W.'s decline is getting worse. He doesn't work at night any more, but watches trash TV instead. And now, like me, he's bought Civilization 4. What appals him, he says, is that he plays Civilization 4 with more seriousness than he works.
Of course, W. knew that the last thing he should ever do is to buy Civilization 4. Which meant therefore that he went straight out and bought Civilization 4, W. says. Then he destroyed Civilization 4; he snapped the CD in two. Then the next morning, he went out and bought it again, he says, but he threw the whole package in the bin before he even got home.
Then, in a weak moment, despairing of his many years of intellectual work and convinced he'd taken a fundamentally wrong turn, he downloaded Civilization 4 from a torrent site, W. says, and has been playing it ever since.
Having Leonard Nimoy as a narrator is an attraction, of course. Whenever you discover a new technology, it's Nimoy who says some apposite quotation. It's edifying, W. says. He hears Leonard Nimoy's voice now whenever he reads philosophy, he says. It is necessary to know whether we are being duped by morality, W. says, in Leonard Nimoy's voice. It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity, in Leonard Nimoy's voice.
The philosophers we've heard have always had unfeasibly high voices, we remember. Think of Heidegger, on that CD I bought, going on about Hoelderlin. He sounded like a castrati, W. says, and does an impression.
Then there was Levinas. Didn't W. phone him once, from a Paris phonebooth? He was going to ask about attending the Talmudic readings. But he had to put the phone down when Levinas answered, W. says. His voice was so high! The receiver fell from his hands, and Levinas was saying, 'hello? hello?' in his very high voice. W. was really nonplussed.
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