These last few years, thought, the capacity to think is retreating from W. He's losing them one by one, his faculties, the organs of thought …
Species trapped on islands see changes in scale. They can become large – grotesquely large, says W., with giant tortoises and the like and Komodo dragons. Or they can become small – minaturising over the generations, W. says, like that species of human who lived until recently on that remote island. What were they called?
Homo Floresiensis, I tell him, after the name of the island, Flores. They shared their island with pygmy elephants and giant rats, I tell him. They hunted the rats on the back of pygmy elephants, or the pygmy elephants on the back of the rats, one of the two, I tell him.
Homo Floresiensis! They had great flat feet like yours, W. says, reading Wikipedia, and an improbably small brain, no doubt like yours. And they murmured rather than spoke. They whistled and hooted, just as I am a whistler and hooter.
I've become a Homo Floresiensis of thought, W. says. It's terrible. Didn't I used to appear intelligent? Even W. is forgetting. That's how it seemed, he says, improbable as it sounds. And now?
It's your flat, W. says. The squalor of your flat. It's the squalor of your life, your isolation, which is the equivalent of the island of Flores. But haven't I become larger rather than smaller? I'm like one of those giant rats, W. says. He's going to climb on a pigmy elephant and hunt me.
W. too is becoming a Homo Floresiensis of thought, that's what he fears. Isn't he becoming shorter by the day? Aren't his feet getting bigger and flatter? Isn't his brainpan shrinking and his chin looking a little more sloped?
He's following my example, W. says. He's declining, W. says. He's beginning to forget the higher ideas. Good God, he can barely count! He can barely add two numbers together! Is this what happened on the island of Flores? Is this where our collaboration has led him?
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