W. always walks slowly, measuredly. – 'Slow down!', he tells me. I know nothing of the art of the stroll, W. has always said. I know nothing of the pleasures of the flaneur. A free man should always walk slowly, the Greeks said that, says W. The slave hurries, but the free man can take all day.
We walk slowly in the Spring air. Crossing the railway bridge, we see the river has burst its banks. The meadows are flooded. A film of water through which clumps of hedgerow poke. Horses wade. What are we going to do?
We decide to take the long route, by road. As we walk, W. asks me about my latest researches and tells me about his. – 'What have you found out?', he asks me. Nothing! Very little! No surprise there, says W. He, on the other hand, has found out a great deal. He's been reading voraciously – voraciously – in the Hebrew literature, and, on the other hand, deepening his study of mathematics.
The trick is, he tells me, to spend immense amounts of money on your mathematical books, so you guilt trip yourself into reading them. £130 – that's how much he spent on Cohen's The Principle of the Method of Infinitesmals and its History. £210 – that was what Mathematics and Theory of Platonic Ideals set him back.
Of course, I'm content to read everything online, W. says. I don't know what it means to handle a volume. And besides, old books, with their learning, frighten me, he knows that. Old hardbacks with scholarly footnotes. Old libraries – what do I know of them? I'm a man of the new age, W. says, just as he a man of the old age. He's an anachronism, W. says, he knows that, and I am a harbinger.
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