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? What happened to the pincer movement we agreed to undertake on German-Jewish philosophy? 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 at least something of a hill walker (of the low hills, the minor ones).
Heaven forfend 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.
He knows it lies beyond me. He knows I'm not his climbing-partner. It would only end up like Touching the Void. 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. ,
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.
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