Non-Thought

We shouldn't try to keep thoughts, W. says. We shouldn't write them down. Shouldn't even try to remember them! The idea should permeate the thinker, W. says. Should radiate from him like an aura.

It should be inseparable from his life, from his slightest gesture. You should be able to hear it in every sentence he speaks. It should be discernible in his bearing, in the way he drinks his tea. You should be able to tell at once he's had an idea, that an idea possesses him, from the way he eats.

There's a kind of distraction to him, the thinker, W. says. A vagueness, as though he wasn't quite in tune with the world, wasn't quite in focus. The thinker's outline is blurred, his replies hesitant. Ask him questions and there'll be long silences, as long as anything. And he'll reply, most often: I don't know. Because he doesn't know. He knows he doesn't know.

His idea – the idea that lives through him, breathes through him – brings with it the non-idea, his thought, non-thought. He is happy with silence. He rests in it. Happy not to know and say he doesn't know. Because he does know something. He actually knows something: his idea. And that certainty, the sun that has risen through him, is such that everything else seems dim and far away.

Ah, the bliss of thinking! The passion of thought! No more opinionating. No more guesswork. He knows; a door has been opened to him. No more chatter. No more idle conversation. He doesn't need others. He's alone in a new way, elected by his idea, ennobled by it.

That's why thinkers like us, W. says. We're non-thought incarnate. We don't have ideas, and we don't pretend to! In the end, we demand nothing, we ask for nothing. The lightness of our chatter is like the murmur of grasshoppers on a summer evening. The to and fro of our banter is like the trickling of a young stream: a backdrop, a kind of night against which the star of the idea can burn ever brighter.

In the end, if we are not thinkers – if we'll never have an idea of our own – we do not hinder thought, either. We're not its enemies.