‘Is it really called a man bag?’, I ask W. – ‘No. It’s just what I call it.’ – ‘What have you got in there?’ He begins to empty it. A book. Hermann Cohen on infinitesimal calculus, in the original. – ‘Wow! maths and German!’ – ‘See, I’m a scholar,’ he says. ‘Not like you.’ A notebook, which he writes in two different directions, following the practice of our friend P.
At the front, the ideas of others; at the back, his ideas. – ‘How many ideas have you had?’, I ask him. He opens the notebook for me. ‘Mmm. Quite a few. Can I copy some out?’ W. says I can. ‘A book must produce more thought than it itself has’, I write. ‘The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics’, I write. And the best one, ‘It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster’ – I copy that out, too.
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