Our grief … We are grieving men, we decide. Men full of grief, saturated with it, men who have had too many disappointments, too many failures. Men of grief, but men of hope, too, men who, for a time each day – just before dawn for W. when he goes into his study to work, just after dawn for me, when I gaze vacantly out at the yard – are given the gift of forgetting their grief. Who, forgetting it, are ready, without knowing it, to disappoint themselves again, to fail anew.
Our idiocy is our salvation, W. says. The way we are unable to learn from our mistakes. For our lives, in their entirety, have been a mistake! We were mistaken from the first, and all along!
Sometimes it strikes him with great force, W. says, the extent of our mistakenness. How could we have got it so wrong? How could we be so deluded? But in truth, we delude ourselves. We forget – we want to forget – the lessons of yesterday in order to begin again today – before dawn, for W., after dawn, for me.
We wish a holy idiocy upon ourselves. We want to be born again as we sit at our desk (W.), or gaze vacantly out of the window (me). Born again in idiocy and forgetting! Plunged into the Lethe freshly each morning! Ah, what would be left to us otherwise but our suicide? What, without our idiocy, except that sickness unto death incapable even of suicide?
Lars Iyer's Blog 