The Interval

Saturday night, Plymouth quayside. Don't look in their eyes!, W. warns me of the milling crowds. They're about to turn. People get glassed here all the time, W. says. – 'Do you want to get glassed?' No.

Still, we are among the people, W. says. We're in the midst of everyday life. Didn't Rosenzweig say theological problems must be translated into everyday terms, and everyday problems brought ino the pale of theology?, W. says. Didn't he say that philosophical problems must be translated into those of everyday life, and everyday life brought into the pale of philosophy?

This is where we should start, W. says, right here on the dockside! But first of all we need to drink, W. says. First of all we have to meet the everyday at its own level. Everyone's drunk, and so we too must be drunk. Everyone's lairy, so we, too, must become lairy. Everything depends upon translating ourselves into everyday terms.

He saw it, W. says later in the taxi on the way home. For a moment, he thought he found it, the interval around which speech turns. For a moment, he sensed its presence – the life of speech …

The speech of the other. The time of the other. What do these abstractions mean?, we ponder over gin in W.'s living room. It demands a new way of listening. We must no longer try to apprehend the other. We must no longer presume we have anything in common. There is no unity here. No common space. What matters is the foreignness between us, W. says. What matters is what escapes our mutual understanding.

Did we understand him?, we wonder of the babbler we met on the quayside. For what was he asking? What did he want from us? Directions? He knew where he was. Drunken bonhomie? But he could have found that anywhere. He saw something in us, W. says. We saw something in him. An interval opened. Life broken in. Were we inquired of?

Speak!, says W. Tell me something! But I can tell him nothing. The interval between us is sterile. It has nothing to do with the hope of a logic of relations that W. holds above everything. But for a moment back there on the quayside, the crowd all around us … For a moment, what did he sense? The interval spoke, says W. He heard it. Between the drunk and us. Between the two of us, drunk, and the other, also drunk …