Beatitude

W.’s flight was cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat. It’s a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.

When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge. ‘You’ve never felt beatitude,’ says W. ‘You’re not capable of it.’

W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious. ‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.

The Ethics, says W. It’s the only book I’ve ever thought is completely right. It’s the opposite of your flat, says W. God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittest thing they have?

W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore. You have to read in the original language, he says. Next he’ll refresh his Greek, W. says.

We used to learn Greek together, only he and the others had the answer book, and liked to watch me squirm with my exercises, having cribbed from the translation in advance. Your idiocy, says W., was spectacular.

For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus. ‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz – and Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza. Ah, The Ethics, he sighs. Beatitude!, he sighs.