Leazes Park: yes, this is where I should come when the ping of incoming emails depresses me, W. says. I should come and watch the ducklings. I should rest my eyes on the waterfowl – the black headed geese, the kingly swans. I should even pay to hire a rowing boat to take a turn around the lake.
Although no man of nature, W. has a great deal of time for the city park, where anyone might walk. Where the alcoholic walks, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholic cannot walk – where his way is barred by security guards or policemen – W. will not walk either.
A man must walk if he is to think, W. says. We have to be receptive to thoughts, open to them. An idea might reach us at any time, and it's only when we relax – when we stretch out the mind – that they might discover us. How many times has W. walked, hoping an idea will come looking for him?
We must not so much look for ideas, W. says, as let ideas find us. It is not a question of mental effort, but of mental slackening. Ideas need time to emerge – unmeasured time. Ideas despise clocks. They even despise notebooks.
Lately, W. has been deliberately neglecting his notebooks. He's put them aside, he says, the better for ideas to reach him. He's been neglecting himself! Is it any accident that Solomon Maimon was taken for a vagrant?
But W.'s vagrancy is confined to the early morning, before he comes downstairs to make tea. It's confined to his dressing-gown hours, his hours before dawn, when he reads and writes in his room. Oh, he shouldn't read or write, he knows that. The thinker-vagrant lets go of all books, all writing. But W.'s is only a contained vagrancy, he says. He has his limits.
Ah, the figure of the thinker-vagrant, the thinker wanderer: was that why he was drawn to me? I resembled the thinker-vagabond, the thinker-scruff, it is true. But he mistook the signs of vagabondage for a sign of thought. The scruff is not necessarily a thinker: it was a painful lesson.
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