Sometimes in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps, do I remember her? Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.
What has he learned about me through his studies?, W. wonders. What's become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. He first thought: here is a man I can think with. Here is a companion in thought.
Wasn't I the one he'd be waiting for? Wasn't I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I seemed clever, too, back then. I spoke well. My voice resounded. – 'Your voice', W. says, 'what happened to it?'
Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W., too, concluded the same. Our collaboration – when did it begin? Several years ago now. Several years …
W. sought a thought-partner, for a companion in thought, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay. He saw me falling off into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn't I? Or perhaps it was never there, W. wonders that, too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely an illusion, being what W. wanted to see.
A thought-companion, isn't that what W. wants? And instead what does he have? What has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.
Hadn't he become fascinated by my decline? Wasn't he watching, fascinated, for every twist in its story? He'd become an anthropologist, W. decided. No, a chimp-specialist. I'd brought him closer to chimp-observation than to thinking.
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