Too tired to revise my papers over again, I resign myself to a day without work. Just go to the office, I tell myself, and wait; after all, you can read this and then that, light reading, half-absorbed reading, where the surface of the page is merely grazed. And so I read, idly, indifferently, pages turn, and I think to myself - or is it just my tiredness speaking - what of pathos in all this? What of the sense of an experience gained and won, what about joy, what about the intensities of affect that attest to that gaining?
I am reading very good secondary commentaries, very clever and faithful, opening up the thought of X by discussing his relationship to predecessors Y and Z; it's impressive, I'm carried on a journey the landmarks of which are familiar to me, but it's pleasant to be reminded, pleasant because it's easy enough, nothing has to be fought for and I can reward myself for a few years' work that allows me to pick up this or that reference or to furrow my brow and think, I'm not quite convinced. The book reaches me as an expert; the book awakens an expert in me. Called forward is another inhabitant of the community of scholars, measured and calm, clear-voiced and versed well in a particular canon.
Because I'm tired, because tiredness leads to that kind of indifference Freud commended to his analysts, one resting on everything and nothing, I see what I might have been distracted from another time: if there is a kind of pathos of the primary text, a sense of a thought struggled for and gained, the joy of a thought granted, the grace of a thought that comes on light feet, whatever pathos, however warlike, however peaceable, it is one lacking in the secondary one. I am not bored by what I am reading; it engages, but it does so only with the expert who only half-lives in the world.
The old saying, before you study Zen, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, while you study Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers, and after you study it mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers: a world has been regained, reborn. The secondary commentary is the text for whom nothing has been regained yet, it lives as an abstract storm, a kind of fog; it is another of Job's temptations, a challenge to his faith.
And to you, who would be faithful? Do not read me, says the modest commentary, read the original. Always that modesty. But a kind of reading has already happened of those same originals. Their secrets have been given up, you have a basis from which to read, a sound one, a scholarly-endorsed one, you can make an honest beginning, you were prepared, you know what's to come, there'll be surprises, to be sure, but nothing too surprising; the text has already been measured in advance, its length and its breadth are known, its weight calculable, its significance estimated.
What, then, am I advocating? The abolition of these useful stepladders? How else are we going to read what is around us? How else will we sort and catalogue? How else can an oeuvre be measured and a contribution assessed? How else might comparable worth be gauged? There's a marketplace for ideas, said Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and you can get everything for a knock down price. But at the price of pathos, too - that's what you given up to enter that same marketplace. £8.99 will buy you Kierkegaard in 60 minutes or £10.99 the Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling. This is valuble.
What have you lost? I could put it this way, once again like Kierkegaard: the discord between system and pathos, but this is too abstract. What have I lost?