Sometimes W. thinks his melancholy is deeper than his philosophy; that he has attempted to think, that he has been drawn to thinkers, only to escape the despair that, in the end, always lies in wait for him.
It always seeps back, he says, in the still hours of night. It's always there when he turns off his television and trudges up to bed. It's there in the blackness above him as he sleeps, in the blank slate of the sky. And it's there at the heart of his sleep, too, forming itself into nameless monsters, into stirrings that lead him to break out in night sweats.
Hope returns, of course. Hope always returns before dawn, and the pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window. Hope returns as he pulls on his dressing gown and goes next door to his study to open his books and take notes. But such hope, W. sometimes suspects, is but a modality of despair, made of it.
Why is he reading Kierkegaard alongside Cohen and Rosenzweig? Why is he teaching himself the infinitesimal calculus? Why is he attempting to think messianism mathematically? Where will it lead him? To his desk in the other room. To his lonely station against the void which itself is only part of the void, just as his hope is only part of his despair.
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