The Wrong Turn

1.

What was the idea behind moving all the books from the flat to the office? A dislike of the collectors of literature, perhaps – of those for whom what matters is to fill their shelves with books so as to reassure themselves of the imposingness of culture. There is no culture here; the flat is bare. A few CDs, an old television, and no bookshelves. The only books are those I bring home and I like it this way. Perhaps I could put it like this: I am not distracted from literature by books just as no books of philosophy are present to distract me from philosophy. But this is pompous; in the end I deprive myself of what, through hard work, would make me a thinker and a reader.

Why am I still attracted by the pathos of the idea of the solitary thinker, the solitary writer who writes in the absence of books? An idea ridiculous because I produce nothing here at home: the files on the computer at which I type are old and redundant; current versions of the essays on which I am working are kept on the computer in the office. Very little is done here; if I am at home – and I am usually out every night – I play computer games and watch bad television.

If I rise early, as I usually do, to write here before I go to the office, it is to write nothing in particular, to write without project in a pure garrulousness, a prolixity that has no reason to exist other than to prove the voice I would like to test is still there, not inside me, but alongside me. That measured voice unlike the rushed and stuttering one with which I speak. But a voice which says very little – which only lets speak the ‘there is writing’ in which the content of what I say is less important than the fact that it was said.

I confess I like the idea of spinning a post from nothing, of taking the nothingness of the blank day outside, of another mediocre morning and hardening it into a form. In my dressing gown with a cup of coffee beside me, I want to press the quotidian into this blog just as a flower might be pressed into an album. To preserve here those moments between the tasks of the day.

And what are those tasks? I have many papers to write. The summer is for work, and there is a great deal of work. New modules have to be prepared. Reports have to be written, and a summer school to be taught. It is the beginning of August. Each day seems more obscure than the last. When I was young I thought: how is it there can be another day? How is it that the world continues? And thought: even if it continues, I will not, and every edition of each magazine I buy will be the last.

Curious to have outlived oneself, to live posthumously. Curious to feel I took a wrong turn, and missed the direction I was supposed to take. Each morning, without books, without DVDs and distractions there is the sense of having taken the wrong turn and I know if I have children, I will do my best to make them take the right one. And will they see in me the evidence of these empty hours spent between sleep and work, of a life at once solitary and crowded with the ghosts of the books I have read and the films I’ve seen?

For they are with me, here, these books and films, and I wonder if I love them only because of the wrong direction I have taken and that they took me on. I was ready for them, and they for me. And now they live again around me, like a halo. They live like a circle of ghosts.

2.

Conversations with W. turn on our reading of literature. It is as though we were snagged by those books which opened literature to us. Is this what disappoints us in the philosophy we try to write? Is this is why we are never quite philosophical enough?

Consolation: the oldest image of the philosopher is of one on the way. But on the way to something, and this is the point: to love wisdom is to stand on the path that would lead to wisdom, it is to have faith in the seeking because of what there is to be sought. Eros, in Plato’s Symposium, is not a sad figure but a hopeful one.

And when it is not a matter of hope, but only of wandering? When there is faith insufficient to hold oneself up in the name of philosophy? But perhaps there is a philosophising lived as wandering. An etiolated philosophy, perhaps – a blanched one, and one which will soon be despised as a relic of the last romanticism which saw philosophers in the last century turn to literature just as they claimed philosophy was coming to an end.

R.M. thought I was praising the Americans when I spoke of their pragmatism the other night. But, I said, that pragmatism is what I most fear. In Britain, there is the inertia of what is left of our miserable traditions. There is still some social democracy here, still something left of the welfare state that allows those interstices in which it is possible to drift and to live. But in America? I shudder. Work is everywhere. Doing is everything. It scares me.

Now I understand: what I think of as the wrong turn is an experience which belongs to those of us who still live close to Old Europe. Not, it is true, the Europe of culture, of literature, of philosophy – the old, magnificent unity which still survives, I think, in some countries across the channel – but the Europe of the NHS and unemployment benefits. The Europe in which it was possible to experience in the limbo of unemployment a sense of a global possibility.

How vaguely all the themes I have tied together resonate with one another! I know what I would like to say: that what comes down to us as literature, unbound as it is to the culture that sustains it, is that circle of ghosts experienced in that same between-time that is named by the everyday. There are no books in my flat, but this is appropriate; the hours I spend here are those lived out of time.

3.

Old Europe. The last unemployed wander along the last riverbanks. The last readers pick up secondhand copies of The Castle. There will be no time for literature, either because you work or you train for work and worktime is all time, or because you mobilise yourself alongside others to combat that world for whom work is all. No alibi can sustain reading. It is insufficiently political, insufficiently philosophical and the wickedness of the world calls for stronger arms.

I took the wrong direction; I live posthumously. How is it possible to say, I am dead? Those of us who walk across the tomb of old Europe know the answer. Elsewhere, capitalism perfects itself. Elsewhere, capitalism is driving away all the ghosts and we too will be exorcised in the coming pragmatism.