W. stops to read the plaque about waterfowl. There’s usually a melancholy to the urban park, he says, but this one is different. It’s more vibrant, somehow. We look around us. The empty bandstand, the high grey wall of St James’s Park, goths and emo kids drinking cider in the sun … It harbours some great clue about life, W.’s strangely certain about that, or maybe it’s the effect of the coffee I made for him this morning.
We should bring our thinkers here, W. says. This is the perfect place to help them walk away from their troubles. It’s perfect to help them walk their way to thought.
Haven't we taken many walks alongside one of our thinkers? Haven't we been able to loosen our thinker from the crowd and take him outside?
Thinkers have thanked us for nothing less: for giving them freedom from the crowd. Crowds are unbearable to the real thinker, W. says. The thinker always wants to escape. And so we've taken many such journeys — journeys out, away from the others, in company with our thinker. Away from the tumult.
We try to calm our thinkers on such walks, that's our main task, W. notes. We try to put them at ease, drawing attention to the pleasant vistas around us, to the blueness of the sky, to the peace of the forest. We make no demands. It's not about us: we've always grasped that. It's about our thinker: that, too is obvious; we have a kind of instinct.
Occasionally, it is true, I've begun to expound my caffeine theories, and W. has to put a stop to that. He prods me when our thinker isn't looking. He raises his finger to his lips. And occasionally, W. ventures to introduce some intellectual topic or another before pulling himself back, apologising.
Let the thinker introduce the topic!, we've always told ourselves. And sometimes they do. Sometimes they begin to speak, and we respond only to enable them to speak some more, only to let ourselves drift into the central current of their reflections.
What a privilege it is to hear a thinker think! What to hear the untrammelled ideas of the thinker extemporised to us as to no one in particular! What to be the beach upon which the thinker-sea spreads his waves! What, prone, to be the shore over which the thought-ocean breaks!
Of course, we can understand little of what we hear. But we expect nothing more. In the end, it's not meant for us! We're overhearers, not interlocutors. We're listeners-in, not conversation-partners. To our credit, we've always understood that, which is why we're popular with thinkers.
We don't have ideas, and we don't pretend to! In the end, we demand nothing, we ask for nothing. The lightness of our chatter (for we speak when our thinker is silent) is like the murmur of grasshoppers on a summer evening. The to and fro of our banter is like the trickling of a young stream: a backdrop, a kind of night against which the star of the idea can burn ever brighter.
In the final judgement, if we are not thinkers — if we'll never have an idea of our own — we do not hinder thought, either. We're not its enemies. They were not enemies of thought: isn’t that what they might write on our tombstones?
Ah, but there are no thinkers with us today, as we stroll around the lake at Leazes park. We've been thrown back on ourselves, once again! Thrown back: not upon thought and the development of thoughts, but upon the peace of non-thought in which a real thinker might find repose.
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