Category: W.

How will be judged, if we are to be judged?: W. often wonders about that. And the answer: we've sought to assist thought and its thinkers. Sought to lighten the solitude of thinking. We've written consolatory emails (W. more often than I). We've praised and consoled (again, W. more than I). We've even discovered thinkers, picking them out from the crowd (well, W. has).

We've done our best, we'll tell the angel with the fiery sword. We didn't think of ourselves. But he'll strike our heads from our shoulders anyway. For who were we to presume to ally ourselves with God's chosen? Who were we to presume to alleviate the suffering to which God elected them?

We shouldn't try to keep thoughts, W. says. We shouldn't write them down. Shouldn't even try to remember them! The idea should permeate the thinker, W. says. Should radiate from him like an aura.

It should be inseparable from his life, from his slightest gesture. You should be able to hear it in every sentence he speaks. It should be discernible in his bearing, in the way he drinks his tea. You should be able to tell at once he's had an idea, that an idea possesses him, from the way he eats.

There's a kind of distraction to him, the thinker, W. says. A vagueness, as though he wasn't quite in tune with the world, wasn't quite in focus. The thinker's outline is blurred, his replies hesitant. Ask him questions and there'll be long silences, as long as anything. And he'll reply, most often: I don't know. Because he doesn't know. He knows he doesn't know.

His idea – the idea that lives through him, breathes through him – brings with it the non-idea, his thought, non-thought. He is happy with silence. He rests in it. Happy not to know and say he doesn't know. Because he does know something. He actually knows something: his idea. And that certainty, the sun that has risen through him, is such that everything else seems dim and far away.

Ah, the bliss of thinking! The passion of thought! No more opinionating. No more guesswork. He knows; a door has been opened to him. No more chatter. No more idle conversation. He doesn't need others. He's alone in a new way, elected by his idea, ennobled by it.

That's why thinkers like us, W. says. We're non-thought incarnate. 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 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 end, 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.

Leazes Park: yes, this is where I should come when the ping of incoming emails depresses me, W. says. I should come and watch the ducklings. I should rest my eyes on the waterfowl – the black headed geese, the kingly swans. I should even pay to hire a rowing boat to take a turn around the lake.

Although no man of nature, W. has a great deal of time for the city park, where anyone might walk. Where the alcoholic walks, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholic cannot walk – where his way is barred by security guards or policemen – W. will not walk either.

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 stretch out the mind – that they might discover us. How many times has W. walked, hoping an idea will come looking for him?

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. 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, the thinker-scruff, it is true. But he mistook the signs of vagabondage for a sign of thought. The scruff is not necessarily a thinker: it was a painful lesson.

The lake is fed by an underground spring, I tell W. A river used to run from here to the quayside. Lort Burn – Grey Street follows its long curve. But they culvetted it and made the lake which is higher than the surrounding park as we observe, walking around its edge.

Leazes Park, so near my office, should be my thinking space, W. says. My breathing space. When do I ever take the time to walk round the lake? Never, I tell him. Never: of course, W. says. I'm not an ambler, he says. I've forgotten how to stroll.

W. is a great advocate of strolling. The man of thought is a strolling man, he maintains. I should know that, he says. 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 into the countryside?

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. 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. We make no demands. It's not about us: we've always grasped that. It's about our thinker: that, too; we have a kind of instinct.

Occasionally, it is true, I've begun expounding my caffeine theories, but W., has 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 current of their reflections.

What privilege it is to hear a thinker think! What to hear the untrammelled ideas of the thinker spoken to us as to no one in particular! What to be the beach upon which the thinker-sea spreads its waves! What, prone, to be the shore over which the thinker-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.

Ah, but there are no thinkers with us today, as we stroll around the lake at Leazes part. None as W. stops to read the placards about the waterfowl, and we stop to inspect the ducklings. 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 the thinker can find repose. 

Coming up the path in the evening, we see the birds rise from the field and wheel through the sky as though they were one organism – as though the whole flock was the wing-edge of a single, greater, bird. It must be a sign, W. says. He's on the lookout for signs. But what is it telling us? Turn back!: perhaps that. Go on!: perhaps that, too. Are we at the end, or is this a beginning? 

W. has Sal, I have my potatoes. What's the difference?, W. says. Can I tell him the difference? He lives with a living, breathing woman who loves him, and I with a pile of Marks and Spencer potatoes – very good potatoes, he admits, he's tried them. I boiled up some for breakfast, which we ate with good olive oil, but they're potatoes nonetheless.

Potatoes! My potato friends!, W. says and laughs. Most people wouldn't eat their friends, but I would, and that's why they're my friends, aren't they? Maris piper: they're my favourite kind, W. says. They're the kind I sit and eat in the darkness, until I finish the whole bag, boiling its contents on the stove.

For his part, potatoes always send him to sleep, W. says. He can't stay awake after potatoes. But they seem to energise me, he says. They seem to drive me on. After potatoes, wine, and after wine – the internet. It's internet time, every night, when I write drunken rubbish on my blog, my belly full of of potatoes and wine.

I always take my trousers off when I visit – why is that? On one level, the answer is quite obvious: I am growing too fat for them, their waistband cutting uncomfortably into the vastness of my belly. But then I never take them off elsewhere, my trousers, W. has noticed. Only with him, with him and Sal. Only in his front room, whether the shutters are open or closed.

Once, when a friend of theirs called round unexpectedly, I leapt up, frantically looking for my trousers, before she entered the room. Too late! He always takes his trousers off when he visits, W. told her. I feel some sense of shame, at least, W. says. He didn't think I did, but there it was: shame over my trouserlessness. My public trouserlessness.

Ought he to take it as a complement, my taking off my trousers in his front room, every time I visit? Is it a tribute to intimacy, to my trust of him, of Sal? Is it a kind of gift?, he wonders. 

Nestled in these questions is a much broader one, of course, W. says: that of his significance for me as a whole. Who is he, for me? What does he permit? He likes to think of me as free and wild, W. says. As a roaming idiot on the wind. Sal thinks the same. That Lars …, she says, and lets her sentence trail off. Sometimes I allow him, too to become a roaming idiot. Sometimes we roam insouciantly together.

But then he leaves me, then we return to our homes on the opposite edges of the country, I to the northeast, he to the southwest. Then he leaves me, he imagines, to roam on my own on the gusts of idiocy. He has to retire from idiocy! It's too much for him! He holes up with Sal. They close the shutters and eat dinner. And where am I?

Circumambulating my town, looking for my 75p dinners. Circumambulating it, drinking pint after pint on the way. Circumambulating my town and then taking my trousers off my in my flat, then all my clothes. He can imagine me, naked and bloated in my flat. Naked, bloated, half-drunk, bleary eyed amidst the plaster dust and squalor, and then rising next morning to do it all again.

Is that how I live? I can't live that way, can I? No one could, not even me. I must hole up, too, closing my curtains. I must sit alone the dark to restore my energy, whispering to the potatoes that are the only foodstuff in my flat. I, too, must be exhausted from my idiocy, taking solace in my potatoes, W. says, my potato friends.

'You talk to them, don't you?' He sees me talking to them in his mind's eye, W. says. He sees me sharing my adventures. Yes, that's who I go home to, when I'm done with our adventures, and head to the airport. I'm thinking only of my potatoes, my potato friends, with whom I will recover in darkness.

He looks like Kim Il-Jong, I tell W. when I come down in the morning. It's his grey trousers and grey top: he looks like the Great Leader. W. pulls some tai-chi moves. Now he looks like Kim-Il Jong doing tai-chi.

I look like that guy in those John Walters movies, W. says, what was his name? The really fat transvestite guy who ate dog shit … Divine, that's it. – 'Do your Divine tai-chi', W. says. 'Bust out your Divine moves'.

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. It'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.

It's my fault, of course, W. says of our lack of self-control. For a time, it's liberating – it liberated W., freeing him from the high table. He felt a great rush of freedom; he sent laughter into the air.

But then what? His former colleagues on the high table turned their backs on him. He was free, but alone. Well, alone except for me, and I hardly count, after a while. I hardly count, I who wear out friendship and all the usual forms of sociability.

So W. set off on his lonely path. We set off, and left everything he knew behind him.

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. It's our operating principle. If we lived them over again, would our lives be any different? Not one bit! The same, they'd be exactly the same, and that's our strength, W. says. We are reliable in our idiocy.

Is that why thinkers – real thinkers – are attracted to us? They want to be amused, no doubt, and we are amusing, for a while at least. We have a kind of charm. We make them laugh, our thinkers, who are often lost in melancholy. We lighten their souls.

But we always go too far in our inanity. We alienate them, our thinker-friends, sending them into a new kind of melancholy. They walk away, shaking their heads. What happened when we rushed into the rooms of one of our thinkers, pulling up his bedclothes in order to sleep like a thinker? What when we pulled on his tee-shirts over ours in order to dress like a thinker? He was appalled, of course. He shook his head. We'd invaded his thought-cell, and for what? We'd breached the outer doors of his thought-sanctum, and then what did we do? We can't control ourselves, W. says. It's grotesque.

If anything, I am too punctual, W. says. I'm always there before everyone, anxiously pacing about. What do I think I'm going to miss?

I have a dim sense that something is going to happen – but what? What can I possibly understand of what is going to happen?

I strain my intelligence, W. says. He sees it on my face. But you can't replace intelligence with punctuality.

We rank our friends in order of their intelligence. Then we rank them in order of their melancholia, and wonder if there's a correlation. Then we rank them according to their punctuality, cross-referring our results to our previous findings.

Our brighter friends are always late, we decide, always disorganised. Our brighter friends are melancholy, which is probably why they can never keep their appointments. How many times have they left us standing, looking at our watches? W. always smiles on such occasions. There are more important things than meeting us, he says. Much more important things!

Why does he hang out with Lars?: the perennial question, W. says. Why Lars, of all people?: that question, which W. has had to field many times. It's worse when it's merely implied: when he sees it in a querulous but fleeting look, in a momentary hesitation, even in a kind of involuntary retching, quickly covered up by a cough. Worse when thinkers – real thinkers, not like us – are distracted by my presence.

Why him?, their facial expressions silently ask W. What's he doing here?, that's the question he sees in suddenly contracted eyes. You, we understand, but him …? That they, the thinkers, have to be bothered by such a concern even momentarily is torment to W. Why should they have to think about me? It's enough that he has to think about me, that he has to follow me and clear up my messes. But the thinkers, his thinkers, as W. likes to think of them – since he has done so much first of all to discover them, and then to draw them out of the crowd – they should never have to contemplate me, the fact of me, W. says. The fact of Lars. A dreadful fact. A kind of curse, in fact. A kind of catastrophe.

I confuse them, his thinkers. Of course, they know at once I'm not a fellow thinker, a fellow thought-adventurer, W. says. It's clear by my gait, my facial expression. Intelligence, when it is there, glints in the eyes, but in my case, nothing glints. Intelligence flashes in the teeth, but my teeth are dull. Oh it's perfectly clear. I can't hide anything, although of course I've never tried to hide anything. No, it's not my obvious lack of intelligence that confounds them. What then?

They know I'm not one of them – that's obvious – but, too, that I'm linked to W. in some way – to W., who, their attention grants, is at least a potential man of thought, whom they greet as such, to one who might understand the particularities of their, the thinker's achievements – confounds them. Yes, that W. keeps company with me: that's what bothers them. Not the fact of my stupidity, which is plain as the day, but that of our companionship, that W. and I hang out together, that where he is, I will also be; and that where he will be, I, too will be. That somehow I have found myself included in all plans concerning W.

What's it all about? For a moment – and for no more than that, since such thinkers have other things to reflect upon – they wonder whether I am not to W. as W. is to them – a kind of younger brother, a cousin and fellow, one who needs encouragement, bringing on, but also one who understands, since he is kin, something of their struggles - and that therefore I do indeed have some relation to them, albeit at a couple of removes.

That's why they smile at me, despite everything. It's why they make some semblance of including me in their conversations, turning to me as though I could understand what they were saying, as though I were capable of following their accounts of their struggles with thought (a meeting between thinkers is rarely about thoughts, W. says, so much as the struggle to think, since that's what unifies all thinkers, even rivals). Struggles that, indeed, are so exacting, that cost so much in terms of ordinary satisfactions, that it is solely to maintain this sense of shared suffering that drives thinkers from their labours. How they suffer! How much their thoughts have cost them!

And they perceive something of that cost in W., too. They're happy enough talking to him. Happy to bask in his admiration, his sympathy. Hasn't he pulled some of them back from the brink of suicide? Haven't more than one acknowledged the strength of his fellowship, his encouraging emails, the offer he's made of a room in his house for weeks – months – at a time?

Hasn't he taken thinkers into his home, treating them as the most honoured of guests, looking after their needs for weeks – months? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to speak before an audience they themselves were allowed to invite and that he, W., found funds to bring over? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the quadrangle bathed by the sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.

Haven't these thinkers thanked him for bringing them back into the world again, for acting as a kind of conduit or go-between between the world and themselves? Hasn't W.'s real help drawn their tribute? Hasn't he been thanked in a hundred acknowledgements?

Hasn't he always understood their terrible melancholias, their disorders of the spirit, madnesses that thought, the effort to think, only drives deeper, and done what he could to intervene lest that melancholy, that disorder, that madness wreck their ordinary satisfactions, which is to say, the – to them – unnoticed stratum beneath their lonely promotories?

Hasn't he extracted great confidences – life-stories – touched with isolation and withdrawal? Haven't his thinkers confessed their infidelities and alcohol addictions? Haven't they whispered in his ear about their fears of secret mental disorders, of inherited conditions, of early-onset dementia? Haven't they spoken of family horrors and early bereavements, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments? Haven't they spoken of finding God and losing God, of the search for God and the quest to free themselves of God? Haven't they spoken of the temptation of science and of the consolations of science, of the move into philosophy and the move away from philosophy?

He's mopped brows, W. says. Not literally, but metaphorically. He's wiped away tears. This time, quite literally. He's let his voice rise so the shouting of his thoughtful interlocutor does not seem such an aberration. Quite literally in this case, too. As the editor of a special edition of a journal, he has promised them he'll publish anything, anything they write, even if it is only a lengthy missive on the impossibility of their writing anything at all, on the impossibility of writing. He's bankrupted whole institutions of learning shipping his thinkers over from the other side of the world and bussing in acolytes – acolytes indebted to him, W., for discovering and then disseminating his thinker's thought – so as to show how greatly they were appreciated.

W. is a man of practice, he says. He seeks to effect changes in the world. For the good, the good, only for the good! For thought, W. says. And for his own thought, too. His own Denkweg, his thought-path. He likes to talk with those who make him think!, he says. It's the same with his reading. Why bother reading a line of Hermann Cohen if Hermann Cohen didn't make him think? If Hermann Cohen wasn't a spur in W.'s flanks? In the flanks of thought!

We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Prompted from without. Thought should reach us from outside, from an unfathomable source. Thoughts should shatter the frozen ice within us, as Kafka said. That's what he has seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its details in a way only the thinker would understand.

He's seen ice in the eyes of his thinkers. Starlight on ice. Starlight flashing on the empty expanses. He's seen inhuman distances in their eyes. Seen all the way to heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole, and the thinkers returning from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. Seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Antarctic of thought. Seen the deserted expanses of the steppes of thought, and the impassable flora of the jungles of thought. Seen the depths of ocean trenches and the high attenuation of the upper atmosphere where nothing can live.

Ah, They've suffered like gods, his thinkers. Like beasts made of stars and the aurora borealis. They been subject to distant agonies, to interstellar torture. And I, who have never suffered, but have only caused suffering, W.'s suffering and the suffering of others, what place do I have among them, which is to say, alongside him? That's the real question, W. says. That's the imponderable of imponderables.

Why bother? Why begin? Why again, and again and again? We're bored with ourselves, with our eternal slapstick.

I should shoot him, W. says, and he, me. We should aim our guns at one another and fire at the same moment. But our double suicide is part of our clown act, which reaches its pinnacle when we fire and our guns pop and we get up again, as stupid as ever, as desperate as ever.

Who are we amusing? Who laughs at our slapstick? Tragedy repeated becomes farce. And when farce is repeated – when farce wears itself thin?

Two clowns throwing custard pies at each other, long after the audience has left. Two clowns, make-up running with their tears.

In the morning, we work, W. before dawn – in the hours before dawn, when the world is quiet – and I after dawn, as the world wakes up. We work – W. reads, and sometimes he writes, and I look blankly out at the window, sometimes jotting down a few notes or so – in a kind of innocence, a forgetting.

For hadn't our work, the day before, left us as failures? Hadn't we failed our task yet again, and anew? Isn't that all the succession of days means to us: failure again and anew; fresh failure, different varieities of failure, but each time failure nonetheless?

But there is our innocence, our holy forgetting. There is the new morning, and the confidence of the new morning. So we can forget, and thereby get to work. In innocence, we begin to work – or what we call work. We work, Sisyphuses who have forgotten they are Sisyphuses, and our day is always the same day, the same mockery of the day, and the same despoiling of our innocence and forgettting.

Abandonment – is that the word? But abandoned to what? Our lives, the wretchedness of our lives. Our failure. Again and again, our failure.

Why don't we learn? Why do we never learn from our mistakes? But if we did learn? If we took, as our lesson, the failure of our efforts on a previous day and on a succession of days? If we saw our lives as what, in fact, they are: a series of grotesque mistakes, a series of impostures and usurpations? W. shudders.

Why has it been left to him, rather than me, to face our disaster? I am a little more idiotic than him, and therefore a little more forgetful. I can wake with a little more confidence in my labours; I can throw myself more obliviously into my studies (my so-called studies). And in that way, I throw myself ahead of him, too – ahead, and calling him after me by my power of forgetting, which is to say my idiocy.

Why don't I learn?, W. asks himself. But he thanks God that I do not, and that I encourage him by my example. Everyone needs an idiot friend, he says. He thanks God for his idiot friend.

Our grief … We are grieving men, we decide. Men full of grief, saturated with it, men who have had too many disappointments, too many failures. Men of grief, but men of hope, too, men who, for a time each day – just before dawn for W. when he goes into his study to work, just after dawn for me, when I gaze vacantly out at the yard – are given the gift of forgetting their grief. Who, forgetting it, are ready, without knowing it, to disappoint themselves again, to fail anew.

Our idiocy is our salvation, W. says. The way we are unable to learn from our mistakes. For our lives, in their entirety, have been a mistake! We were mistaken from the first, and all along!

Sometimes it strikes him with great force, W. says, the extent of our mistakenness. How could we have got it so wrong? How could we be so deluded? But in truth, we delude ourselves. We forget – we want to forget – the lessons of yesterday in order to begin again today – before dawn, for W., after dawn, for me.

We wish a holy idiocy upon ourselves. We want to be born again as we sit at our desk (W.), or gaze vacantly out of the window (me). Born again in idiocy and forgetting! Plunged into the Lethe freshly each morning! Ah, what would be left to us otherwise but our suicide? What, without our idiocy, except that sickness unto death incapable even of suicide?

Sometimes W. thinks his melancholy is deeper than his philosophy; that he has attempted to think, that he has been drawn to thinkers, only to escape the despair that, in the end, always lies in wait for him.

It always seeps back, he says, in the still hours of night. It's always there when he turns off his television and trudges up to bed. It's there in the blackness above him as he sleeps, in the blank slate of the sky. And it's there at the heart of his sleep, too, forming itself into nameless monsters, into stirrings that lead him to break out in night sweats.

Hope returns, of course. Hope always returns before dawn, and the pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window. Hope returns as he pulls on his dressing gown and goes next door to his study to open his books and take notes. But such hope, W. sometimes suspects, is but a modality of despair, made of it.

Why is he reading Kierkegaard alongside Cohen and Rosenzweig? Why is he teaching himself the infinitesimal calculus? Why is he attempting to think messianism mathematically? Where will it lead him? To his desk in the other room. To his lonely station against the void which itself is only part of the void, just as his hope is only part of his despair.

Melancholy, melancholy. 'What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim', Pascal says, 'but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?'

True happiness: what can this possibly mean for W.? What sense of it can he have? I've been in his life too long, he says. I've been there too long, blocking the sun of what might have been his happiness with the moon of my stupidity.

Ah, the lunar eclipse of his life! Ah the obliteration of his hopes and dreams! He knows his happiness, what he might have been, only from the faint glow of its corona.

'The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves'. Pascal wrote that, W. says. To hate ourselves: what a task! He'll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he'll move on to hating what I've made him become. What I've been responsible for. Then – the last step – he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.

This stage, for him, is the most difficult. He can hardly remember what he was like without me. He has no idea what he might have been, what he might have achieved? I arrived too early in his life. The blow was fatal.

It's a relief, of course, W. says. He can blame me for everything. It's all my fault, his failure, his inability to think! In fact, that's probably why he hangs out with me, W. says: to have a living excuse for his failure.

But what about me? Do I hate myself? W.'s sure I must hate myself in some way. – 'Look at you! Look at your shoes!'

W. sees no difference between Christianity and socialism, he says. No difference between Christianity and communism. Religion is only ever about this world – W.'s always been insistent on that.

The trouble lies in finding this world, because it's been hidden from us. We've lost it, and lost ourselves: isn't that what Kierkegaard teaches us? We have to understand the real object of our despair, Kierkegaard says. We have to understand what we lack. This world, W. says, this world is paradise.

We need to get out, W. says. We need to leave, just leave. Have I ever felt that?, he asks me. No, of course not. I lack the vision. I lack a sense of the horizon, and what is beyond the horizon. I lack thirst. I lack hunger – spiritual hunger.

My frustration is never expansive, as W.'s is. It never takes, as its object, the whole of my existence; never gives unto that sense of abandonment that makes of the world, and the things of the world a series of illusions. 

Oh, he knows I have a Hindu sense that time is a circle, and the world will be destroyed and remade anew, but I don't have the Christian sense of wanting to escape, of making the exodus to a promised land. Exodus … why does W. find this word so moving? Exile … Expulsion … He knows about these things. He knows what it is to be outside, to be excluded.

Didn't he lose his job last year? Wasn't he cast out, into the outer darkness? And now he has been reinstated – now his redundancy has been rescinded – hasn't he come to understand that the experience of being inside and at work does not surmount, but carries with it the whirlwind from which he has escaped? That at any moment it might happen again, his expulsion, his exile that, in each case, are only the mirror of a larger expulsion and a greater exile: of that Fall which is at the root of the Christian conception of things.

For the Christian (for Kierkegaard), we are fallen. We are sinners. But our despair must also be the ground of hope. It is a sign of what we have lost, and what we might find again. This is why exile, for him, is also an Exodus; why the promise of paradise has awoken in him.

I'm wearing Frankenstein shoes, W. says. The shoes only Frankenstein's monster would wear to hide his great, ugly feet. And my feet are great and ugly, W. says. And flat – as flat as the Fens. As flat as the salt lakes of Utah. – 'You've no arch!', says W.

His feet, by contrast, are superbly arched. He can walk quietly, disturbing no one, whereas I crash everywhere, disturbing everyone with my great, ungainly flippers.

That I don't try to hide them, my feet, by suitable shoes is a sign of my decadence, W. says. That I compound the error of my feet with the error of my crocs: my Frankenstein shoes, only shows how far I have fallen.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.

That's Pascal, W. says. Are we nobler than our slayers? Are we more dignified than the forces arrayed against us? And there are many forces, W. says. There are many slayers. The end is coming. These are the last days, the end times. We're vulnerable, he says, desperately vulnerable. But isn't it now, at the moment of our extinction, that we might rise to our highest glory?

'My God, look at you', W. says. 'Your trousers are covered with stains. Your shirt … It's unspeakable. And your shoes: do you really call them shoes?' They're crocs, I tell him. – 'Yes I know they're crocs'. They're good for the allotment, I tell him. – 'But this isn't the allotment!'

This isn't the allotment … why does W. see this, and not me? Why don't I understand my own abasement, and the forces that are arrayed against me?

'His melancholy, rather than his talent, made him exceptional', says one commentator on Kierkegaard, 'and his talent purified his melancholy'. And our melancholy?, we wonder, as we wander round the lake in Leazes park. Ah, but we're not really melancholy, W. says. Sometimes we're a little sad, W. says. A little down, but these reflect only the disappointments of mediocre men.

Sometimes, it is true, he does feel he is in the grip of something – that he has some sense of the world-sadness Kierkegaard describes. Of a sadness that belongs to existence, to human life in its fleetingness, in its ignominy. But this is only after spending a few days drinking with me – only after late nights and early mornings, after eating rubbish and spending too much - and he soon cheers up.

He is a man of hope, W. says, just as I, too, am a man of hope. It's in hope that we set forth in the morning on one of our expeditions, just as it is in hope we stay up until dawn, discussing our findings. But isn't our hope only a sign of our shallowness? That we can rise again, each morning, full of hope, despite all that happened the day before, despite ourselves, despite the mediocrity of our achievements; that we can take stock, each night, of the adventures of our day having forgotten that every one of our adventures is like any other, i.e. a failed adventure, is a sign only of our imposture, and of how far we are from Kierkegaard's melancholy.

''From a child I was under the sway of a prodigious melancholy …' Ah, what can we understand of the melancholy of Kierkegaard – of melancholy and its attendant suffering of which he says 'I was never free even for a day'? What of the 'premature aging' of the Danish philosopher that, he said, was caused by his melancholy? What of his isolation to which, he says, melancholy condemned him – 'for me there was no comfort or help to be looked for in others'?

Then, too, there was his necessary capacity to hide his melancholy; the depth of his melancholy found its correlate in what he says is the dexterity he possessed of hiding it 'under an apparent gaiety and joie de vivre'. His only joy lay in the fact that no one knew how unhappy he felt.

He would communicate nothing! He would fool them all, and not only because he wanted to spare them his wretchedness. He wanted to be 'absolutely alone with his pain', he wrote; he wanted, he said, to be 'relegated to myself and to a relationship with God'. This was why he could revel in the 'unlimited freedom of being able to deceive'.

And what about us, W. and I? Neither of us is alone with his pain, W. says. I am the cause of his pain, for one thing. And if I suffer – if I whimper, sometimes, about my manifold troubles – it only adds to his suffering, aping it, mocking it, as if W.'s Weltschmerz were on the same level as my administrative worries, which are really only the same as worries about keeping my job.

Pain, what do I know of pain? Of the pain I cause W., for example. Of the pain I cause others and for which W. has constantly to apologise. He dreams of being alone with his pain, W. says. Alone with it, relegated to himself and – perhaps – to a relationship with God. A relationship with God, and by dint of his Weltschmerz, the depth of his Weltschmertz. But then, too, he is frightened of being alone, W. says. Frightened of losing me, because he might be relegated only to his own idiocy, his Weltschmerz disappearing like morning dew.

'The self must be broken in order to become itself', says Kierkegaard. The self must be broken: what do you think that means? Have we been broken? Are we broken enough?

We need to be brought to our knees in order to understand Kierkegaard, W. says. We need to intensify our despair, to despair over it. Yes, that's what we need: to double up despair, to set despair against despair.

Ah, but this, too, is a danger. For we are liable, in such extremity, to set ourselves defiantly against the task of becoming ourselves. We tend to that defiance in which we glory in the particularity of our despair, using it as a badge of our excellence. I am my wound, we say to ourselves. I am my suffering. 

Of course, W. has always believed that I am his wound, and that I am his suffering, but it comes to the same thing: he hasn't despaired enough. If he is to grasp the true measure of his despair, understanding it as sin, and then moving to the opposite of sin, that is, faith, then I am the idol he has to smash. He must move beyond localising all his troubles, the cause of his despair, in my presence in his life.

But how can he do that? There must be some part of him that loves his despair just as he loves me, for he does love me, W. says.

One mustn't read 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.