The Train South

The train south. We're heading into the belly of the beast, we agree. We heading into Dante’s Inferno. We'll need to take special measures to survive.

We check our survival kit. Do we have our bottle of gin? Check. Of Plymouth Gin? Of course! It’s safe in my rucksack. What else? What books have I brought?, W. asks me. The Sickness Unto Death. The Concept of Anxiety: ‘Ah’, says W., ‘nothing better’. And Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace. – ‘Hmm, there’s a wild card’, W. says. ‘What drew you to Weil? What was she doing on your bookshelf?’ Perhaps there's something serious about me after all, he says. He's brought some Rosenzweig – a collection of miscellaneous writings, he says. We'll need some Rosenzweig in the south. We’ll need protection.

Plymouth's in the south, of course, we acknowledge, but not in the south south. Plymouth's in the southwest, which is entirely different. In fact, W. thinks of Plymouth as being part of the north. In his mind, it's as far north in England as Newcastle, he says, albeit with a warmer climate.

W. has always appreciated the rawness of Newcastle. It’s barely touched by the Westerlies which ravage the southwest, but it’s cold, terribly cold in my city. Even the summers are cool, the blue of the sky as remote and hard as that of Scandinavia.

W. wonders whether he might become a keener, sharper thinker if he lived in the northeast, whether his ideas might become less diffuse and more jewel-like, coalescing like new stars, and whether I might become a warmer thinker, a tenderer one, full of love and generosity, if I lived in the southwest.

But now we’re heading into the southeast, which is entirely different prospect, W. says. The southeast: hasn’t it always meant, to us, the destruction of thought, its complete compromise? Hasn’t it always meant the destruction of philosophy?

In the end, philosophy can only survive at the periphery, we agree. It only thrives among the poor, the working class, when the working classes are given a chance to think. There were universities like that once in the southeast, W. says. That’s where the University of Essex, W.’s alma mater was, in the southeast. And there’s Middlesex, of course, and Greenwich: departments of the margins, we decide. Peripheral departments, where the working classes are given a chance to think.