Atlantis

W.'s workfiles mean little to him now, he says. There are dozens of them now, saved in a folder called Notes, one after another, on every kind of topic. Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, for example. Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason. He saves them to his folder and forgets them immediately, W. says.

What are they all for? What do they mean? Didn't a friend of his set up a website in his honour? Didn't he put up some of W.'s miscellaneous notetakings? It was a disaster, of course, W. says. You should never venture casually into the public domain. It's something over which you should exercise the greatest caution.

He always does the opposite to me, W. says, that's his policy. Take my attitude to the internet, for example. Take my advocacy of the world of blogging. A few years ago, I was a blogging-advocacy-madman, W. remembers. I spoke of nothing else.

I told him of Rilkes of the blogosphere, of blogospherical Nietzsches. I spoke of the new commons, of new modes of writely collectivity. Couldn't we envisage the online fuflilment of Blanchot's La Revue Internationale? Couldn't we bypass the institutions and channels of conventional thought?

Even W. was persuaded, or some part of him was. Even he thought something was happening, that something might come of it … We started a group blog, of course. – 'And then what happened?', W. says. 'Tell me. Start at the beginning'. When I say nothing, he says, as he always does, 'You ruined it! You destroyed it straightaway!'

I published like a maniac, W says. Post after post, one after another. No one else had a chance! No one could get a word in! Occasionally, W. would put up one of his considered, reasonably-written posts, he says. Every now and then, after much thought, W. would put something up – a modest post, soberly written – supposing that, surrounded by my madness, his post might seem all the more reasonable. He thought it might rise up, a calm island in the midst of a sea of madness.

But that's not what happened, is it? It was drowned! Everything he wrote was drowned! It was like Atlantis all over again, W. says. That's when he learnt the internet was only a support network for my fantasies.