London, the heart of London. Wasn't this where we refused to come to launch our books? We had to refuse!, we agree. What other choice was there? To be admired by the academy is to become corrupted by the academy, we're agreed on that. We have to remain outside the academy, indifferent to it. We have to pursue our work in obscurity and silence.
Of course, this is not a time which admires modesty, we agree. We'll have no followers; we'll found no school: W.'s reconciled to that. No one will seek us out to discuss our ideas. So be it! Ah, we have our friends, of course, W. says. W.'s friends (they're his friends really). He sought them out! He approached them!
Ah, our thinker-friends, W. weeps to think of them. Hasn't he taken them into his home, treating them as the mnost honoured of guests, for weeks at a time? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to present their ideas? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the college quadrangle bathed by sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.
Haven't these thinkers thanked him for restoring them to the world, for bringing them back among others. Haven't they told him of their terrible melancholias, of disorders of the spirit that their effort to think has only driven deeper? Haven't they told him about finding God and losing God, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments?
Ah, they've suffered like gods, his thinkers. They've been subject to impersonal agonies, to interstellar torture …
We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Reached from without. He's seen it in the eyes of his thinkers: distance, starlight. He's seen starlight flashing in the empty expanse. He's seen all the way to the heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole in the thinkers who have returned from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. He's seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Anarctic of thought.
Thoughts should shatter the frozen sea within us, Kafka said, says W. And that's what he's seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its every detail in a way only a thinker could understand.
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