He wants to blame someone else! W. wants to blame someone else for his despair. Me, in actual fact. It's all my fault, he wants to say. But what if it is not? What if the fault lay elsewhere, and even within W. himself?
He shudders. The ground beneath him seems to plunge. After everything, his studies, his researchers, he really being sent back to himself? He thought he could blame me, he says. Thought that I was the single source of his problems, oh not me as an individual so much as what I embodied and exemplified: an era of cynicism and opportunism, an epoch with neither breadth nor depth, an age of information in which no one knows anything.
But he thought, too, that he might show me the way, that, clutching me to his breast as he soared into the skies of philosophical speculation, that I, too, might be changed. Hope, that's how he saw it: that I, his charge, his ward, might be redeemed as our time might be redeemed. Promise, that's how he thought of it. Our friendship – always asymmetrical, always dependent on one knowing so much more than the other – was also a hope for our time.
And if he felt despair in company, as he so often has, it was only a modification of hope; it still referred to the open sky in which we would soar. And now? If it is all W.'s fault, and not mine, then what are we to do?
Lars Iyer's Blog 