What's happened? I've lost my ability to walk slowly, W. says. I'm no longer an ambler, like him. – 'You're in too much of a hurry!' It's only the slow walker who notices things, W. says. Who can take things in.
He's concerned for me. I look pinched, stressed. – 'You're taking all the nonsense too seriously'. I should work harder, that's the remedy, W. says. I need to read. I always get depressed when I don't read.
W. reminds me of our collaboration: we were to read Kierkegaard together, volume by volume, over the summer, sending our findings to one another. Kierkegaard, volume by volume! Don't I have the Hong and Hong editions lined up in my office?
W.'s always admired them – their sober spines, the varying colours against which the title appears, varying from volume to volume (Point of View in charocal, The Book on Adler, bronze, Fear and Trembling in a handsome burgundy). And then there's the sheer bulk of them, spanning my windowsill; it's quite moving.
How is it I know Kierkegaard's work better than him? What was it in him that appealed to me, the Christian to the Hindu? But then we have our Danishness in common, Kierkegaard and I. We have our Tungsind in common, I've insisted, our melancholy. My deep Hindu sadness sits side by side with my deep Danish melancholy, it's a terrible combination.
But W. has never believed in my sadness, nor my melancholy. – 'You're capable of neither'. Nor is he, for that matter. – 'We're frothy men. We're men of the surface'. But why, then, do we find the depths so fascinating? Why this row of sober books on my windowsill? Why has our collaboration led us to Kierkegaard?
Sometimes W. feels we're being tested. Sometimes he feels he's being tested, having to work with me. Like Job before the whirlwind, he wants to ask 'Why me?' Why him, indeed. Why me? Why has he been paired with me in our collaboration? Who shacked his leg to mine? Who tied us together like Siamese twins?
We're being tested, and Kierkegaard's our test, W. feels sure of it. Kierkegaard's the name of the mountain range before us. Oh God, the lofty, terrifying peaks of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript! Oh God, the fearsome ravines of The Concept of Anxiety! And what about the treacherous lowlands of the Edifying Discourses?
And what of the other mountain chains to which Kierkegaard's is joined? What of range of Hegel, of Kant, of Aristotle, looming in the mist? What, for that matter, of Luther and the Schoolmen? And what of those contemporaries of Kierkegaard, his interlocutors, the targets of his invective, who you would have to speak Danish to read? He thought he could count on me to read Danish, but I'm no good for that. What kind of Dane can't read Danish?, he sighs.
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