How much time do we have left? You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about the credit crunch and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.
Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders sometimes. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. How else could he account for it? Somehow, at the end of the end, the door was open enough to let us in. Somehow, at the last minute, and in the last second of the last minute, it was time to admit us, but only as a kind of parody. Only as a kind of clown act, the auto-satire of philosophy.
Our eternal puppet show, says W. Our endless ventriloquy. Who's speaking through us? Who's using our voices? Sometimes he swears he hears a voice within our own, W. says. He can hear it, he says, on the threshold of audibility, a little like the grinding of the celestial spheres Pythagoras claimed to hear. Only this time it's idiocy that grinds itself out. This time it's an amazing force of idiocy, a solar wind sweeping through space.
