Tuesday evening. I had said to myself, since summer is over, it’s time to work in my evenings, and so I am here at my desk, back in the flat, watching the news. It’s only 7.00, but the sun has set. I have Josipovici’s In A Fertile Land beside me, and files with complete electronic versions of texts by and Deleuze open in other windows.
I should begin, but I’m too tired to begin. K. said he’s too tired in the evenings to work. Perhaps, he said, it’s because of his children. But he’s exhausted now even though he was once able to work. Not keen to work, perhaps, but able to work. Have we peaked? I ask K., and he laughs, was that it? Was that all it came to? But why should we have hoped that it would come to anything?
Intelligence is not enough. A modicum of education is not enough. The support of friends is not enough, but what would be enough? A culture saturated in philosophy, perhaps, a culture where philosophy is valued, where thought is everywhere, where everyone would think for themselves. No, that would not be enough, for there have been philosophers in societies indifferent to philosophy.
Some philosophers preferred that indifference; it allowed them to work in silence. Without speaking, with no need to speak, to answer to others, to rush to conclusions, they thought and wrote in peace. What need had they of a society that recognise their place, which allotted them a place? They thought and they wrote; sometimes they read; sometimes they walked out of their houses and into town, but always they were thinking and always the silence of their fellow bus passengers on matters philosophical was propitious.
Sometimes, imagine it, they would open their notebooks in cafes, scribbling a few notes, looking into the near distance, scribbling some more. Yes, these are my fantasy-philosophers, writing without publication, speculating in silence, not even waiting for a time when their thoughts could be shared. Writing, filling notebooks, but not even patiently – not even with the dream their thoughts would be published, not even dreaming of a future in which their name would be known.
What need would they of fame? What need did they have to see their words in print? Without masters (they were taught by no one but themselves) and without pupils (what pupils could they seek, the ones who were indifferent to everything but thought?), without friends with whom they could escape their thoughts (drinking, eating, enjoying the fruits of life) or with whom they could share them (conversation, correspondence, exchange of papers), they had no need but thought, the need thought had given them. The need thought has for itself.
But what would be enough for us, for us to think? Something else, some merciful surplus of strength, something – but what? – that lifted our eyes from our books, that looked back at us, something that interrupted our reading and our writing, something that addressed us and changed us. Ah, our friends would have seen we had changed! We would have changed, would have been surrounded by a soft light, our faces would glow, our laughter would become lighter, our movements more graceful!
How can I fail to think of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, indiscernible from the rest of us even as he passes among us! Passing, yes, but changed, changed from inside, radiant, for those with eyes to see it, profound, for those with ears to listen! But we have not changed, alas. We pass with all the others and are just like all the others; we see all they see and speak as they speak. All the while wanting to be transformed. All the while waiting for that merciful surplus that would make thinking at last possible, that would allow a thought to be born in us as it comes from outside, the thought from outside inside us, setting us on fire from within, shining from our eyes and in our words.
One day I would like to think. One day. But I know it is too late. When was it, the day I missed my appointment with thought? When was that day – how old was I? Seventeen, perhaps, like Schelling, sixteen like Shankara – eighteen like Serres, or nineteen like Deleuze? Years pass. Soon, I will be too old for that great age – thirty-seven – when Heidegger published Being and Time and Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit! But in truth, I am writing of a thought – of that thought that would precede all books, that thought that, as it happens, would set itself back inside me, retreating from my present into the past in which it would shelter itself.
Thought, star, buried not in my past, but in a past into which I will be henceforward set, bound by an excess of memory, a hypermnesis, by that thought that would remember itself in me, drawing me to it, pulling me up to its level, summoning me to itself and granting me its measure. Happy thought that would be like fate! Joyful thought that would grant me a life lived in the quietness of thought! There with me always, waiting for me, ahead of me, calling me ahead, giving me a future as the future of thinking, drawing me from the past into the future and allowing me to write to the future, to set down untimely thoughts, to think for another generation, for those not yet born, for thinkers yet to come, to fire an arrow forward for another thinker to pick up, just I had picked up the arrows of thinkers before me (happy the ones who know community in the thoughts of those long dead and in anticipation of thinkers to come! Happy that solitude filled with thought and with the knowledge that there are other thinkers)!
Once, I met one, a thinker, we spoke and I remember how marvellously he said, my thoughts are interesting but I’m not interesting. Marvellous because he knew he was a receptacle of thought, that thought had given itself to him, that he had been vouchsafed a destiny that was not, in some sense, his, that he lived in lieu of thought, behind it, attempting to catch up with it, sometimes capable of thinking, sometimes not, but always with the bliss of having had thought, of thought having been given to him, of having written from thought, of having written from what was given. We spoke. He said, I’m not interesting, but my book is interesting. Modest shell! Modest nova-husk, as if the thought had voided and exploded him, as though he were nothing extraordinary without thought, as though he were in lieu of the one he was once allowed to be, as though, ordinary, prosaic, here before me, he were no one at all but one whom thought had deigned to touch!
I would like to think, of course, of course. I would like to carry around my neck my version of the amulet Pascal wore in which he had folded that scroll on which he had set down details of his religious vision. I would like my journal to cry out the joy! joy! joy! Kierkegaard wrote in his at the age of twenty-seven. And if it never happens – as it will not – that I am one day given to thinking? If it never comes? Patience is not enough; nor is impatience. It cannot be expected; you cannot demand that it comes, like a genie who would grant you three wishes. Rather that thought will summon you to it, that you would be the genie from which things would be commanded! But I will never be that genie, I say to myself. I will never know what it is to be commanded. What, then? I cannot call myself a failure, for this would make an idol of that success to which thought is indifferent.
I have not failed thought, for thought has not been given to be to fail. How can I fail what was never mine? Could I say I failed what I thought thought might be? Another idol – but one, I think, speaks a kind of truth. The evening that spreads indifferently around me (it is 7.50, night; the news is ending) is, I know, the opposite of thought. Whatever thought will be, it is not this, and I am not its thinker. But what do I know of thought, I who know only what it is not? Curse and blessing: I have a sense of what thought is not, but not of what thought might be. The poisoned gift: I know that others think, and what it means that they think. I know the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary, know, that is, the bounty others carry inside them, even though they appear like husks whom thought has exploded. Poisoned gift: I know thought has not set out to reach me from the other side of the universe. I know others see in me some light of the thought of others, that I glow not like the sun, but with the reflected light of the moon. But to be a sun – what would that mean? To think and to experience the destiny of thought!
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