Why does he hang out with Lars?: the perennial question, W. says. Why Lars, of all people?: that question, which W. has had to field many times. It's worse when it's merely implied: when he sees it in a querulous but fleeting look, in a momentary hesitation, even in a kind of involuntary retching, quickly covered up by a cough. Worse when thinkers - real thinkers, not like us - are distracted by my presence.
Why him?, their facial expressions silently ask W. What's he doing here?, that's the question he sees in suddenly contracted eyes. You, we understand, but him ...? That they, the thinkers, have to be bothered by such a concern even momentarily is torment to W. Why should they have to think about me? It's enough that he has to think about me, that he has to follow me and clear up my messes. But the thinkers, his thinkers, as W. likes to think of them - since he has done so much first of all to discover them, and then to draw them out of the crowd - they should never have to contemplate me, the fact of me, W. says. The fact of Lars. A dreadful fact. A kind of curse, in fact. A kind of catastrophe.
I confuse them, his thinkers. Of course, they know at once I'm not a fellow thinker, a fellow thought-adventurer, W. says. It's clear by my gait, my facial expression. Intelligence, when it is there, glints in the eyes, but in my case, nothing glints. Intelligence flashes in the teeth, but my teeth are dull. Oh it's perfectly clear. I can't hide anything, although of course I've never tried to hide anything. No, it's not my obvious lack of intelligence that confounds them. What then?
They know I'm not one of them - that's obvious - but, too, that I'm linked to W. in some way - to W., who, their attention grants, is at least a potential man of thought, whom they greet as such, to one who might understand the particularities of their, the thinker's achievements - confounds them. Yes, that W. keeps company with me: that's what bothers them. Not the fact of my stupidity, which is plain as the day, but that of our companionship, that W. and I hang out together, that where he is, I will also be; and that where he will be, I, too will be. That somehow I have found myself included in all plans concerning W.
What's it all about? For a moment - and for no more than that, since such thinkers have other things to reflect upon - they wonder whether I am not to W. as W. is to them - a kind of younger brother, a cousin and fellow, one who needs encouragement, bringing on, but also one who understands, since he is kin, something of their struggles - and that therefore I do indeed have some relation to them, albeit at a couple of removes.
That's why they smile at me, despite everything. It's why they make some semblance of including me in their conversations, turning to me as though I could understand what they were saying, as though I were capable of following their accounts of their struggles with thought (a meeting between thinkers is rarely about thoughts, W. says, so much as the struggle to think, since that's what unifies all thinkers, even rivals). Struggles that, indeed, are so exacting, that cost so much in terms of ordinary satisfactions, that it is solely to maintain this sense of shared suffering that drives thinkers from their labours. How they suffer! How much their thoughts have cost them!
And they perceive something of that cost in W., too. They're happy enough talking to him. Happy to bask in his admiration, his sympathy. Hasn't he pulled some of them back from the brink of suicide? Haven't more than one acknowledged the strength of his fellowship, his encouraging emails, the offer he's made of a room in his house for weeks - months - at a time?
Hasn't he taken thinkers into his home, treating them as the most honoured of guests, looking after their needs for weeks - months? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to speak before an audience they themselves were allowed to invite and that he, W., found funds to bring over? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the quadrangle bathed by the sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.
Haven't these thinkers thanked him for bringing them back into the world again, for acting as a kind of conduit or go-between between the world and themselves? Hasn't W.'s real help drawn their tribute? Hasn't he been thanked in a hundred acknowledgements?
Hasn't he always understood their terrible melancholias, their disorders of the spirit, madnesses that thought, the effort to think, only drives deeper, and done what he could to intervene lest that melancholy, that disorder, that madness wreck their ordinary satisfactions, which is to say, the - to them - unnoticed stratum beneath their lonely promotories?
Hasn't he extracted great confidences - life-stories - touched with isolation and withdrawal? Haven't his thinkers confessed their infidelities and alcohol addictions? Haven't they whispered in his ear about their fears of secret mental disorders, of inherited conditions, of early-onset dementia? Haven't they spoken of family horrors and early bereavements, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments? Haven't they spoken of finding God and losing God, of the search for God and the quest to free themselves of God? Haven't they spoken of the temptation of science and of the consolations of science, of the move into philosophy and the move away from philosophy?
He's mopped brows, W. says. Not literally, but metaphorically. He's wiped away tears. This time, quite literally. He's let his voice rise so the shouting of his thoughtful interlocutor does not seem such an aberration. Quite literally in this case, too. As the editor of a special edition of a journal, he has promised them he'll publish anything, anything they write, even if it is only a lengthy missive on the impossibility of their writing anything at all, on the impossibility of writing. He's bankrupted whole institutions of learning shipping his thinkers over from the other side of the world and bussing in acolytes - acolytes indebted to him, W., for discovering and then disseminating his thinker's thought - so as to show how greatly they were appreciated.
W. is a man of practice, he says. He seeks to effect changes in the world. For the good, the good, only for the good! For thought, W. says. And for his own thought, too. His own Denkweg, his thought-path. He likes to talk with those who make him think!, he says. It's the same with his reading. Why bother reading a line of Hermann Cohen if Hermann Cohen didn't make him think? If Hermann Cohen wasn't a spur in W.'s flanks? In the flanks of thought!
We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Prompted from without. Thought should reach us from outside, from an unfathomable source. Thoughts should shatter the frozen ice within us, as Kafka said. That's what he has seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its details in a way only the thinker would understand.
He's seen ice in the eyes of his thinkers. Starlight on ice. Starlight flashing on the empty expanses. He's seen inhuman distances in their eyes. Seen all the way to heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole, and the thinkers returning from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. Seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Antarctic of thought. Seen the deserted expanses of the steppes of thought, and the impassable flora of the jungles of thought. Seen the depths of ocean trenches and the high attenuation of the upper atmosphere where nothing can live.
Ah, They've suffered like gods, his thinkers. Like beasts made of stars and the aurora borealis. They been subject to distant agonies, to interstellar torture. And I, who have never suffered, but have only caused suffering, W.'s suffering and the suffering of others, what place do I have among them, which is to say, alongside him? That's the real question, W. says. That's the imponderable of imponderables.