Away-From-Here

Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? How can he explain it to me?

There's story by Kafka – a parable really. The Master demands that his servant saddle up his horse. 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. – 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Why did he come crawling back? What secret fatality led him home? Why was he chained to Britain as a dog to its vomit? Was it some inadequacy? Some sense that he didn’t belong among the cafes and cobbled streets? Was it British inadequacy? British stupidity? A British inability to take himself seriously as a thinker?

Perhaps he lacked some dimension of belief: W. sometimes thinks that. He lacked a real sense of himself as a thinker: that’s what he had to conclude, W. says. He wasn’t ready for Old Europe. Britain sits too deeply inside him. He bones were British bones. His heart beat British blood. The voices in his head were British voices.

What could he do but come home? What, to the country that is completely opposed to thought, and in which thought can only be rebellion and despair, and wild, vague pathos? Perhaps we need something to think against, W. says. Perhaps thought needs an enemy. Or perhaps it is just his weakness, he who has never done anything but react against the horror of Britain. Against the horror of capitalism! Perhaps there are more affirmative ways to think, to live …

Away-From-Here … But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters … 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and some of the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. They compromised, he says, they who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another place; that life moved in Old Europe like fire in fire, like weather on the sun …

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.