Our first leader was always an example to W. and I. I'm not very interesting, he always insisted, but my thoughts are interesting. My thoughts! As if he had nothing to do with them!, W. exclaims. As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptable for something infinitely more important.
He was completely serious, W. remembers, not like us. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatittude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?
W. and I reminisce about our second leader. He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of his everyday life, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. said. We agree: how frankly and absolutely he spoke of himself, and to anyone who asked. Frankly and absolutely, as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking was possible. A level of which we have no idea, W. says.
He was completely serious as well, says W. of our second leader, not like us. We're the apes of thought, W. says, but he was completely serious. Everything was serious for our second leader. Nothing mattered but thought, the life of thought!
W. and I reminisce about our third leader. Everyone knows to keep quiet when she speaks, W. says. She speaks very quietly herself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. She lives in a different way to everyone else, that much is clear. She lives a different life, and her quietness is a sign of her elevation.
It's what everyone in the room knows when she speaks: she's better than the rest of us, cleverer, she occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it would be impossible for us to think. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in Northern forests!
We lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to listen. For a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.