Category: W.

'How's your damp?', W. asks. 'Tell me about your flat again. It's shit, isn't it? You've got the worst flat of anyone I've ever met. My God, I don't know how you live there. What's causing it? Do you have any idea?'

It's a mystery, I tell W. I called six damp proofing companies in turn, I tell him, one after another. The water's getting in behind the rendering, says one. You'll have to strip it off, repoint the brick, and render it again. It's the holes in your wall, said another, referring to the long scar left where the lead pipe had to be pulled away.

It's your hopper, said yet another, showing me a thick patch of green on the top of the pipe through which it drained. Ah yes, I said, I tell W., impressed at his observational powers. Do nothing, said another; let the wall breathe. To breathe!, I said, I tell W., but I need to breathe! I need to take a single non-damp breath! I've got spores in my lungs! I'm coated in mildew!

A fifth pressed his nose to the brown plaster in the pathroom. He put his hand on its wet surface. He sniffed. It's condensation that's causing it, he said. Condensation, I said, behind all this? The flat all around us, brown-walled with damp. People underestimate condensation, said the damp whisperer. In a flat like this, with the double-glazing, there's nowhere for water to escape.

He told me about the dew point, I tell W. He told me how the wall comes forward to offer itself to the touch of condensation. I imagined a runner breasting the finish line, I tell W. I imagined a dolphin leaping from the sea.

But the sixth interpreter said he thought it was penetrating damp, the sort that permeates through pasty brick and the gaps between bricks. Penetrating, coming through, a slow ceaseless tsunami, a brown, persistent wave …

Damp calls for a Talmudic inquiry; I go from one wise man to another, from one to another, I tell W., but none is really certain of the Law.

Death is close, says W. Death has set out to find us, all of us. And this will be a death of a kind we cannot anticipate. A meteor-strike, the flaming sky, the stars falling from the heavens … We have no idea of what is to come, he says.

What idea could we have? How could we anticipate our annihilation? Death will be everywhere, W. says. The earth a flaming ball. Why does no one understand? He understands, though, insofar as he can understand. He gets it, and that makes him feel very alone.

It's the opposite of cosmogony, W. says. It's the return of the pell-mell, of chaos, of the tohu vavohu, he says, quoting Genesis. Of course, I should know a great deal about that, with my flat, W. says. I should know everything about it, with the damp spreading across my wall.

It's like fate, I've told him, the damp. The water streams down the wall. It weeps. And then my flat's tilting sideways. It's pitching into the earth. If you look at the skirting, I've told him, you'll see how far they are above the floorboards, which are sinking, along with the joists beneath them. Sinking and leaving a great gap between themselves and the skirting, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

I think it's smiling at me, the flat, I tell W. I think it's beginning to laugh at me.

Of course, if we started to laugh, really started, we wouldn't be able to stop, how could we? If we really laughed, if we laughed from the bottom of our lungs, from our bellies …, what then?

Laughter would laugh at itself, W. says. It would laugh at laughter and at us, we laughers, who have the audacity to laugh. Hasn't he always dreamt of a laughter that would sweep us away? Of a laughter that would return us to the original state of the world, the empty fields, the empty sky … and to the interruption of that state – the first loping hominids, the first to move to stand upright, the first to split the air in two with their joy?

That's what we stood on two legs to do, says W. Laugh! To laugh at our imposture! To laugh at our standing up and the rest of nature lost in itself! If we started to laugh, how could we stop? At the imposture of our lives. At our mockery of uprightness … At ourselves laughing and the audacity of our laughter.

For our time is running out, says W. Soon it will be the empty fields, the empty sky once again. Soon the earth will turn into fire; soon a new, fiery dawn will burn away everything. That's what laughter knows, says W. That's what it knows as it laughs at itself.

A year after I submitted the final copy of my manuscript, W. is still polishing his. – 'It's like Gnosticism', he says, 'if your book is full of typos, which it will be, mine has to be pristine'. Pathos is not enough, he says. He wants precision, too; jewelled writing.

It's time to make distinctions, he says, serious ones, W. says with great severity. Lines have to be drawn, demarcations made! This is no time for sloppiness of thought. W. is becoming a jeweller of philosophy, he says, whereas I will only ever be one of those elephants who splashes with a paintbrush.

Ah, the revolution, the break in time! 'You remember what Benjamin wrote about the July revolution, don't you?', says W. During the evening of the first day of the struggle, simultaneously but as a result of separate initiatives, in several places people fired on the clocks in the towers of Paris. And in the coming revolution, where will they aim their rifles? Where will they aim them, in separate initiatives and from several places? – 'At you', says W. 'They'll fire them at you'.

Come the revolution, the turning of time, and friendship itself will be changed, that's W.'s great hope. What will it mean, friendship? What will it become?

Sometimes W. supposes that the revolution will be only the unfurling of friendship, and of a new freedom of speech that would accompany friendship. It would be possible to say anything at all, W. says. Anything!

And everyone would have something to say. Everyone would have something to write on the walls. In the end, says W. saying something was more important than what was said. It's the act of speech that will be most important. No one will speak on behalf of anyone else. The one will only speak to the other, W. says, addressing her, acknowledging him. The one to the other, in the anonymous, innumerable crowd.

And in the meantime? Friendship is but a sign of what will happen. Our happiness is not yet happiness. Our joy is not joy. But there are signs, signs …

Where does he find them, on this sunny day in Cawsands? In the honey beer, W. says. In that dog who wants me to play with him, dropping a stone at my feet. In the narrowness of the three-storeyed house opposite. In the name of the pub in whose garden we drink: The Rising Sun.

And in me, too? No, says W. Not in you.

The end has come, we know that. The end has come, the credits have rolled, and now it's the advert break, and that's our reality, or what passes for reality. So now what? What are we going to do about it?

Looking out to sea, W. speaks of his overwhelming sense of shame. We do nothing, he says. We're parasites. And little later, in the beer garden, How did it get to this? At what point did we lose our souls?

Sometimes W. supposes we should live two lives, one turned to the world and to the horror of the world, and the other turned towards our friends. Two lives! One public, a life of immeasurable despair, and the other private, joyful, and withdrawn from the world.

But W. can only see this as a terrible betrayal. When the revolution comes, he says, there'll be no more friends. Or, rather, the meaning of friendship will change, how he's not entirely sure. Either way, he won't be sitting with me in a beer garden, W. says. We won't be sharing the water-taxi home.

How much time do we have left? You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about the credit crunch and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.

Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders sometimes. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. How else could he account for it? Somehow, at the end of the end, the door was open enough to let us in. Somehow, at the last minute, and in the last second of the last minute, it was time to admit us, but only as a kind of parody. Only as a kind of clown act, the auto-satire of philosophy.

Our eternal puppet show, says W. Our endless ventriloquy. Who's speaking through us? Who's using our voices? Sometimes he swears he hears a voice within our own, W. says. He can hear it, he says, on the threshold of audibility, a little like the grinding of the celestial spheres Pythagoras claimed to hear. Only this time it's idiocy that grinds itself out. This time it's an amazing force of idiocy, a solar wind sweeping through space.

Perhaps we've already had our idea, our great chance. Perhaps it's already occurred to us, and we've forgotten it: what a terrible thought! Worse still, perhaps it was something we exchanged in conversation, that passed between us and was immediately lost amidst the general inanity. 

That must be my task, W. tells me: remember everything! Write it down!, and perhaps then it will shine forth behind the pages like a watermark.

In the end, we fail at the level of the banal, W. says, that's the truth of it. It's not about our ideas, or whether we can think, but about forgetting what building we're staying in, or locking ourselves out of our rooms. We're incompetent in this general sense before being incompetent about anything to do with our thought, we should admit that. How can we sit down at a table and begin to think when we cannot find our rooms, let alone our buildings? How can we begin to read and write if we've lost our keys?

W. is cheerful and full of bonhomie. Why shouldn't he be? The apocalypse is imminent, things are coming to an end, but in the meantime …? It's always the meantime, for W. There's always time enough.

He has a critical distance from events, W. says, which I entirely lack. Life is a perpetual emergency for me. It's always at the very end of the end. It's always the final extremity, which is why I am so frantic, W. says. It's why I'm so paranoid. 

No one's out to get me, W.'s often told me that. And I should calm down, relax. Do some work! Find a quiet corner like him and get on with something. But I can never relax. I'm up at dawn, and sometimes before dawn, pacing the halls. It's why I look so tired. It's why my eyes are bloodshot.

I'm fundamentally self-dramatising, W.'s always known that. Do I really think the secret police and going to turn up and take me away? I'm not Shostakovich, though I like to think I'm Shostakovich, and this is not Soviet Russia. I'm the sort of of person who would thrive under a dictatorship, W. says. My paranoia would make sense; it would have a correlate. But as it is …

Why do I fear unemployment so much? Why do I fear empty time? It's becauseI have no projects. It's because I never get on with anything except the administrative tasks in the office. On the one hand, I'm frantic, I always look harried, but on the other …

'No one's after you', says W. 'You're on no one's list'. And then, 'You matter to no one. Your life means nothing'. Because isn't that the other side of paranoia; paranoia's fantasy: that your life would mean something, that it would matter enough to draw attention?

'You matter to no one', says W. Only to him. And even then, not greatly. In the end, it's some contingency that will wipe me out. The iceberg will loom because of some minor clerical error. My name will appear on some form, and will be crossed out, and that's it, I'll be gone, scratching my head and wondering what happened.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck in little metal pillars with the names of famous residents written on them.

What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality? Surely someone should keep a record, if only as a cautionary tale. Blind Alleys, that's what it should be called, W. says. Or, A Wild Goose Chase, though that makes it sound too exciting. Stupidity – now that would be a title! Nice and simple! Or, How Not To Think. Very instructive!

Above all, we need to warn off others, to tell them not to make our mistakes. Shouldn't our lives be fenced off in some way, as with a cliff that is crumbling away into the sea? A Path Not To Follow: that could be the title. The Way of Idiocy: that could be another.

How many times have I betrayed him?, W. wonders. I'm on every page of his Book of Betrayals. He's always taken detailed notes. And there are pictures, too. W. wants to remember everything. Everything! One day, he's going to read his notes to me and show me all his pictures, he says. One day, standing at the head of the bed like Saint Peter, he's going to read me the great list of my betrayals and show me the pictures.

It's going to end in a stabbing, W. says. Someone's going to stab me. I bring them on myself, W. says, the nutters and the weirdoes. I'm like a nutter-and-weirdo Messiah, W. says, which means I'm undoubtedly doing to get stabbed. He's always wondered what they see in me, these mad men and women. What draws them to me? Why is it me they pick out from the crowd? But they do pick me out. They follow me, buttonhole me, write incessant emails to me; he knows; I've shown them to him; they're terrifying.

More terrifying still is his role in all this. Is he a nutter? A weirdo? The worst of the nutters, the worst of the weirdoes, I tell him, which terrifies him all the more. Sometimes he thinks the whole world, the whole crazy world is nothing but a fever-dream of mine. The whole world – and him included, him, W., included, his thoughts being nothing other than my thoughts, his life a dream-muddled version of my own. Does he even exist, independently of me? Can he even lay claim to his own existence?

W. can never really understand the everyday, he knows that. There's a limit to his capacities; even a kind of blindspot. What could he, who has always had his intellectual projects, his reading and writing projects, understand of the stagnation of the everyday? What could he know of its infinite wearing away, its infinite banalities?

A man who hasn't been brought to his knees by the everyday can have no understanding of the everyday, says W. aphoristically. But I have been brought to my knees thus, W. says, that much is clear. I spent whole years on my knees, haven't I told him exactly that?

W. wants to hear about my illnesses, he says. He wants to hear about my unemployment, he never tires of it. 'What did you do all day?', he asks me, and when I shrug, he says, 'take me through it. Take me through one of your days'. There's no point, I tell him. He'll never understand. - 'Did you drink a lot?', W. asks. 'is that how you got through it?' Sometimes I drank, I tell him. Sometimes I did nothing at all. I looked out of the window, I tell him. I watched the raindrops bead and run down the window.

But W. can never understand. Imagine if he lost his job, I tell him. Imagine, his job lost, if Sal left him (Sal would never leave him, W. says), and he was stranded in a room, a single room, for year after year. He'd become a kind of cosmonaut, all lines cut, tumbling into space. Tumbling, getting further and further away, utterly lost …

But he'd have his reading, W. says, and his writing. He'd have his intellectual projects. Couldn't he get down, really get down, to learning maths? Couldn't he finally master classical Greek, getting past the aorist which always floors him?

Ah, but he'd soon tire of such tasks, I tell him. They would leave him behind; his project would belong to someone else, living another life. The infinite wearing away: that's what W. would have to fear, I tell him, and for a moment, he says, he feels it, it's terrible. No more reading and writing, he says. Books stranded on a desk, open and with no one to read them (the air reads. The white light reads.) And he'd be watching raindrops bead and run down the windows …

I approach the everyday like a kind of mystic, W. has come to learn that. No one understands it better than me. No one is as fitted as I am to understand it; it's my special gift. The ordinary, the banal, become the extraordinary and the infinitely interesting for me, W. knows that. I'm like a cosmonaut of the everyday, or a deep sea diver. A stroll up the street becomes a kind of spacewalk for me; to put one foot in front of another is already enough. Everything is there, everything reveals itself.

Of course, I'm a creature of the suburbs, and can only be understood there. I'm never more at home than in the suburbs, whatever I say about the suburbs, W. says. It's their anonymity, W. says. It's their near-infinite expanse. Hasn't he visited the suburbs with me? Hadn't he thought himself lost there, until I guided him out? – 'You have a kind of instinct', W. says. 'You could never get lost'.

I'm at my most moving when I tell W. stories of my childhood in the suburbs, he says. I grew up in the suburbs, and when I was older, worked there. – 'Tell me about your warehouse years', says W. repeatedly. It's very important to him, my years in the warehouse. 'You had no hope, did you? You had nothing to live for'.

That's where my intellectual awakening occurred, W. knows, there in the warehouse. – 'Tell me about it again!' I can never tell him enough, although he knows all the details. Kafka's The Castle. A stairway that led nowhere. There on infinitely long lunchbreaks, the rain pounding on the metal roof, I put down The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, and picked up The Castle, W. remembers. That's when it began, didn't it?

'What was your job title?', W. always asks me. 'What were your duties?' I sought out UTLs, I tell W. Unable-to-locates. I searched high and low in the warehouse. I inspected log books and van manifests. I scrolled through great lists on the computer. I quizzed my fellow workers, and all in the name of unable-to-locates. Of course, when I found them, I only hid them more deeply, I tell W. It wasn't worth the paperwork, a found UTL. The insurance would pay for everything, after all, I tell W. My boss said as much. Everybody said so. What mattered was that I looked busy, that was the consensus. What mattered is that everyone thought I was on the track of UTLs.

'And what about Kafka?', W. always asks. 'What about The Castle?' I can't remember when it happened exactly, I tell him. I can't remember how I came into possession of the book. Did I get it from the library? Did someone lend it to me? But there it was, nonetheless. It found me, I always tell W., and he finds this very satisfying. It found me, it appeared for me, there in the warehouse, I tell W., where I might have spent the rest of my life reading The Mammoth Book of Fantasy and books like The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, I tell W.

But nevertheless, I put down The Mammoth Book of Fantasy and picked up The Castle, that's when it began, I tell W. That's when the everyday started to reveal itself to me as such, I tell W. This is the part of the story W. always finds most mysterious. He's asked about it repeatedly. He's demanded explanations, but I am unable to explain it. What has The Castle got to do with the everyday?, says W. insistently. What did it reveal to me concerning the everyday?

I can't put it into words, I tell W. It's mystical, I tell W. Somehow, The Castle doubled up the everyday, I tell him. It allowed the everyday to double itself up; to become experiencable as such, I tell him. Everything depends upon this 'as such'. I became a kind of cosmonaut, as W. says. I became a deep sea diver of the suburbs, air lines cut, W. says, slowly drowning, but slowly learning to breathe at the bottom of the sea.

He finds the suburbs unbearable, W. says. They won't allow him to breathe. But I, for my part, am never happier than when I'm there. I'm mystically happy, he says, beatific. It's always a great expedition for me, W. says, the trip to the suburbs. – 'You warehouse years', W. says, 'that's the secret'. And then, 'The Castle', he says, 'that's the secret'.

There's no point bringing any books in his man bag on one of our trips, W. says, because soon he'll be too drunk to read. And there's no point carrying his notebook either, because soon he'll be too drunk to think. Why does my presence make him drink so much?, W. asks. What is it about me? He wants only to drink until he passes out, W. says. He wants oblivion, he says, and this must have something to do with me.

What has he learned?, W. muses. What are his four noble truths? He knows only that I am wrong, and that I have always been in the wrong. He's certain of that.

Could he, given such the indubitability of such a starting point, begin to reconstruct his sense of things, like Descartes? Could he, having reached such a realitatpunkt, begin building everything up again?

No. From the realitatpunkt of my stupidity, there's nothing to build, and nothing that can be built. The realitatpunkt must destroy everything.

W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes. – 'Your rolls of fat', says W.

It was like Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen me naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.

The signs are coming more quickly now, we agree. The current's quickening, as it does when a river approaches the waterfall. And who are we who can read such tell tale signs? To whom has the secret begun to reveal itself?

The apocalypse will reveal God's plan for us all, that's what it says in the Bible. And if there is no God? No plan, either. We're lost, quite lost, as the signs quicken. My life, for example. W.'s. Our friendship; our collaboration. Signs, all signs, which in turn enable us to read signs, as though our lives, our friendship was only a fold in the apocalypse, a way for it to sense its own magnitude.

How long has he been reading Rosenzweig?, W wonders. It's like rain hitting a tin roof. Nothing goes in. It makes no impression. But at least he does read; at least there is the steady rhythm of his non-understanding that beats against his intelligence. He knows his limits, W. says, because they are constantly tested. He has a sense of what he does not know.

But I have no such sense; I err with no knowledge that I err. My ignorance is happy, almost innocent. Many times, W. has tried to teach me shame, but I'm a poor pupil. -'It's the purity of your idiocy', W. always says. 'It protects you'.

Our friends, what has happened to our friends? W. dreamt we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all; that we would be, standing together, a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamt we'd mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs. But he was wrong, terribly wrong, for news has come that they are turning on one another, our friends, just as we, one day, will turn upon one another, W. says.

It has to happen; he sees that now. It has to fall apart. Wasn't his dream, always, that we could hold back the apocalypse? But we will not hold it back; the apocalypse begins with what is closest to us. And what's my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand? Et tu, idiot?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs. Et tu?, as he sees my face is only that of the apocalypse …

My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.

How could I understand what I've unleashed?, W. wonders. Does the storm understand that it is a storm? Does the earthquake know that it is an earthquake? I will never understand, says W.; that's my always appealing innocence.

It's time for the reckoning, W. says. It's reached that point. But with whom might he reckon? How to tackle an enemy who has no idea he's an enemy?

Can you see me burning?, W. asks me in his dream. He's on fire! What am I to do? Put him out – but with what? But then I, in his dream, understand: I am the fire. I am what makes him burn.

What will happen the next day – the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. asks. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear? That the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can't avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it's all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he's sure not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It's my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

'If you knew, if you really knew' … but I don't know, says W. I have intimations of it, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

I am less and less able to listen to the presentations of others, W. notes. He can see it on my face. I can never hide it. At one point, he says I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.

What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don't I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water?

There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the Mersey, when I full intended to catch a ferry, he says. Then there was our aborted Thames trip, the boating expedition all the way upriver … How disappointed I had been!

Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which there gusts the wind of pure idiocy.

Retrospective redemption, that's what W.'s holding out for. It will have made sense, he says. It will always have made sense from the perspective of redemption, that's what he hopes. But there's little sign of it, he concedes. In fact, it's getting worse.

He hears the dull rumble of thunder, W. says. The storm is coming; lightning could flash down at any time. But why does no one else hear it? Why does no one but him know the signs? Make it stop!, W. wants to cry – but to whom? Make it stop! – but not to me, who is only part of the catastrophe, only a catastrophic scrap torn off to torment him.

What is hell?, W. muses. It's when friend falls upon friend, he says. I would turn upon him, wouldn't I? I'm always about to. I'm already poised …

When friend turns upon friend, that will be the sign, says W. But then hasn't our friendship always involved a turning against him, W.? Hasn't it always meant the destruction of friendship? Yes, that's what W.'s concluded: it is nothing but the destruction of friendship in friendship and as friendship.

My indifference to the idea of God has always disappointed W. He likes to imagine me in another life, he says, as a young priest wandering around in the fields, raising my fist at God's absence.

Sometimes W. thinks we should write a book on God. On God! Imagine! Of course, W. doesn't understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by this word. But at the same time, his own absence of belief seems to him entirely a matter of a blockage of thought, and what he can only describe as a kind of dullness and opacity.

He doesn't have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says; he doesn't know what that means. When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he's come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It's not because he thinks there's some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach – quite the contrary – but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and it is all because of some personal stupidity.

But what would I contribute to our book on God?, W. asks. What would I bring to the project? – 'You could explain your indifference', W. says. 'And then you could draw some cocks'.

Up early, we step into the sun, out to find a cafe. Another day full of possibilities! – 'Which we will crush', says W.

'Have you had any thoughts yet?', W. asks me. None, I tell him.  'It's like Zen', says W. 'Pure absence'.

I should work more, W. tells me. An hour a day, that's all he asks. If I can't work at home, then in the office. And if I can't work in the office, then I should find a cafe.

My assignment this summer, W. says, is to investigate the work of Rosenstock-Heussy. He will continue to read Cohen, he says – he's just bought a book on logic by Cohen from ABE books for 180 Euro – and my task is to investigate the not especially well known work of Rosenstock-Heussy. That way, W. says, we can approach our principal philosophical topic in a pincer movement.

Weil: The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

W.'s proper method of philosophy, he says, consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problem of my stupidity in all its insolubility and then in simply contemplating it, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting, knowing it will never, ever change.

Literature was our great curse, W. says. To be fascinated by something of which we would always be incapable. And it's not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our heads against them, over and over again, like idiots.

I close my eyes. – 'What are you contemplating?', W. asks. 'Your next magnum opus?'

'You have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can't do, in your case, everything', W. says. 'Where do you think your strengths lie?', and then, 'do you have any strengths?'

What sort of literature would W. write, if he could? – 'I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you'.