I came from outside, and I brought the outside with me, W. says. I came from the everyday and had to stamp the everyday from my boots. – 'How long had you been unemployed?' Years, I tell him. Years! W. can't imagine it. – 'And for how long before that did you work in your warehouse?' Years again. – 'Years!', W. exclaims, impressed. Of course, there was also my time with the monks. That's my wild card, W. says, my monk years. Who would have known from looking at me?
But there you were, and who had seen anything like it? – 'You were like a one man horde, a Tartar'. There was spittle on my lips and drool in my beard. Had I ever heard of a footnote? Did I know what an appendix was, or what op. cit. might mean? Scholarly standards were an irrelevance to me; scholarly apparatus an imposition I could completely ignore, it was quite impressive.
'Your book!' W.'s still amazed. A book without scholarship, without ideas. Without the usual concern to explain or to clarify. A book almost entirely lacking in merit. And yet! He saw something there, although no one else did. He saw it, and not in spite of its many typos and printing errors … It was there because of them. It was inextricable from them. A kind of massive, looming incompetence. A cloud of stupidity that covered the sun. But more than that: didn't it belong like a shadow of the sun, and of its burning? Didn't it belong to the clarity of the day as its cloud and blind opacity?
It was demonic, W. says. It was as forceful as a demi-urge. That's when he became aware of it as a vast Gnosticism, as a division of light within light, of life within life. Who could have written anything so bad? Who, who ruined the temple of scholarship and revealed it to have been always ruined? He saw it, W. says, even if no one else did. And it was his role to look after me.
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