'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.
In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books – that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library. – 'It's always new for you, isn't it?' And this, W. supposes, is why I never really finish the books I read, but pile them up, one on top of another. I never finish them, says W., but I let them lean, one against the other, on my bookshelves.
'What have you been reading?', W. asks. 'What's caught your fancy lately?' I tell him. W. nods and murmurs. – 'Flusser again, oh yes … Walser, oh very interesting ….'
W.'s read everything, he says. For a long time, reading was more important to him than anything. Those were his golden years, W. says. He was in his heyday! He doesn't read anything like as much now, W. says. It happens in your late 30s; you find you can't read as much as you used to. You can't read for a whole day, stopping for dinner, and then read in the evening as well, not that this would mean anything to me.
'A bit of Flusser – the editor's introduction, for example - and a little Walser – or an online essay about Walser – that's enough for you', W. says. It's enough of me to have a whiff of literature, and it's the same for philosophy. Have I read, really read Rosenzweig, about whom I talk so passionately? And what about Cohen – have I read him?
W. even offered to lend me Religion Out Of The Sources Of Reason, he says. He would have offered to buy it for me, but there was no point. – 'It was enough for you that it existed'. Enough, for me, that there was a man called Cohen and a man called Rosenzweig, and that they wrote books once, a long time ago.
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