Glamour

'The glamour of thinkers, of thinker's lives, that's what attracts you, isn't it?', W. says. The glamour and distance of the lives of Kierkegaard, of Weil, or Rosenzweig, of their lives as thinkers: I have a sense of that, a real sense, and it humbles me. How could it not?

But in the end, I admire them only as I admire the celebrities in the gossip magazines I buy. Their brilliance is only the equivalent of a celebrity's beauty; their integrity, the fervour of that of an ingenue's rise to fame. But this means I admire them only because of what I lack. My stupidity places them at an infinite and glamorous remove.

It's different with W., he says. He's that little bit smarter than me, that little bit farther ahead, and it's enough that his non-intelligence, unlike mine, is commensurable with real intelligence, his non-integrity with real integrity. At least he has the glimmerings of the faith of Kierkegaard, of Weil and of Rosenzweig, W. says. At least his non-belief is of the same order as their belief.