Warehouse Years

The suburbs. I tell W., about the companies where I used to work. One had meeting rooms named after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I've told him that. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I told him. It was like a fairytale giant burying his heart in a chest in the middle of a lake. In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, that's what I said.

Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me?

I talked about this in my first ever Dogma presentation, W. remembers. I spoke about reading Kafka in my warehouse in snatched time, stolen time. I said The Castle gave me hope, which was strange, because it seemed to be a book about the absence of hope, of hope's falsehood.

K. wanted to know who he was, and what he was to do, but there was no one to tell him. He was looking for orders, but he could make no sense of what he found. He was looking for the castle, but the castle was only the town in which he was living, at one with it. Hope, still. K.'s hope was undefeated.

But wasn't that it: to see the world without hope for what it was; for nothing other than what it was? I saw it in its totality for what it was. I saw it in its completeness, which was also its nothingness, I said, and W. was moved by this formulation. The Castle gave me a kind of freedom, I said. And wasn't it then that my warehouse years began to end, and my university years to begin?