Work, real work: what do we know of that? Not our ceaseless administration, not our ceaseless attempt to defend our jobs, which has, in essence, become the entirety of our jobs, but the patient labours of a monk tilling a field?
W. dreams of the scholar who has no thought of writing in his own name, who writes only to expand his soul, to spread it like a great sail that would catch the wind of other scholars, of the great tradition of scholars…. He dreams of a thinker – a man of ideas, who thinks without concern for himself, for what he might write, for what he might achieve in his own name….
W. dreams of a thinker who exhibits a great, impersonal seriousness; who thinks because there is something to be thought, and because he, for entirely contingent and, to him, uninteresting reasons, has been held out into thought…. A thinker, in the end, whose inwardness – the real content of his life – is also an outwardness, for his life, the contingencies that have shaped him – matter nothing compared to the idea that burns ahead of him, the idea that is least of all his own, least of all something he would possess.
Impersonal thought, the thought of the outside: it is this which comes towards him in the days that open each morning at his desk. It is the future that does not cease to arrive in those propitious days when he is turned in humility and patience toward the labour of thinking.
Lars Iyer's Blog 