'What a racket! How do you do any work?', W. says. They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.
The sound of drilling, high pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through something. The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A massive chugging in the distance. The throbbing of engines.
He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him.
Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice, very calm and reasonable. And now warnings overlapping with warnings, as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear … Stand well clear … Stand well clear … And now a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. – 'Surely a helicopter isn't landing?', W. says. 'A helicopter couldn't be landing …'
We walk out through the campus through the narrow pedestrian routes left to us alongside the building works. W. feels so channelled, he says. We're being channelled, he says, staff and student alike, heads down and in lockstep. Where are they leading us?, he says. Where are we going?
A thick smell – is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. – 'They're going to crush us', W. says. 'They're going to drive right through us …'
'How long do you think we'll last?', W. says. 'How long before we're closed down?' Because there's no room for us in this world. No room for Kierkegaard …
'Are they shredding trees?', W. says. Yes, they really are: we can see them cutting off their boughs with chainsaw, and feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up over the fence. And the smell: sap. Life, destroyed. The stuff of life, being destroyed.
'It'll be our turn next', W. says. 'They'll cut off our limbs and feed us into the machines …'
Oh God, the building, the eternal rebuilding. The noise! We want to put our hands over our ears. We want to stop up our ears …
Stand well clear … Stand well clear …
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