Molehills

If he had had the time, all the time in the world, what would he have written?, W. asks himself. What projects would he have taken on? He would have worked on Cohen, of course, and Rosenzweig as he does now. But he would have worked harder, and driven much deeper.

He would have plunged into their writings like a mole, following their interior corridors. He would have worked ceaselessly, ceaselessly until he could re-emerge, until the sunlight would have broken across his star-shaped snout.

What would he have become? A man of ideas, says W. A man of God and mathematics. A man at home in religion and philosophy. And a man who could at last turn, as Rosenzweig said he did, towards life.

Life!, cries W., That's all he wants. To live somehow. To begin to live. But it's not simple for him. It's not so for anyone. Life: what does that mean? Living: how to begin to do that? But in the meantime, working that out, scholarly articles would bump up like molehills. Articles, perhaps a monograph, exterior signs of vast underground processes, of unguessable paths, of unfathomable depths … But all on the way to Life.

What else would he have written? What else would he have done? To have too much time is a curse, W. says. To have too much time, too much opportunity: because it's only then that you would experience, really experience your own failure. We achieve little because we are worth little. We write rubbish because we are men of rubbish, and no amount of time is going to change that.

Life? We can barely sit at a table, W. says. What do we know about life?