'Tell me, when did you reached your greatest despair?' W. wants to know. When did I discover the sickness unto death, if I have discovered it at all? Ah, it was the outcome of a long process, W. knows that. When did it begin?
I began in joy, as all children begin. I lived in pure immediacy, as Kierkegaard would say, and I had met no obstacle that would challenge my joy. I knew no disappointments, or at least none that would change my understanding of life.
When did it change, that understanding? When did I, as Kierkegaard would say, come against 'something earthly': some disaster over which I despaired? When I disappointed myself, as I had already, no doubt, begun to disappoint others? When did I lose pure immediacy?
There must have been so many things! – 'Your growing obesity. Your tiny penis'. So many things, but W. wants to focus on just one, which he may have made up: the day I discovered the limits of my intelligence, W. says.
He sees it in his mind's eye, the young student working round the clock in his room. He sees it: dawn, then 7.00 AM, and the student had worked the whole night through. 7.00 AM, 9.00 AM, and the student taking Pro-Plus pills to push himself, bleary eyed, through another day.
'You covered your walls in brown paper, didn't you?' I'd told him that. Told him I'd written logical proofs and apposite quotations all over my papered-over walls. I'd gone a little mad. I'd worked a little too hard, but I'd come up against, hadn't I: the limits of my intelligence? It was as though I was too big to think. As though I was imprisoned in a cell in which I could never stand up, or if I did, if I stood up, I would only have broken my neck. Would only have died gasping, back broken, on the floor.
So I stooped. I wrote my notes with my big hand. I read books I couldn't understand. Then I shut the flap of my bureau and stared into space. Was that when I reached it, my first despair? Was it then that it shattered, the pure immediacy I knew as a child?
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