Schwarmerei

Pathos is my milieu, W. says. It's where your heart really lies. I am a pathetic thinker, W. observes, if I can be called a thinker at all. Of course, so is he. He learnt it from me. In its way, it's quite impressive – the way everything I say is marked with urgency, as though it was the last thing I will ever say! As though I were going to expire at any moment!

Then there's the way I raise my voice, reaching great shouting crescendoes entirely arbitrarily, W. says. It bears no relation to what I'm actually saying. And then I like to go all quiet, too, don't I?, W. says. All hushed! As if you'd drawn everyone back to the moment of creation! As if something momentous was about to happen! 

All in all, it's always an amazing performance from me, W. says. I always look as though I want to start a cult. Schwarmerei, W. says, that's what marks everything you write. It means swarm and enthusiasm, W. says. I'm one of the enthusiasts that Kant hated. It's all Schwarmerei with me, isn't it?, W. says.

Sometimes he thinks it's because I'm working class. I can't get over the idea someone is listening to me, W. says. that I have an audience. Which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary. I think I'm speaking to people better than me, more refined. Which is, of course, almost always true. I hate them and I love them, W. says; I want only their approval, but at the same time I don't want it; it's the last thing I want.

W. has his pathetic moments, he admits. Sometimes he feels the Schwarmerei rising in his breast. Sometimes his voice begins to climb the decibels. But then he knows that I am to follow him, and who will notice his excesses then? I make audiences flinch, he says. I make them twitch in involuntary horror. All that Schwarmerei! All that pathos!