Stand Well Clear

‘God, what a racket! How do you do any work?’, W. says.

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 heavy chugging in the distance. The distant throbbing of engines …

They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.

He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in his study in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him, and Sal asleep in the other room.

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice. 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 route-marched, 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 …'

They’re going to drive right through philosophy, W. says. What use is our subject to them? What use philosophy to the new breed of the university, which is busy hatching from the old one?

'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 and for scholars of 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. thinks. They'll cut off our arms and legs 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 …