Spurious

Fauns

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad - very bad - and at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Of course, my tendency is to scare them off, W. says. It's to bellow and fuss and deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. tries to keep quiet, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who can go back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe them with soft words and sympathy.

It won't be that bad, he tells them. Don't listen to him. Or: don't worry, everything's going to be fine. Ignore him, he's an idiot. - 'But in their hearts they know', W. says. 'They know what's going to happen'.

It All Ends Here ...

It all ends here, with us, The Star of Redemption open on our desks, doesn't it? It's completely at an end, a whole civilisation. Who allowed it? Who got us into this mess? Who raised our aspirations to the sky, by setting the great books amongst us? Who granted us the chance of commerce with the great ideas?

Because they were too great for us. They were more than our heads could contain. They broke us, and we wandered around dazed. What had happened to us? Something had happened, but what? We'll never understand, that's the tragedy. It will always have been beyond us.

Chatterers

These are the last days, says W. It's finished. Everything's shit, but we're happy - why is that?' Because we're puerile, he says. Because we're inane.

We're chatterers, we're agreed on that, like monkeys. We're never happier until until we've worn speech down to nothing, until we've reached the highest, most rarefied of inanities.

It was different once upon a time, W. says. He spoke little. He was nearly silent, everyone said so. And then he became a lay member of the Trappists, a silent order, W. remembers. That must have been difficult! No, he says. He liked the peace. He wasn't as inane back then. His head wasn't full of chatter. - 'It was before I met you'.

Thought-Provoking

Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out aloud from Heidegger. - 'Most thought thought-provoking is that you think you are thinking', W. says. 'Because you do, don't you?'

The Opposite Of A Swan

W. admires loyalty wherever he finds it. Take the animal kingdom, for example. Swans!, says W. They mate for life! - 'You're the opposite of a swan', W. says. 'Friendship means nothing to you'. And then, 'You're always about to betray me', he says. 'You're thinking about it now, aren't you?' And then, 'You're a betrayer. You'd break the phalanx'. What phalanx? - 'The phalanx of our friendship!' 

Kafka On The Stairs

It's empty time that I fear, W. remembers my telling him, it's always struck him. Empty time, he says - he's rarely heard me speak so movingly on any topic. Of course, it's all to do with my fear of unemployment, he knows that. That's always been my real fear, W. says, which goes back, no doubt, to my warehouse years.

W. has often talked of using my account of my warehouse years as an example in one of his philosophical essays. He's often urged me to write it up, to present it to him as a text he might use in some way. Whenever he thinks about the great questions of philosophy, W. says, he always has my warehouse years in the back of his mind. He knows they are relevant in some way, but how? He hasn't worked that out yet, W. says.

W. has always admired my working class credentials, he says, which are far better than his. When he thinks of me leaving school and working in the warehouse, he is invariably moved and feels the great urge to protect and encourage me. How long were you there?, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps. That long! And what did you do there?, he asks, and when I tell him he's amazed.

Best of all, he says, are my accounts of reading in the warehouse: of the flight of stairs that led up to the roof and no one ever used, and where I went as I began to read my way through the library, W. says. What was the book I started with?, he asks. Oh yes: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, he could never forget that. I began with The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, W. says, and read my way up to Kafka: how was that possible?

W. began with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library ('we had a school library', he says, 'unlike you'). They had yellow dustcovers, W. says. Why was he attracted by that colour, he'll never know. But there it was: The Castle. The gates of literature opened to enclose him.

The Castle, W. says. He didn't have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes, W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. The fatal lure of literature: wasn't that where it began to go wrong?

Of course, he immediately wanted to become a writer, which was a disaster. But then he could form letters, W. says, unlike me. He could actually write a coherent sentence, a task of which I am still incapable, W. says. It was worse, much worse in my case, W. says. It led to all my hopes and dreams, and the perpetual dashing of my hopes and dreams.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of my sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof, The Mammoth Book of Fantasy already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E to himself.

The Tulip Garden

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar - a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

But what would I understand of any this?, W. wonders. What conception could I have of the ceremony of reading, of the rituals that must surround it?

He knows how I read, of course, W. says. There are books piled all over my office. Books leaning against other books. But it means nothing! You can have all the books in the world, but if you know nothing about reading, then ..., W. says.

He's seen me at it, my reading, W. says. I open one page - another - and then what? I make a beginning, I open a book, and not always at the start, and what happens? I invariably open another, W. says. Another and then another.

Anything so as not to be alone with a book, W. says. Alone and undistracted, he says. Alone with a span of time opening ahead of me. Haven't I always feared empty time, W. muses, the time in which something might happen? And don't I, for that reason, fear - really fear - what might happen to me when I read?

Streaming Tears

There are some books, of course, over which W. has wept like a baby, he says. Imagine it! Him! Completely disarmed! Completely overcome! He's wept many times, W. says. There are books that have brought him to tears, he says, great floods of tears. He's always been a pathetic reader, W. says. He's always been tremendously alive to pathos.

Of course, it's different in my case, W. says. My eyes are always dry. When do I weep? Never, W. says. I am only a hooter, a pointer. I can hoot and point at a book, but that's about it, he says. Whereas W. will sometimes read in great sweeps, on a long train journey, for example, my reading is always sporadic and spasmodic; it begins, and is almost immediately interrupted.

In a sense, W. says, I cannot be said to read at all, though I claim to be a reader; I claim to have read books by this thinker and that thinker; I claim to be an admirer of literature. But what can it mean to me, all this philosophy, all this literature? What can it mean to one who has never wept like a baby over the pages of Cohen? What can it mean who has never felt so compelled, utterly compelled by The Star of Redemption, that tears ran streaming down his cheeks?

T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E

Someone, at a certain time in my life, must have praised me too highly, W. says; I show all the signs of that. Someone must have told me I excelled, which of course I have, given my education.

Wasn't I happy in my warehouse? Wasn't I content long before I decided to venture into the university? Shouldn't I have stayed there, reading The Castle in my lunch hour? Should I have remained a lunchtime reader of Kafka and the others, rather than venturing into the university?

Of course, as W. knows, I never really read The Castle. He finds the idea of my reading anything particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming the letters as I spoke them out loud, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. - 'It's still an effort for you, isn't it?', W. says.

But in the end, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. - 'They're like totems to you. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

The real reader has no need for surrounding himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? 

But it's different for me, W. says, for whom all books - and particularly the first one for me, Kafka's Castle - are like the obelisk in 2001, making me jump up and down and hoot excitedly.

The Good and the True

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books - that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library. - 'It's always new for you, isn't it?' And this, W. supposes, is why I never really finish the books I read, but pile them up, one on top of another. I never finish them, says W., but I let them lean, one against the other, on my bookshelves.

'What have you been reading?', W. asks. 'What's caught your fancy lately?' I tell him. W. nods and murmurs. - 'Flusser again, oh yes ... Walser, oh very interesting ....'

W.'s read everything, he says. For a long time, reading was more important to him than anything. Those were his golden years, W. says. He was in his heyday! He doesn't read anything like as much now, W. says. It happens in your late 30s; you find you can't read as much as you used to. You can't read for a whole day, stopping for dinner, and then read in the evening as well, not that this would mean anything to me.

'A bit of Flusser - the editor's introduction, for example - and a little Walser - or an online essay about Walser - that's enough for you', W. says. It's enough of me to have a whiff of literature, and it's the same for philosophy. Have I read, really read Rosenzweig, about whom I talk so passionately? And what about Cohen - have I read him?

W. even offered to lend me Religion Out Of The Sources Of Reason, he says. He would have offered to buy it for me, but there was no point. - 'It was enough for you that it existed'. Enough, for me, that there was a man called Cohen and a man called Rosenzweig, and that they wrote books once, a long time ago.