I send W. a quotation from my reading. I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Who said that?, W. says. Tarkovsky, I tell him. Write it in your notebook!, says W. We're to produce a collective notebook to go with our intellectual movement, W. has decided. There are some quotations we need to keep before us.
How about this one?, I ask him, and send him an excerpt from a letter by Knut Hamsun's wife:
he has not a single so-called friend . . . he cannot be bothered to write letters to friends, and . . . in the course of time all people have become a matter of indifference to him. This may be a fault, but it is simply how Hamsun is . . . His work is his only friend, his only love, and the rest of us just have to accept this.
It made W. shudder, he says. It's the ultimate horror, to place work above friendship, he says.
In Rosenzweig's new thinking, W. says, friendship, intellectual fellowship is everything. We have to think together, together. We have to speak, says W. The new thinking lives by virtue of another's life, W. says. Whereas the old thinking is always a solitary business, the new thinking lives through dialogue, through the chorus, W. says. And through friendship!
Lars Iyer's Blog 