greeny-black depths of forgetting …
Poor, mournful Okulu of the library stacks … Poor deep-diving Okulu. He, like us, is seeking a past that grows ever more remote. He, like us, is a creature of the upper waters — of the sun-suffused shallows. But he, unlike us, hasn’t forgotten the depths …
Next year, a new crop of students will appear to replace us. Next year, our tutors will already have begun to forget us. Our essays and exam scripts will be shredded and recycled. Our photos will disappear from internal websites. Our academic referees will no longer be sure who we were. We’ll be confused with this person, with that one. And in the end, we’ll be lost in the anonymous crowd of all the students who were ever taught here.
We each bear a trace of every student who ever studied at Cambridge. We are each a ghost of all the other students — students who have been here, and students who have yet to be here. Our lecturers, who will have seen us already, will see us again. We will have been here before, for our lecturers. We will be here again. There is neither end nor beginning.
But with Wittgenstein it is different. We are not nobodies. We are not insignificant. We are at Cambridge for a reason: that’s what his presence helps us to believe. We are here for him, just as he is here for us. And we are here, Wittgenstein and his men, for the sake of thought.
Something is happening. Something is going on that will not be repeated.
The convolutions of his lectures. How complex his enemy is! he says. How complex, then, his classes must be!
Is it necessary, in some way, to recapitulate the entire history of philosophy in his lectures? he wonders. The entire history of philosophical mistakes?
Is it necessary to lead his class to the origins of philosophy? Is it necessary to lead us to an originary philosophical bafflement?
Katargesis: written on his blackboard in capital letters. And in small letters, below: The fulfilment of the Law. Fulfilment underlined. Then, in still smaller letters: The fulfilment of philosophy?? Two question marks. The end of philosophy??? Three question marks.