Inanity

I am an expert at inanity, everyone knows that. It’s my great talent, says W., to be able to generate nonsense and to do so with others. Hours can pass, days, and there’s still more inanity to be tapped. How is it possible?, asks W. How do you do it? Whenever he’s in my company, says W., he longs for nothing other than to read Spinoza. Spinoza, he says, is your opposite. He longs for nothing else than to pore over Spinoza. All the answers are there he says.

Inanity – how do we do it?, W. wonders. For W. has a part in it too. W. is also an expert inanist. We ask each other questions, ‘Would you call yourself a corruptible man?’, or ‘Do you consider yourself to be a man of emotion?’ which permit of infinite permutations and infinitely stupid answers. W. is a great expert at question asking. When there’s silence for a moment, W. is ready with a question. I admit it, I’ve learned from him the great art of arbitrary question asking.

W.’s questions often have a melancholic tinge. ‘What do you consider your greatest failure?’; ‘When you look back over your life, how do you excuse it?’; ‘Why do you think things turned out so badly for you?’; ‘Do you think you will ever come up with a single idea?’; ‘What do you regret most about your life?’: these are all classic W. questions, which begin with a presumption of a failure that is utter and complete.

‘That’s what draws us together’, says W., ‘our sense of having failed’. I always tell him that I lack such a sense, and that things have turned out quite well, considering. I tell him his love of failure is a nostalgia for success. ‘In your heart, you measure yourself against success’. I tell him I recognise no such idols. ‘We were doomed from the start, everyone’s doomed …’

We’re on the North Devon coast, in Minehead, looking for cider. You’d think you could find it here, this is Somerset. A morning cider! Bright and glinting in our pint glasses! It’s a bright, warm day and we are after nothing other than cider, Somerset cider, though there’s none to be found. So we climb the hill instead, to enjoy the views. Up we go, our chatter filling the morning air.

We’re on particularly good form. Chatter pours forth in joyous profusion. Have we ever been happier? Have we ever achieved such inanity? Secretly, we both know we’ve reached our high point. It must be the morning air, the brightness, the sunlight on the waves below. There’s no cider in us, no alcohol, but it must be the air growing thinner as we climb. We feel purified. Light pours down upon us. We twitter like birds. We laugh and twitter.

How funny we are! But to none but ourselves. How inane! But who would appreciate it but us? At the summit of the hill, we can see the town spreading out on one side of us, and the sea on the other in the morning brightness. This is it, we’ve done it: it’s our ascent into the thinnest, most rarefied of inanities. But who would know it but us? Who would appreciate us but us?