Vagrancy

Leazes Park, Newcastle: this is where I should come when the ping of incoming emails depresses me, W. says. I should let my gaze rest on the waterfowl: the black headed geese, the kingly swans. I should hire a rowing boat to take a turn around the lake. Above all, I should walk …

A man must walk if he is to think, W. says. We have to be receptive to thoughts, open to them. An idea might reach us at any time, and it's only when we relax — when we let the mind stretch out — that they might discover us. How many times has W. walked out alone, hoping that an idea would come looking for him?

W. goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe when he wants to think. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar — a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or, for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip is Kafka!, W. says. The flower is the thought! But what would I understand of that?

We must not so much look for ideas, W. says, as let ideas find us. It is not a question of mental effort, but of mental slackening, he says. Ideas need time to emerge — unmeasured time. Ideas despise clocks. They even despise notebooks.

Lately, W. has been deliberately neglecting his notebooks. He's put them aside, he says, the better for ideas to reach him. He's been neglecting himself! Is it any accident that Solomon Maimon was taken for a vagrant?

But W.'s vagrancy is confined to the early morning, before he comes downstairs to make tea. It's confined to his dressing-gown hours, his hours before dawn, when he reads and writes in his room. Oh, he shouldn't read or write, he knows that. The thinker-vagrant lets go of all books, all writing. But W.'s is only a contained vagrancy, he says. He has his limits.

Ah, the figure of the thinker-vagrant, the thinker wanderer: was that why he was drawn to me? I resembled the thinker-vagabond, I was scruffy enough, unkempt enough … But he mistook the signs of vagabondage for a sign of thought. The vagrant is not necessarily a thinker: it was a painful lesson.