Decline

W.'s amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading and writing before going to work. – I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. Then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. But he still managed to learn Hebrew! He still learned classical guitar!

What happened then? asks W. He has no name for it, W. says. A general malaise. A kind of collapse. In part, says W., it was Kafka's fault. How could he, W., write anything as good? He kept notebook after notebook, W. says, before giving them away.

He no longer had an alibi, W. says. He couldn't hold them apart any longer: the writer he wanted to be, and the person he was. It happened with literature for him, W. says, and then it happened in philosophy, which was terrible.

His turn to philosophy was in some way his way of escaping literature, W. says. Didn't philosophy hold out the possibility of a Kant-like flowering of one's powers much later in life? And there was his dawning sense of the apocalypse, too, W. says, of the end of the world.

And the sense that the highest task was of countering the apocalypse, which might indeed be a task of thought, of philosophy, W says. A task for which he discovered himself to be singularly unfitted, which made the distance between the philosopher he wanted to be and the person he was yet more unbearable.

It's was all Rosenzweig's fault!, says W. And Cohen's. All those declarative sentences! All that mathematics! How could he ever approach their brilliance? He fills notebook after notebook, but it's all futile. What is there for him to do in the teeth of the apocalypse? What relationship can he have to the highest that must be thought?

Then he met me, W. says, and things got really bad.