Oxford, again. Why do we come here? Why, year after year? W. feels as though he's suffocating, he says. As though his hands were clawing the air. Still, at least we didn't bring Sal, though she wanted to come. She'd run amok, we agree. It's like matter and anti-matter, we agree. Bringing Sal to Oxford might destroy the universe.
Still, here we are, suffocating again, buried alive again. Being buried alive is bad enough, W. says, but being buried alive with an idiot! At least I should amuse him. At least I should do something funny. But Oxford even gets to me. It's like going round with a sulky ape.
It's happening just as you predicted, W. says. The collapse of universities. The collapse of civilisation. Don't you realise how good we're having it?, I always said to him. These are the best of times. He thought it was bad then, W. says. It's going to worse, much worse, I told him, and I was right.
It's not even that we're in the End Times, I've always insisted. We're beyond them. We've gone past the End Times. Oxford after the end looks quite like Oxford before the end, we decide. The same colleges, the same river. And the same walk for us, through Christchurch Meadows.
After tragedy, farce, we agree, remembering Marx. And after farce? This. Us. Christchurch Meadows.
'You need a woman in your life', says W., as he always does when very bored. 'Why haven't you got a woman in your life?' Sal's more intelligent than him, W. says. More intelligent than us. – 'And better than us. More consistent. She thinks something and does it. We think things, and what do we do?' She's our Rosa Luxembourg, we agree. And who are we?
Sometimes W. dreams of a great political act, of a great deed as pure and simple as a swordstroke. Of an act of great goodness, great justice. But all he can think of is suicide. – 'Let's jump into the river'.
The son of Man will bury man, while he himself will remain unburied: where's that from?, W. wonders, looking through my notebook. – 'Ah, who will bury us?'
On Magdalen Bridge, a junkie in a sky-blue jumper asks for money for 'chippies'. To the left, the meadow to which we can never work out how to get. If only we could find our way to that meadow, which runs along the river! If only we could feel the grass under our shoes! What thoughts we would have! What ideas!
Sometimes W. thinks we might walk our way to ideas. That to walk – if we walk far enough, hard enough – might also be to think. Or at the very least to think about thinking. To have ideas about ideas, ideas we might one day have.
What's my significance?, W. wonders. Do I illustrate some broader trend? Am I a man of our times, or against our times? Sometimes, W. thinks I'm ahead of my times, a kind of augur. – 'Go on, predict something'. But the future is unclear.
We're in the desert, W. says, and the meadow by the river is our Canaan. In the desert, the face of the wilderness … that's where the Biblical prophets went to be alone with themselves. To be alone with God! What else did John the Baptist seek? What else Elias and Eliseus?
The fidelity of the desert, W. reads in my notebook. Cassian: prayer of fire. – 'What have you been reading?', W. asks. I will give you rest (hesychia): God to Moses. Jesus to his disciplines. I seem to be drawn to Christian pathos, W. says. He feels it himself, he says.
If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions, and give to the poor … and come, follow me. Is that what we should do?, W. wonders. Should we head further into our desert? But there's no pillar of cloud to lead us, no pillar of fire, and we have to get a bus back to town from the Oxford suburbs.
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