W. can never really understand the everyday, he knows that. There's a limit to his capacities; even a kind of blindspot. What could he, who has always had his intellectual projects, his reading and writing projects, understand of the stagnation of the everyday? What could he know of its infinite wearing away, its infinite banalities?
A man who hasn't been brought to his knees by the everyday can have no understanding of the everyday, says W. aphoristically. But I have been brought to my knees thus, W. says, that much is clear. I spent whole years on my knees, haven't I told him exactly that?
W. wants to hear about my illnesses, he says. He wants to hear about my unemployment, he never tires of it. 'What did you do all day?', he asks me, and when I shrug, he says, 'take me through it. Take me through one of your days'. There's no point, I tell him. He'll never understand. - 'Did you drink a lot?', W. asks. 'is that how you got through it?' Sometimes I drank, I tell him. Sometimes I did nothing at all. I looked out of the window, I tell him. I watched the raindrops bead and run down the window.
But W. can never understand. Imagine if he lost his job, I tell him. Imagine, his job lost, if Sal left him (Sal would never leave him, W. says), and he was stranded in a room, a single room, for year after year. He'd become a kind of cosmonaut, all lines cut, tumbling into space. Tumbling, getting further and further away, utterly lost …
But he'd have his reading, W. says, and his writing. He'd have his intellectual projects. Couldn't he get down, really get down, to learning maths? Couldn't he finally master classical Greek, getting past the aorist which always floors him?
Ah, but he'd soon tire of such tasks, I tell him. They would leave him behind; his project would belong to someone else, living another life. The infinite wearing away: that's what W. would have to fear, I tell him, and for a moment, he says, he feels it, it's terrible. No more reading and writing, he says. Books stranded on a desk, open and with no one to read them (the air reads. The white light reads.) And he'd be watching raindrops bead and run down the windows …
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