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New interview at The Cherwell.

‘Staines — what a name for a town!’, W. says. And, a little later, ‘Egham — it's unbearable!’ ‘These names, these names!’ True life is elsewhere, isn't it?, W. says. True life is elsewhere. But we are in the suburbs, and on the slowest train in the world.

This is suicide country, W. says. He’d top himself if he lived here. He’d either top himself, or think some great thought, W. says. To think against the suburbs. To think in the suburbs, hating the suburbs. What pressure of thinking you could build up! What a head of steam! – ‘But it didn’t work for you, did it?’

Oh, but he sees why. It gave me the fear – the fear of falling back here. The fear of crash-landing here where I grew up. That’s why I’ve flung myself into administration. That’s why I’ve tried to lodge myself in the administrative work of the university like a tick in an armpit. – ‘They’ll find you in the end’, W. says. ‘They’ll smoke you out. There you’ll be, coughing in the sun …’

We speculate about the lost geniuses of the suburbs. Bracknell's secret Rilke (Coetzee lived in Bracknell, W. says) … Martin's Heron's hidden Leibniz (W.: ‘Martin's Heron: what kind of a name is that?’). And Sunningdale's own Solomon Maimon, drunk in Tesco's carpark …

You'd have to go on the sick, if you lived in the suburbs, W. and I agree. You'd have to stay unemployed, wandering the streets with the early-retired and mothers pushing buggies. And you'd go mad from isolation. You'd go off your head. And then you'd top yourself.

It's different in the north, of course. It was different in my Manchester, back then before the regeneration, I tell W. It was different before Marketing Manchester and Heritage Manchester and Superclub Manchester. It was a shithole, I tell him. It was a shithole, W. agrees. But we should only live in shitholes. Where else could we live? (W.’s house, for all its grandeur, is in the worst part of Plymouth).

Maimon would have felt right at home there, in old Manchester, we agree. I felt right at home there, as muggers held knives to my throat and junkies trailed after me asking me for money. I felt right at home in my bedsit next to the curry house extractor fans.

There's a crack in the wall, I told the landlord, when he showed me the room. — 'A crack in the wall, yes', he said and smiled. I could hardly breathe for cold and curry, but I took the room nonetheless, because it cost nothing and I had nothing. — 'You were born for squalor', W. says, and that’s my gift. I live the life of the abased, of the abject, he says. I can’t help it. I’ve found my level, which is very low, and I’m bringing him down to my level, W. says.

The suburbs, the suburbs … There are still bits of countryside, we notice from the train. Forlorn horses in tiny fields. Rabbits hopping across a golf-course. Rats crawling along a wall by the sewage treatment works.

W. pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery fire, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you were? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I used to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. — 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

A pristine snow bank like a blank page. And whirling snowflakes above. And silence, deep silence. I underlined a passage in my book. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness. And I gazed across the snow into the white emptiness …

K. on the bridge, that’s where it all began for me, I’ve told W. that. K. on the bridge, gazing upwards into the swirling emptiness, just as I was on a metaphorical bridge staring upwards into a metaphorical emptiness.

'So you went north', W. says. I went north. — 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (back then, he could only read Kafka in translation). But they'd lied in the prospectus, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things — great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great railways of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like a Russian space station.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. — 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. — 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

I point out my old school from train window, in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything. We didn't know anything. Our teachers didn't know anything, I tell W. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell him.

‘When did the other children turn on you?’, W. wonders. ‘When did they find you out? When did you go home in tears?’ Because that’s how he sees me, W. says, going home in tears, snot running from my nostrils, an idiot child alone with his idiocy.

I point out the warehouse where I worked as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs, I tell W. We stood about doing nothing. Sometimes management would come downstairs and tell us to get on with our jobs. From time to time, there'd be a cull; they'd sack a few of us. But we'd reappear in the warehouse sooner or later, employed by another agency, and go back to standing about and doing nothing.

‘When did your fellow workers turn on you?, W. wonders. When did they find you out? When did you go home in despair?’ Because that’s how he sees it, W. says, my heading back to the station, quietly sobbing to myself, an idiot alone again.

And I tell him about my escape to university, my escape to Manchester, although I knew nothing whatsoever about Manchester, indeed nothing whatsoever about the north. — 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will we bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. — 'Never mind the high table!', W. says. Our speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else, for one thing. — 'You had a real appetite!', W. says to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. – ‘And scrofula’, W. says. 

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Cor blimey, guv’nor.

Our speaker says he feels unwell. He feels unwell! What have we done to him?, we wonder. How can we make reparation?

It's our duty to talk, we know that. We need to settle his nerves, our kidnapped plenary speaker. We need to settle his stomach! So we tell him of our Kierkegaard project, of our collaborative endeavour, for which we are constructing an elaborate dossier. We tell him about the intimate link we expect to discover between Kierkegaard and contemporary capitalism, about the Danish philosopher's despair and our despair.

Despair is everywhere, W. says. – ‘Even monkey boy feels it’, W. says, nodding at me. ‘He’s full of despair, monkey boy, though he doesn’t really understand why’. Still, perhaps our researches will help me grasp my despair for what it is, W. says to our speaker. Perhaps I’ll learn its real cause – which is to say, not simply its proximate cause.

Oh, I feel a great deal, he’ll give me that, W. says to our plenary speaker. – ‘Look at him, monkey boy, full of pathos!’ My eyes are always ready to brim with tears, W. says. But when it comes to thought … When it comes to thinking from my despair, out of it …

Silence. We’ll need to say something else! Religion! What does our speaker think about religion?, W. wants to know. Does he, like W., have a sense of the urgency of the question of religion? Our speaker says he has no particular thoughts about religion. What about despair, then? What does he think about despair?

Silence again. Do we drink?, our speaker asks us. He drinks, our speaker says. He drinks every night. Do we drink?: we muse, separately considering the speaker’s question. Of course we drink! Whatever can he mean, Do we drink? What kind of question is that? What are we being asked?

We probably have no idea of what drinking means, we think to ourselves. Do we drink?, we wonder. Have we ever drunk? Ah, but what do we know of drinking, and what could we know?, W. and I think to ourselves. And about despair, about religion: what could we know about those topics, either?

Our speaker falls back into silence. All three of us are silent, as the fog grows thicker. – ‘Marx and Kierkegaard’, W. says finally, to fill the silence. ‘We intend to think the conjunction of Marx and Kierkegaard’, W. says. ‘They were both born in the same year, you know’, W. says to our speaker.

He’s feeling really ill now, our speaker, that much is clear, we think to ourselves. What will we do? The fog's thickening. We need to stay close! To keep a head count! And it's darkening, too. Are we really going to meet our God? Do you think we'll receive the Tablets of Law? — 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.

In the pub, we wait for our plates of sausage and mash with our kidnapped plenary speaker. — 'You know they hate you', W. says to kidnapped speaker. 'They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too'. — 'Who hates me?, the speaker says. — 'Everyone. Everyone here', W. says. — 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. — 'They do! They hate us, and they really hate you'.

‘They hate thought!, W. insists. ‘Don’t you see? They hate thought, and want to drive all thought away!’ – ‘Why did they invite me, then?’, our kidnapped plenary speaker wonders. It's a mystery, we agree. Perhaps there's still some instinct among the Reading philosophers concerning what they lack, W. speculates. Perhaps they feel some residual shame about their inability to think.

We feel shame, W. tells our speaker, setting down his cutlery. Well, he does (W.) at any rate. He’s been trying to teach me the meaning of shame, W. says. How can you teach a grown man shame?, W. says. If only he’d known me as a child, he says to our speaker; what I might have been! Give me a child till the age of seven, and he’s mine for life, say the Jesuits. Give me a full grown adult idiot, and he’ll never be yours, W. says. – ‘In fact, you’ll be his. You’ll be his for the rest of your life!’

Our sausages and mash arrive on big oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree, but what can you expect for £3.95? Eat, man, eat!, we urge our speaker. He needs to keep up his strength! After all, very soon he'll have to go back to the conference! We'll protect him, we tell our kidnapped speaker. We'll flank him like the president's secret service bodyguards. We'll keep our sunglasses on and speak into earpieces. — 'The package is in the building', we'll say. 'The package is about to give his speech'.

This has to be our last lecture tour, W. says. This has to be the last time, the last dog and pony show. We came here against our better judgement, it's true. We were invited, personally invited, and how could we refuse? Our trouble is, we're too polite, W. says. We want to please people, despite everything.

How will we survive? We need a rallying point, for one thing. — 'Look for a pub!' We need a place of safety, W. says. We need a panic room. A war room! And we need a general strategy. — 'Keep your head down! Talk to no one!'

Then we spot him in the foyer: the plenary speaker who W. recognises as an ally. How did they get him here?, I wonder. — 'Just as they got us. Through flattery', W. says. Suddenly we feel a great surge of tenderness. We have to protect him, we decide. He doesn't belong here. For one thing, he actually has ideas. He needs to be rescued!

We resolve to smuggle him off campus to a pub. We need to save him, the plenary speaker. To save thought!

And in the meantime? Be careful. There are enemies everywhere.

Reading University campus. W. is full of dread. He has the feeling that it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no — more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell him. How could it be otherwise? On the bus out to the campus, he was already squirming. Driveways packed with Range Rovers and 4X4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows, in great estates at the edge of everywhere … All the styles of history and mocking history, laughing at it. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Did it ever have a history, Reading? Did anything ever happen here?, W. wonders. But he knows it did. He's read about the Abbey, and he knows Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here. He might as well be imprisoned here, W. said on the bus. He might as well write his own Ballad of Reading Jail.

Of course, it’s very hard to explain Reading, the horror of Reading, W. says. What happened here? What failed to happen? He could think against Birmingham, W. says – it was easy enough: the city looks disgusting. It’s easy to think against the Bull Ring, all the more so since it’s been rebranded as BullRing. But here, where I was brought up? You can’t hold Reading apart from you in the same way as Birmingham, W. says. It isn’t as obviously repugnant. There’s nothing in particular on which to focus your disgust.

Nothing in particular … but there’s something wrong, W. says, you can sense that. Something colossal, but at the same time, hidden. – ‘The horror of Reading is yet to come’, W. says, mystically. What rough beast is slouching towards Reading to be born?

Even I have a sense of it, W. knows that. Even I am saturated with disgust when I come back here to my hometown. Even I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. Wasn’t that what drove me towards philosophy, the attempt to diagnose the horror of Reading? Isn’t that why, despite everything, I have a taste for philosophy – for European philosophy – and for the more philosophical of the European novelists, W. says.

Reading and the southeast made me think the whole, he has no doubt of that, W. says. Reading led me to philosophy and abandoned me at its doors as a foundling. And who was it who opened the door to admit me? Who who swaddled me and took me in?

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.

Of course, one mustn't start reading too soon, W. is adamant about that. One mustn't simply devour an oeuvre, tempting as it may seem, the many-coloured spines of Kierkegaard's works in the Hong and Hong edition, lined up on my windowsill, as inviting as boiled sweets.

One cannot just begin at page one, and then read one's way to the end. There must be a kind of pause before reading, a dwelling in the clearing opened by the fact of Kierkegaard, by the fact of his writing, by the fact that he lived.

That Kierkegaard wrote: we should pause before that fact, mulling it over. That Kierkegaard was at all: we should mull that over, too. And that we exist, too: ah, that's what's unbearable, W. says. The fact that, despite our best intentions, we'll never be able to understand a word of Kierkegaard.

W.'s always admired them — their sober spines, the varying colours against which the title appears, varying from volume to volume (Point of View in charcoal, The Book on Adler, bronze, Fear and Trembling in a handsome burgundy). And then there's the sheer bulk of them, spanning my office windowsill; it's quite moving. The collected works of Kierkegaard, with my improvised bookmarks sticking out! – ‘You mean you’ve actually read something!’, W.’s amazed.

And I have read them. The books look worn, tired. – ‘Is that blood?’, W. wonders of the blotches in the margins of Practice in Christianity. ‘Are those tears?’ There are even annotations, W. notices. What did you write?, W. says, turning the book sideways. He can hardly make out a line. Iration – what does that mean? Livity?

What is the attraction of Kierkegaard for lunatics?, W. says. He’s seen it before, with some of his more desperate students. In the half-wild ones, who’ve come off the streets after years on the streets. In the half-mad ones, who want only to lose themselves in some great task of scholarship, but who are made for everything but a great task of scholarship …

Still, I'm to be his guide into the mountains of Kierkegaard, W. says. His sherpa. I'm to carry his things. What should he bring? His learning. His years of study of the philosophy of religion.

He'll instruct me as we climb, he says. He'll point things out, and when he gets tired, I can give him a piggy-back. Kierkegaard: in truth, I know more about him than W. There's my Danish connection, of course. My half-Danishness should be a help.

Of course, I'm only half Danish. Half Danish and half Indian, a peculiar combination, W. says. He, of course, is Irish on one side of his family and from Ostjude stock — probably Ostjude stock — on the other. He's a mixture, too. He'll be able to bring his Jewish-Catholic approach to bear on our reading of Kierkegaard, he says, and I my Hindu-Protestant approach.

Kierkegaard's Danishness has always bothered W. He lacks a context for him. He can't grasp his place. Of course, this is doubly difficult for W. as a Catholic (and as a Jew). No doubt there is something Protestant in me (through my Danishness), alongside my Hinduism. No doubt I have some instinct for Kierkegaard that W. lacks.

But then, of course, my knowledge of Kierkegaard is confined to trivialities. Gossip about his life, for example. About his broken engagement, or his melancholic father. Gossip about his thought. The leap of faith this. Fear and trembling that.

I don't understand his place in the philosophical tradition or, for that matter, the theological tradition. I don't know his place in the great chain of thinkers.

That's what W. will bring to our collaboration: his sense of the broader landscape. His grasp of the whole sweep of European thought.

'Did you bring some Schnapps?', W. says. I brought some Schnapps. — 'Is it chilled?' It's straight from the freezer, I tell him, as Danes serve it.

Aalborg Akavit, for our picnic. Did Kierkegaard drink Aalborg Akavit?, W. wonders. Undoubtedly! Kierkegaard would certainly have drunk it in his early years, his pagan years, W. says. He probably drank himself blind on Aalborg Akavit before his return to his faith, just as we must drink ourselves blind on Aalborg Akavit, we who are lacking in faith, in Kierkegaard's faith.

And did I bring the herrings? Yes, I brought the herrings, a disc shaped packet of crispbread and some cod roe sandwich paste from the grocery in Ikea. And we have some ryebread, too. – ‘Good’, W. says, ‘we're well prepared’. To think like a Dane, you need to eat and drink like a Dane, we agree. And here we are in the north of England, pretty much at the same latitude as Copenhagen, ready to eat and drink like Danes. We're well prepared.

We're method thinkers, we’ve decided. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!

It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only to the mind! To the cultural world of the thinker, in this case, the cultural world of Denmark of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the work, its engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.

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.

Solomon Maimon was unkempt. Maimon was dirty. That's what I always protest to W. when he reprimands me for my personal habits. But Maimon was a genius!, W cries. A genius driven out of his home city for daring to philosophise. A beggar-genius, living on alms as he wandered for years, before being offered a position as a live-in tutor.

Was it in those years that Maimon formulated the most decisive criticisms of Kantian thought ever made? Was it then, his begging bowl before him, Kant's three Critiques in his knapsack, that the ideas came to him which, in his final years, he would publish in a series of essays?

Only Maimon understands me, Kant said, after reading his unkempt admirer’s Transcendental Philosophy in manuscript. And when Kant died, it was suspected that among the causes of his death was Maimon's devastating criticism of his work. How could he, Kant, survive an attach by the ragged philosopher?

But Maimon never succeeded in penetrating academic circles, or even the salons of enlightened Berlin Jews. To them he was of the Ostjude, his manners too rough, his jerks and tics too disconcerting, his speech stammering and garbled. And he was a difficult man, lacking in manners, brusque and intolerant when he should have been diplomatic.

And he smelt awful, everyone said that. Maimon stinks! Get him out of here!: that's what you'd hear in Berlin salons. And out he went, back onto the frozen streets, back outside with the three Critiques in his knapsack. He was an alcoholic, of course. He drank like a madman, W. says. He drank himself to death even when he found employment, even as great essay after essay poured forth from his pen.

Is that what's going to happen to me? Am I going to produce a great stream of books in my final years, which can't be far off?, W. says. He's offered me support, and now he's waiting. He brought me in from the cold, and now he's sitting by expectantly. But he thinks he's going to be disappointed.

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.

New short interview with me from The Philosopher.

New long interview with me at Biblioklept.

What do I think is going to happen to me at the end?, W. asks me. I’ll die with froth on my lips, he’s sure of it. I’ll die like some rabid animal with wild eyes and dirt under my nails. I’ll have tried to dig my way out. I’ll have gone mad from confinement, and they’ll shoot me out of disgust like a dog.

And what about him (W.)? He’ll have starved to death, W. says, having given up all hope, all desire. There he'll sit, a skeleton by the window, who'd hoped that things could be otherwise, but learnt that things could never be otherwise.

Ah, but what does it matter, any of this?, W. says. There’s no time left. It's coming, the end, as great and fearsome as a hurricane. Climatic collapse, financial collapse: it's coming, the great wind that will blow out our candles …

Death is striding towards us. Death is laughing in the morning air. It's so obvious, so clear. Why can't everyone see it: death, laughing, striding towards us?

How they're going to hate us, all of us, the future generations!, W. says. He can feel their hatred even now. They're not yet born, they've yet to appear on their scorched and burning earth, but they already hate us. They already hate us, especially him (W.) …

Some of them, of course, will never appear. Some of them have been denied even their chance to be born. They hate us even more for that, he says. They hate him even more.

And he feels the hatred of the generations of the past, W. says. He feels their hatred, those who felt something good might come from their struggles on the slaughter-bench of history. He feels their disappointment, those who expected something better to come.

Ah, none of this troubles me, he knows that, W. says. Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. — 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'. I’m not loyal to thought, W. says. What do I know of it, the demand of thought?

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. There’s something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, W. says. The thought of our own stupidity, for example; the thought of what we might have been if we weren't stupid. The thought of what he might have been, W., if he hadn't been dragged down by the concrete block of my stupidity … The thought of what I might have been, if my stupidity had simply been allowed to run its course … W. shudders.

Oh, he has some sense of what we lack, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. He has some sense that there's another kind of thinking, another order of idea into which one might break as a flying fish breaks the surface of the water. He knows it's there, the sun-touched surface, far above him. He knows there are thinkers whose wings flash with light in the open air, who leap from wave-crest to wave-crest, and that he will never fly with them.

He's not brilliant enough, that's his tragedy. There is a dimension of thought, another dimension of life he will never attain. The murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface … Ah, he half-understands, half-knows; but he doesn't understand, he doesn't know.

But isn't that his mercy, too; isn't that what saves him? For if he had understood, really understood, how immeasurably he had failed, wouldn't he have had to kill himself in shame? If he knew, really knew, the extent of his shortcomings, wouldn't his blood have had to mingle with the water?

But then if he really understood, then he wouldn't be stupid, W. says. To know, really to know, would mean he had already broken the surface.

Sometimes W. wants to send up a great cry of dereliction. Not his dereliction, he says, but dereliction in general. Abandonment.

Who has abandoned us? Who has left us behind? Who left us to ourselves, and left him to me? Who thrust me into his arms like a foundling?

Two yammering British intellectuals travel to the American south to form a new religion—with Canadians

The sequel to the 2010 hit Spurious—which was acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Washington Post, which called it “fearsomely funny”—Dogma finds Lars and W. still, continually and without cease, arguing, although this time in a different country.

This time out, the duo embarks on a trip to the American Deep South, where, in company with a band of Canadians who may or may not be related to W., they attempt to form a new religion based on their philosophical studies. Their mission is soon derailed by their inability to take meaningful action, their endless bickering, the peculiar behavior of the natives, and by a true catastrophe: they can’t seem to find a liquor store that carries their brand of gin.

Part Nietzsche, part Monty Python, part Huckleberry Finn, Dogma is a novel as ridiculous and profound as religion itself.

– Publisher's blurb for Dogma, the sequel to Spurious, out early next year.

I understand nothing of the rhythms of scholarship, W. says. I know nothing of its seasons: of the time of sowing, of tending and caring, and of the harvest, the gathering in of the crops of thought.

Isn't that of which what he dreams, at the beginning of the summer: of the coming autumn, which will see his thought-crops ripe and ready, bowing in the breeze? Isn't it of carrying back the harvest of his ideas, so carefully tended, in his sun-browned arms?

There must be a process of thought-threshing, too, W. says. Of thought-winnowing! The wheat must be separated from the chaff. And there will be chaff, he said. Even the greatest of thinkers cannot avoid chaff. But there is still wheat. Still the evidence of a year's long labour …

But what would he know of this? His crops have failed, W. says, as they have always failed, and he stands in the empty field, weeping.

I understand little of the patience of scholarship, W. says. Scholarly work is slow and meticulous, W. says.  You need to accept that you’re in it for the long haul, and the results of thought will not come quickly, if at all. What has W. ever done but wait for thought?

Above all, we mustn’t expect quick results, W. continues. How many years did Marx labour on Capital in the British Library? How long did Engels give financial support to his friend by working at his detested family cotton mill in Manchester? But now imagine a Marx who did not finish Capital – an Engels who never left his job in the family firm. Imagine those poor idiots whose thought-paths led nowhere, petering out in the scrub.

W. doesn't believe I actually read books. — 'They're like totems to you', he says. 'They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

My office is actually filled with books, that's the paradox, W. says. I get a childlike excitement from them, from the fact of them, with their heady titles and colourful spines.

Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He would prefer to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

We must read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they – the authors of the books on our bookshelves – have not.

Alcoholics in the long grass, stretching their limbs and laughing, half-drunk bottles of cider by their ankles. Anyone can walk on the Town Moor, he likes that, W. says. Where the alcoholic can walk, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholics cannot walk — where his way is barred by security guards or policemen — W. will not walk either.

Shouldn't we lie down in the long grass and drink ourselves to death?, we wonder. Shouldn't we just give up — give up everything — and let death come and find us on the Town Moor? But we consider ourselves to have work to do — that's our idiocy, and our salvation. We actually take ourselves to be busy — that's our imposture and our chance of survival.

The Town Moor: escape. We wander through the knee-high grass. What are those birds?, we wonder. What are those flowers? But we have no idea.

The Moor is like the world on the fifth day of creation, we agree — before Adam, before anyone, when everything went unnamed and unredeemed. It needs words, we agree. It needs a poet! Where is the Rilke of Newcastle to sing of the Moor?

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. — 'That's a weather front', W. says. Which way is it travelling? Where is it heading? And where are we heading, we who walk beneath it, the shore of clouds?

Is the future open to us, or closed? W. can never decide. Are we making progress, or falling behind? W. can never decide about that, either.

‘God, what a racket! How do you do any work?’, W. says.

The sound of drilling, high pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through something. The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A heavy chugging in the distance. The distant throbbing of engines …

They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.

He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in his study in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him, and Sal asleep in the other room.

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice. And now warnings overlapping with warnings, as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear … Stand well clear … Stand well clear … And now a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. — 'Surely a helicopter isn't landing?', W. says. 'A helicopter couldn't be landing …'

We walk out through the campus through the narrow pedestrian routes left to us alongside the building works. W. feels so channelled, he says. We're being route-marched, he says, staff and student alike, heads down and in lockstep. Where are they leading us?, he says. Where are we going?

A thick smell — is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. — 'They're going to crush us', W. says. 'They're going to drive right through us …'

They’re going to drive right through philosophy, W. says. What use is our subject to them? What use philosophy to the new breed of the university, which is busy hatching from the old one?

'How long do you think we'll last?', W. says. 'How long before we're closed down?' Because there's no room for us in this world. No room for Kierkegaard and for scholars of Kierkegaard …

'Are they shredding trees?', W. says. Yes, they really are: we can see them cutting off their boughs with chainsaw, and feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up over the fence. And the smell: sap. Life, destroyed. The stuff of life, being destroyed.

It'll be our turn next, W. thinks. They'll cut off our arms and legs and feed us into the machines …

Oh God, the building, the eternal rebuilding. The noise! We want to put our hands over our ears. We want to stop up our ears …

Stand well clear … Stand well clear …