Distance

Rosenzweig, Weil, Kierkegaard … what can they possibly mean to me?, W wonders. An answer comes to him as he watches me reading Hello!

'That look on your face … That raptness …': he recognises it, W. says. He's seen it before, when, in the early hours, we pore in wonder over the pages of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard. – 'How is it possible that a human being could have such thoughts?' one of us will exclaim. How is it possible …?: but that's my only response to these thinkers, just as it is to the red carpet celebrity.

In the end, it's a sense of distance I admire, in the case of intellectual brilliance and my stupidity on the one hand, and airbrushed beauty and my unairbrushed grotesquerie on the other.

I eschew OK, National Enquirer and other celebrity magazines just as I eschew lesser thinkers. But I revere Queen Rania of Jordan in her photospread in Hello! just as I do W.'s collection of German edition Hermann Cohens.