Abandonment – is that the word? But abandoned to what? Our lives, the wretchedness of our lives. Our failure. Again and again, our failure.
Why don't we learn? Why do we never learn from our mistakes? But if we did learn? If we took, as our lesson, the failure of our efforts on a previous day and on a succession of days? If we saw our lives as what, in fact, they are: a series of grotesque mistakes, a series of impostures and usurpations? W. shudders.
Why has it been left to him, rather than me, to face our disaster? I am a little more idiotic than him, and therefore a little more forgetful. I can wake with a little more confidence in my labours; I can throw myself more obliviously into my studies (my so-called studies). And in that way, I throw myself ahead of him, too – ahead, and calling him after me by my power of forgetting, which is to say my idiocy.
Why don't I learn?, W. asks himself. But he thanks God that I do not, and that I encourage him by my example. Everyone needs an idiot friend, he says. He thanks God for his idiot friend.
Lars Iyer's Blog 