W.’s greatest flaw, he tells me, is that he believes that with a group of friends, a community, thought might be possible. It is what our friendship, after all, has singularly failed to accomplish: thought is, in fact, utterly impossible, for W. and for me, but especially for me.
I tell W. my greatest flaw is that I’m so mesmerised by my stupidity I can do nothing about it; that I sit and read my own prose in open mouthed horror until I’m afloat out over 60,000 fathoms, but no decision issues from my horror as it would from a sensible person.
I’m paralysed, I tell W., by my own inability, my signal lack of gifts. It amazes me. There’s nothing of which I am capable, I tell him. There’s no intellectual act I cannot sully; no sentence whose swift movement I cannot make stumble. In truth I stumble over myself, I tell him; I get in my own way. Were it not for the fact I existed, I tell him, I might have an idea.
And nor is funny, or surprising that I’ve never had an idea, I tell him. It’s quite obvious. It’s part of the course of things; its plain to everyone. In fact, I blame you, I tell W., for raising my hopes, for carefully nuturing my talents. Wasn’t I the only one who listened to you with your dreams of friendship and community?
But then, on the other hand, I tell him, you are free to blame me even as I have so singularly destroyed any hopes you had for spiritual friendship and intellectual community. In the end, I tell him, our friendship is founded upon the utter impossibility of our achieving anything at all.
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