Exhaustion

W. has always thought that there are certain thoughts which come to you only in exhaustion, only once you’ve reached the end of your strength.

Hadn’t he reached this point with his friends among the Essex postgraduates time and again? Hadn’t he and his housemates … discovered the secrets of the universe after drunken nights at the bar?

The trouble is what exhaustion reveals it also keeps to itself, W. says. What could he and his friends remember the next day of what they had discussed? What of the truth that seemed to dawn between them?

It’s different with me, of course, with whom exhaustion leads nowhere. What thoughts have ever come to him after our nights of drinking? What does he remember the next day except for formless horror and for the kind of states only H.P. Lovecraft would know how to name?