Ideas

W. is telling us about ideas. He’s had one idea, which took him 15 years to formulate. 15 years! 

‘How many ideas have you had?’, says W. I tell him I’m not sure. What’s the sign of an idea? ‘They have to be clear and distinct’, says W. ‘Clear and distinct.’

What I want is to be loved, W. has decided. ‘You want to be adored,’ he says. W.’s much less concerned with being adored. ‘That’s why I can have ideas’, he says. He can work in silence for years. He doesn’t need external affirmation. He’s like a mole, he says. Digging, with his little paws working away and the wet soil on his nose.

Sometimes, W. concedes, it’s as if I have ideas. I once spoke to him very movingly about the Phaedrus, for example, and the reason why Socrates has to leave the city to talk to his friend. W. immediately lays claim to any idea I might have in his articles. I would do the same, he says. But of course, my ideas are always wrong. They’re full of pathos, he says, and they sound correct, but in fact they are no such thing. ‘You always get the Greek wrong. Always.’

But sometimes, for a moment, the clouds do clear. ‘You manage to speak sense’, says W., ‘or something like sense.’

‘There was that pub in Oxford’, W. remembers. ‘We all fell silent and listened in wonder. Not to what you said, which may or may not have been sensible, and in fact probably wasn’t; it was probably the usual pathos and hot air, but that you could say it.

‘You of all people. No one expects it of you. Quite the opposite in fact. Which is why it’s so surprising.’ W. himself was amazed. ‘And there was that time on the docks in Plymouth. The clouds parted. You spoke sense for nearly an hour.’ What did I speak about? W. can’t remember. But he’d been amazed, he remembered that.

‘You should never hang on to conversations,’ says W. He never does. But he’s a great believer in discussion and friendship. ‘Not like you. You’re not capable of friendship. You’re always about to betray me. All you want is to be adored’, says W.