We’re always renewed, I tell W., when we set off once again to speak in Europe. Always young and uncowed, full of fresh hope and new happiness, toasting each other in foreign countries and falling down drunk in foreign gutters. Are we really that shameless?, I ask W. But perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we’re shameless or not: we’ll do exactly the same anyway and will be eternally surprised at the rediscovery of our own idiocy.
But are we really that innocent?, I ask W. Don’t we, at one level or another, know our own idiocy? Doesn’t it saturate our awareness to the extent we can know nothing else? But by some miracle, we always regain just enough innocence, just enough forgetting for it all to begin again.
I think this is why we’re so happy, I tell W. We’re always happy to be setting off on another of our adventures. And I think our happiness is why we are continually being invited everywhere; we’re popular because we’re happy, and because ours is the happiness of idiots. I think we remind people of the happiness of their own youths, and the sense that anything is possible.
For us, I remind W., the prospect of our adventures always fills us with happiness, and we are never more joyful than when contemplating the chance of another speaking engagement. It’s not that we don’t know we’ll disappoint everyone: we are under no illusions with respect to our abilities. Nor is it that we’ll make any advance at all with respect to our studies: we know they are perfectly futile, and that we have got nowhere.
It is the very prospect of travel and arrival; the very foreigness of those places to which we are invited that excites us. And we are invited, I remind W., and that is the miracle. We undoubtedly possess a certain kind of charm, for all our incompetence, or perhaps for reason of that competence. Idiots are charming, I tell W., at least initially. Of course, they soon wear out their welcome, and have no one to amuse but one another.
Do you remember the European professor who asked a whole circle of us how many languages we spoke, rather than read? ‘Oh we can read a whole bunch of languages …’ – ‘That’s not what I asked.’ None of us spoke a single language, of course. None of us had really been to Europe. He was disgusted, of course, I remind W. We were disgusted with ourselves, I remind him. We were mired in self-disgust, our whole circle. We hung our heads. If we could have hung ourselves at that moment, we would have done so.
In your 20s, I say to W., you are still permitted promise. ‘A promising young man’; ‘she really has potential’. Come your 30s, you are supposed to deliver. Everyone’s looking to you, everyone has faith in you, everyone’s hoping you’ll deliver, but we know in truth, that there will be nothing delivered, quite the contrary. And isn’t this the agony of your 30s, knowing that it will become very clear you are capable of nothing at all? The game will be up: it will be evident to all.
But somehow, we’ve escaped the crushing feeling of shame, I say to W. We’re endlessly crisscrossing Europe, but are completely free of shame! We know we should be ashamed, we talk about it constantly, but our actions attest to the fact that we think there’s still hope for us, that possibility remains possibility. It’s as though we were 21, I say to W. 21, and our whole life before us. But of course we are very far from being 21. We are at that age when we should have been crushed by our sense of failure. It should have winded us, we ought to be incapable of saying anything. And yet we are happy; we’re happiness itself. It is our idiocy that protects us, I tell W. It’s our idiocy that burns above us like a halo.
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