Leazes Park

The lake is fed by an underground spring, I tell W. A river used to run from here to the quayside. Lort Burn – Grey Street follows its long curve. But they culvetted it and made the lake which is higher than the surrounding park as we observe, walking around its edge.

Leazes Park, so near my office, should be my thinking space, W. says. My breathing space. When do I ever take the time to walk round the lake? Never, I tell him. Never: of course, W. says. I'm not an ambler, he says. I've forgotten how to stroll.

W. is a great advocate of strolling. The man of thought is a strolling man, he maintains. I should know that, he says. Haven't we taken many walks alongside one of our thinkers? Haven't we been able to loosen our thinker from the crowd and take him into the countryside?

Thinkers have thanked us for nothing less: for giving them freedom from the crowd. Crowds are unbearable to the real thinker, W. says. The thinker always wants to escape. And so we've taken many such journeys – journeys out, away from the others. Away from the tumult.

We try to calm our thinkers on such walks, that's our main task, W. notes. We try to put them at ease, drawing attention to the pleasant vistas around us, to the blueness of the sky, to the peace. We make no demands. It's not about us: we've always grasped that. It's about our thinker: that, too; we have a kind of instinct.

Occasionally, it is true, I've begun expounding my caffeine theories, but W., has put a stop to that. He prods me when our thinker isn't looking. He raises his finger to his lips. And occasionally, W. ventures to introduce some intellectual topic or another before pulling himself back, apologising.

Let the thinker introduce the topic!, we've always told ourselves. And sometimes they do. Sometimes they begin to speak, and we respond only to enable them to speak some more, only to let ourselves drift into the current of their reflections.

What privilege it is to hear a thinker think! What to hear the untrammelled ideas of the thinker spoken to us as to no one in particular! What to be the beach upon which the thinker-sea spreads its waves! What, prone, to be the shore over which the thinker-ocean breaks!

Of course, we can understand little of what we hear. But we expect nothing more. In the end, it's not meant for us! We're overhearers, not interlocutors. We're listeners-in, not conversation-partners. To our credit, we've always understood that, which is why we're popular with thinkers.

Ah, but there are no thinkers with us today, as we stroll around the lake at Leazes part. None as W. stops to read the placards about the waterfowl, and we stop to inspect the ducklings. We've been thrown back on ourselves, once again! Thrown back: not upon thought and the development of thoughts, but upon the peace of non-thought in which the thinker can find repose.