Touching the Void

Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. – 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'.

What, for example, have I been doing all summer? Did I remember the task he set me? Did I remember to set aside at least two hours a day, for my study of Rosenstock-Heussy? Did I remember my Rosenstock-Heussy hours?

He, W., has been studying Cohen as we agreed. He's been reading the most obtuse and difficult of books, in German, and about mathematics, and says he'll send me his notes. 'But what about your notes?' Do I have them ready for him?

What happened to the pincer movement we agreed to undertake on German-Jewish philosophy? I was to approach it from one side (the easy side, W. notes), and he from the other side (the difficult side, W. says). I was to approach the mountain of German-Jewish philosophy from the east face, as it were (the easy slope), and he from the notoriously difficult west face (the difficult slope). He was to be a mountaineer of thought, and I – though no mountaineer – was to be something of a hill walker (of the low hills, the minor ones).

Heaven forefend that we would climb together! W. would never ask that. Never one reader-climber attached to the other by rope. Never two reader-climbers looking for handholds and footholds on the cliff face of Cohen's work.

German and mathematics, W. says. He knows it lies beyond me. I'm not his climbing-partner. He knows it would end up like Touching the Void, anyway. I'd have lost him down some cavern. He would have fell, doubtless trying to save me from some great reading-error, and I would have let him fall, disregarding both my error and his attempt to correct me, and even severed the rope that bound us together.

Yes, he would have fallen, and I, cutting the rope, would attempt to find the easy way round, the simplest of routes. I'd be reading my Idiot's Guide to Cohen instead. My Cohen in Sixty Minutes. And I'd come down the mountain whistling. I've read Cohen, I'd say. And meanwhile, W. be lying there groaning.