Hope. What is it that keeps us going? Why do we bother, in spite of it all, in the face of it all? Sometimes W. thinks we sense a duty to Old Europe, a duty to the thinkers who have preceded us. We have a sense of the dark times, and of the need to preserve something, to hold on to it.
But then don't we also have a sense of a duty to ourselves, to cultivate ourselves, to hollow ourselves out in service? There is a great deal wrong with us, to be sure – almost everything – but there's also a sense that something's missing, that if we don't quite measure up, the world, too, doesn't measure up, and in our inadequacy – in our awareness of inadequacy – something of the world has become conscious of itself.
We are signs, W. says, symptoms. We're the way something is wrong, not the disease itself. Or we are only part of the disease, its augurs, its prophets – if prophets are allowed to be barely conscious of what they prophesise and already touched by the apocalypse – its mystics – if mystics are permitted to wander dazed through their revelation, unsure of what it was they saw.
That we know our limitations is our strength, we're agreed on that. We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness. At least we know it passes above us, like migratory birds in the autumn sky.
We've written. We've even written a great deal. We've spoken. We've addressed learned audiences. We've tried – can't we say that? No doubt I'm a little lower than W., he says, a little less advanced. I have a lower IQ, for one thing, that much is clear. I lack his linguistic abilities, his depth of his scholarship. And I lack his sense of old Europe, of the libraries and archives of major European cities.
But for all that, haven't I lent him something of my shamelessness? Hasn't he learnt from me the power of pathos, of saying very little, but with great feeling? He's acquired a sense of urgency, W. says. He knows what he's up against. He's a man of the new world, this world, W. says. He's emerged from the archives. Without me, would he have written anything at all? Would he have spoken?
But then, too, he wonders whether he hasn't fallen from them, the libraries, the archives, old Europe. Whether the light into which he emerged was like the milky lens of a cataract, and he sees nothing but his blindness, my blindness. What is real? What is good? Perhaps he no longer knows, W. says. Perhaps I've led him astray, terribly astray, and he no longer knows the way back.
Lars Iyer's Blog 