Category: W.

Zeno of Citium strangled himself, W. says. Imagine it! Of course, he was already an old man. He felt he'd missed his appointment with death. It had come, but he hadn't had been ready. So he brought death to him.

And what about us? Should we strangle ourselves? Should I strangle W., and W. me? But that's just it: death doesn't want us. It isn't our time, and it'll never be our time. If we die, it will be from some stupid accident, the most absurd of illnesses, an ingrowing toenail, for example. It will never be a matter of our integrity, of some act of martyrdom. We'll die for nothing, for no purpose. How could we presume to take our own lives?  

We should shoot ourselves, W. says. Someone ought to. He'll shoot me, and I'll shoot him, in some kind of Mexican standoff. We would lie there in the sun, bullets in our heads, the flies buzzing around us, and there would be a great rejoicing. But that's just it, isn't it: there would be no such rejoicing. No one would see, no one would know what had been delivered from the world.

How is it that we've escaped detection?, W. wonders. How is it we've got away with what we have? It would restore faith in the world if we'd be hunted down and shot. At last moment, the gun held to our temples we would laugh in joy because we knew justice had been done. It would all make sense! The world would be restored!

That we're still alive, W. says, is a sign of the closeness of the end.

You've heard of suicide by cop, of course, W. says, but what of suicide by philosophy? What of an infinitely protracted attempt to die by provoking the wrath of others through the attempt to think? What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of your stupidity?

'You know you talk rubbish, don't you? You know you write rubbish, night and day?' W.'s never seen it so pure and keen: the desire to die. The desire to be shot in the head. 'Make it stop!': that's my secret cry, isn't it?, W. says. Someone make me stop! Of course, he'd commit the act, W. says, if he didn't find it so funny.

That's my trouble – I aspire to tragedy and to tragic grandeur, but all I do is make everyone laugh. It's like a chimp shitting himself. A chimp sitting in its own shit, with a bemused expression on his face.

The bars of your cage are caked in shit, W. says. The walls of your cell are caked in shit, in your own shit, and there you'll sit in your blanket, shivering. And everything you'll have done will have been your dirty protest. Everything you've said, everything you've written, every deed you've performed: a dirty protest.

Because you wanted someone to deny you it, didn't you? You wanted someone to intervene, to say: No! But it never came, did it? The order never reached you, and you were forgotten at your post. What else did you do but read and write? How else did you occupy your time? But you were waiting for orders, weren't you?

You knew it was wrong, everything you were doing. You knew someone had slipped up. How were you overlooked? Who forgot you? But there you were, reading and writing. There you were, caking the walls with shit.

Why was I allowed to do this?, that's my great question, W. says. Who let me do it? Whose fault is it? I blame everything on someone else, that's my instinct, W. says. It's never my fault, it's always somebody else's fault. I'm acted upon, rather than acting myself. I'm passive, rather than active. Or rather, my fervid activity is only a sign of a great passivity, as though I was a leaf blowing about in the wind.

It wasn't me!, that's my cry, W. says. It wasn't my fault! This is why, when it comes to it, when it comes to the end, I'll die uncomprehending. – 'You'll never understand. You'll never grasp the extent of your failure'. I'll die with froth on my lips, W. says. 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 have shot me like a dog.

What do I think's going to happen to me at the end?, W. asks me. Will I starve to death? Unlikely, he says, with my enormous appetite. With my desperation. He'll probably starve, W. says, and I'll be shot. – 'You'll try and escape. You'll climb a wall'. He stands up and does an impression of me climbing a wall. They'll shoot me, W. says. I'll fall down in the mud and others will step over me.

He, meanwhile, will be long dead. He'll have starved, having given up all hope, all drive. There he'll sit, a skeleton by the window, who'd hoped that things could be otherwise, but learnt things could never be otherwise.

'They'll round you up', says W. I'm the sort who'll get rounded up. They'll know straightaway. Children will point at my door. – 'Him, him', they'll say. And then I'll be shot and fall down in the mud.

W. admires my persecution complex. – 'You really think they're out to get you, don't you? You really think you're in trouble'. I may be in trouble, W. says, but it's nothing to do with what I've done. – 'It's not about you', W. says. 'It's never about you'.

When the end comes, it'll be structural, W. says. It'll be about structures of which I am a part. It's nothing personal. It's never anything personal. But the fact that I think it's personal accounts for my desire to protest. I jump up and down like an angry ape, W. says. I hoot and wail.

In the end, all that's left to me is dirty protest. – 'That's your life', says W., 'shit smeared across the walls'. It's my life, that dirty protest, and everything I've written or said.

In his new office, his desk up against the wall and a computer that looks like it's from 80s Russia on his desk, W. has discovered absolute despair. He's been taken away from his window. No longer can he see the rain falling. No longer the Westerlies that batter themselves against his city.

What's to become of him? What's to become of us, because it's no different with me, he says. – 'Of what does your life consist, essentially? Where is it taking you?', W. asks. 'Where do you think it's all going?' A pause. 'Nowhere!', says W. with great vehemence. 'You're going nowhere!'

Of course, I have my constant nightmares of unemployment to spur me on, W. says. I have the job pages I read and my ridiculous fantasies about entering management or beginning a new career. They keep me going, W. says. They give me the illusion of choice, when in fact I have no choice at all.

I'm a hamster on a wheel, W. says. A fat, disgusting hamster with some kind of skin disease and foam around its mouth.

I lapse into stammering, and can't get a word out for several minutes. W. is convinced I've had a series of minor strokes, and that one day I'll lose the ability to speak altogether. He'll be my amanuensis, W. says, like Rosenzweig's wife, who, in the period of her husband's total paralysis, used to spell the alphabet out loud until he was able by a signal – an inarticulate sound, a facial contortion – to indicate the correct letter. I am a cock, that's what W. will make me spell every time. I – am – a – cock.

Broken Immanence, that should be the name of our new intellectual movement, W. says, or of an 80s-style band similar to Flock of Seagulls. I think our band should be called The Stars of Redemption, I tell him and that Broken Immanence is a daft name for a movement. The Broken Immanentists – is that any better? To have a movement, of course, you have to have ideas, to stand for something. What do we stand for? 

People used to believe things, we agree. It used to be possible to believe in things. Take Rosenzweig, for example (he is always our example). He was going to become a Christian. He was just about to convert – disarmed, he said, by his friend's simple confession of faith.

It came down to the discussion on a single night - July 7th 1913, when everything hung in the balance. Would he, Rosenzweig take his own life? He held a gun to his temple; he contemplated the nothing. Would he accept his new life as a Christian?

A few weeks passed, and there was another date – October 11th – and he reached another decision. He attended the Yom Kippur festival in a synagogue, and it became clear to him he should remain a Jew. Imagine that! He experienced something which led to a real consequence in his life. Have we ever experienced anything? Has anything ever happened to us? 

On August 22nd 1918, due to a sudden inspiration, he begins The Star of Redemption, finishing it in less than six months, despite his active duty at the Macedonian Front, and long periods of illness and convalscence. Into life: that's how he concludes the book on February 16th, 1919: again, a date.

Into life: he plans to leave writing behind, to turn to the 'demands of the day', to everyday life. Everything is about dates and turning points! Then he founded the Lehrhaus … he turned his back on the university; he taught, he developed a new kind of teaching, in small groups with adult learners, rejoining assimilated Jews with the tradition with which they'd lost all relation.

And what of us?, we wonder. How will our lives be judged? What have we ever begun? Of what movement were we a part? When did we convert or lose our faith? … But in truth, we never had faith. We're not capable of it, or of anything. He was a broken immanentist, is that what they'll write on our graves? He was a member of Broken Immanence?

Into life: those were the last words of The Star of Redemption, we muse. What does it mean? Religion is only ever about the everyday, W. says with great firmness. This is what Rosenzweig saw in rejecting mysticism. Revelation was a public affair. It was about ritual, about ceremony lived between people. And above all, it was about speech.

Speaking with others: what else did Rosenzweig mean by life? Rosenzweig was heading into life, existence, where he had, in The Star, argued the most elementary structures of religion were to be found. Henceforward, he could only inquire when he found himself inquired of, that's what he said. And inquired of by men rather than scholars.

Theological problems must be translated into human terms, and human problems brought into the pale of theology, that's what he said. Philosophical problems must be translated into everyday life, and everyday life brought into the pale of philosophy. To what extent do we live?, W. and I wonder. How could we be said, in the Rosenzweigian sense, to be alive?

Speech, thought Rosenzweig, was the bridge between human beings and God. It's all about speech, says W. About speaking. We're very good at that, he notes, speaking. We're chatterers. Are we ever happier than in our chatter? That's always our high point, we agree, when we've worn speech away talking about blowholes or monkey butlers and there's nothing left to say.

We carry on regardless, we agree. We twitter like birds. We ascend to the highest, most rarefied plain of inanity. But what's that got to do with God? Perhaps we are only desecrators and despoilers of speech. Perhaps we only bring it to the edge of meaninglessness, of the tohu-bohu.

For when have we ever been inquired of? When have we ever drawn anyone else into the process of inquiry? We compare ourselves to our third leader, who's clearly superior to us. He gives, we take. He has ideas, we don't. He actually engages with the world, whereas our engagement is mediated by books we half understand.

He tries to change things, whereas we're parasitical on people who try and change things. He makes people feel witty and intelligent; we make them feel depressed and demotivated. Every day, for him, something new might occur. But every day, for us, confirms that nothing new will ever have happened.

Are we religious? I ask W. I'm never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that's already something. There's an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that's certain. But are we religious, I mean, really religious?

Wasn't it pathos which nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig?, we wonder. Wasn't it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one night in particular – June 7th, 1913 – which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.

He confronted the Nothing, he said. He'd come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn't what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed – when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him – Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.

Kneel and try to pray: that's what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naif or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig's crisis. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.

Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he re-converted back to Judaism. If he was to become Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.

But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one's relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you'll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig's account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It's all about pathos.

But there's pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig's despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the nothing might mean?

Hadn't our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn't we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naiveity or romanticism? We plunged into no crisis. We did not contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn't translate into an action.

Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W. We always fall short. But short of what? What idea could we have of faith, of the pathos of faith, as it streams infinitely far above our stupid heads?

When W. was 13, despite the fact that he had not been brought up religiously, he demanded to be taken to church. It was a great moment, he says. What brought it on? W.'s not sure. – 'You've never been religious, have you?', he says to me. I'm Hindu, I tell him, and he laughs till beer comes out of his nostrils. – 'Oh yes, your Hinduism, your spurious Hinduism'. What idea could I possibly have of Hinduism?

Sal thinks W.'s drifting back to religion. She gives him a year. – 'It's al this Rosenzweig', says W., 'it's very plausible'. And then, 'You need a religion', he says. 'It would be a channel for your pathos'.

If there's one thing he's learned from me, W. says, it's pathos. – 'Saying nothing, but with great emotion'. He's always impressed at my presentations. – 'You sound so serious. If only they knew'. I tell him I am serious. – 'No', says W., 'it's because you're working class. You think you have to be serious when you give a presentation, but you don't really have to be'.

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we're not geniuses. It's a gift, he says, but it's also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don't have it ourselves. 

Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka?

But then again, didn't Kafka depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka, lean on his friend in times of despair and solitude?

We too, W. and decided long ago, must give our lives in the service of others. We too must write interpretative essays on the work of others more intelligent and gifted than we will ever be. We too must do our best to offer support and solace to others despite the fact that we will always misunderstand their genius, and only bother them with our enthusiasm.

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck. – 'Poseidon must be angry', says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time.

It's choppy! – 'We should libate the sea', says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It's because the mountains are salty and the sea is full of broken up mountains, he says.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful when we were here last year, reading the plaque then as he does this time. Why was he so unhappy? He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache, then a great wave of depression breaks …

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I could have lived here, imagine … We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. – 'A better person', W. thinks, 'taller, with some nobility of character'.

W. reads to me from The Star of Redemption. – 'Listen to this!'

In the innermost sanctum of the divine truth, where man might expect all the world and himself to dwindle into likeness of that which he is to catch sight of there, he thus catches sight of none other than his own. The Star of Redemption is become countenance which glances at me and out of which I glance. Not God become my mirror, but God's truth.

What does it mean?, W. wonders. It doesn't matter. It's amazing, I tell him. It's the best thing I've ever heard. W.'s impressed at my vehemence. I have certain instincts, W. allows. Occasionally I'm right, he tells me. – 'It's like a chimpanzee who knows a storm's coming, jumping up and down and screaming'.

Sometimes we go up to W.'s study and spread Rosenzweig's books on the table. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. always says, with quiet reverence. – 'Even you feel it, don't you? Even you have a sense of what is greater than you'.

'Why don't you get rid of that jacket?', says W. 'You've been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. It's completely shapeless'.

W. and I are wearing our flowery shirts. 'Look at us', W. sighs, 'fat and blousy, and in flowery shirts, and everyone else slim and wearing black'.

What's wrong with us? Why are we never dressed for thought? Take my trousers, for example. They should be pulled up round my waist like those of Benjamin in the famous photograph. But they sag. They droop disappointingly. – You're a man without hips!', says W. 'A man without ideas!'

W. remembers the pictures of Deleuze from the 70s, with his flares and long hair. Then there were the trousers of Levinas, generous, expansive …

I'm getting fat, of course. Eventually, I'll have to wear elasticated trousers like the American professors, W. says. Perhaps it will suit me, that obesity. Perhaps it give me gravitas.

We've always needed a leader, W. and I agree. We were in Poland several years ago, in Wroclaw town hall square and it became very clear to us: we needed a leader, someone to inspire us and force us to work harder. Someone to make us capable of more than we could accomplish on our own.

For his part, W. has always dreamt of being part of a pack. Friendship is very important to him. – 'You have to work together, to strive together, to force each other on'. Friendship involves a lot of nagging, W. explains, which is why he's so merciless with me. It's a sign of love, he says, his loving. But a leader, that's what we really need, he says.

In truth, we have found several leaders. The first, far cleverer than us, far more serious, wrote a book we admired. We spoke alongside him and were the dull panels of a triptych. We were there only to make him shine all the more, we agreed. It was enough to be close to our leader, enough to give him a background of stupidity on which to set himself against.

But then the disaster happened, W. remembers. We told him, didn't we? We told him he was our leader. We told him what we hoped he'd make us become. We told him of our hopes and fears … That's where it all went wrong, we agree. We scared him off. After that, we resolved never to tell our leaders they were our leaders, but we could never help it.

Didn't the same thing happen with our second leader? – 'Which one of us blurted it out', W. asks, 'you or me?' Regardless, the spell was broken. We had spoke to him of what we lacked and what he had. We spoke of the nectar of knowledge and the bees of the invisible, of the Open and the Closed. We frightened him, we agree.

Then there was the third leader. – 'Ah, our third leader', W. exclaims, 'the greatest one of all'. We brought him halfway round the world! We thought this was it, that we'd finally justified our lives; this was our high point! And what happened?, W. asks, knowing what happened.

We told him all we wanted was a leader and to be led by a leader. We told him about first leader and our second leader, and our desertion by our first leader and our second leader. We told him of  the great harvest of ideas, and of the coming end times. We told him of the apocalypse and of waiting for the Messiah … 

He was better than us, W. and I agree. He gave, we took. He had had ideas, we had stolen them. He engaged directly with thought, whereas our engagement was meditated by books we half understand. He tried to change the world around him, whereas we've always been parasitical upon people who try and change things. Every day, for him, something new might have occured. Whereas every day, for us, confirmed that nothing new will ever have happened …

Our third would-be leader was not so easily scared. But we think he wanted peers, not disciples. Where is he now? – 'On the other side of the world, far away from us, sensible man', says W.

The last Duke of Edgcumbe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and put the whole estate up for sale. The city bought it. It's a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up through the woods.

It was here the Dukes and their guests would drive about in their carriages in the twilight, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There's even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, looking very convincing in the autumn sun.

A landslide has taken the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing aslant, though most have fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It's slow going – very overgrown – and where the cliff has completely collapsed, you have to scramble across scree.

What would happen if we fell? It's a long way down. But W. and I never think about our death or anything like that. It's pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we've always been convinced by that. We're syndromes or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more signifcant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.

Strasbourg soothes us. Strolling through the wide boulevards, we grow calm and quiet. So many beautiful buildings, one after another! It's too much, we're dwarfed, humbled … and for a time, we're quiet, really quiet, lost in wonder at old Europe.

Isn't this where Levinas and Blanchot met for the first time? Imagine them, two students, the one tall and thin – very pale, the other cheerful and plump; one dishevelled in a double breasted suit and the other dressed like a dandy with a silver-knobbed cane …

I show W. the picture of them both from Malka's biography. Doublepatte et Patachon, that's what someone wrote on the back of the photo, no one knows who, I tell him. Doublepatte et Patachon, that was their French name. Long and Short, that's what they called themselves in English (they were originally from Denmark). Can you imagine Levinas and Blanchot as a comedy duo?

We sit down in a bistro and drink Alsatian wine from tumblers. W. speaks soft French, his voice lowered, and we dream, for a moment, that we are real European intellectuals.

Freiburg's destroying us. Last night, we worked our way through all the wines on the menu, glass by glass. In the end, the waiter sat down with us and told us the bar was terrible. He was Polish and keen to try his English: 'my heart, how do you say it? (he makes the gesture, and we say 'aches') aches for you. Go somewhere else'.

Where should we go? In moments of crisis, W. always asks himself what Kafka would do. What would Kafka do in our place? What would he make of it all? But that's the point: Kafka would never find himself in our place; he would never have made the mistakes we've made.

Kafka was at least a man of Europe, of old Europe. A Europe in crisis, but Europe nonetheless. And us? We are men without contexts, without roots, men in space who float endlessly in a fog of the intellect.

Freiburg's a terrible place, we agree. But what is it that makes it so terrible? We muse on this for a time. – 'It was rebuilt to look exactly like it was after the war, that's the problem', W. decides, and compares it unfavourably to Plymouth, which was rebuilt in an entirely different style.

W. reminds me of Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth, published during the war, which saw the city organised in long boulevards, transected by the avenue that runs from the train station to the Hoe. Modernism at its finest, we agree.

But Freiburg's fake. I remind W. of Warsaw, the central part of which was built in an exact replica of what was therefore before the bombing – weren't we at our happiest eating out with our guide in the old square? - 'That's because it was obviously fake', W. says. And then there was the warmth and conviviality of the Poles. – 'The Freiburgers are cold!

Nothing here is historical; nothing has any historical weight. They've lost the past, though they've no idea they've lost it, nor what it might mean to have lost the past. They don't miss it. It's gone the way of its intellectual life: it's a relic, its roots have been entirely cut away.

But what of us, who are likewise without roots? What of us who drift in a haze through European cities. We recognise ourselves here, that's the trouble. Freiburg confirms us in what we are.

Tired of Freiburg, we catch the train to Titisee and hire a pedallo to paddle out into the lake. Feet on the dashboard, the blue bowl of the sky above us, we discuss the limits of phenomenology and the limits of the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, whose hut in Todtnauenberg we refuse to see.

We discuss the inadequacy of political thought in failing to tackle the question of political economy and the failure of philosophical thought to pose, really pose, the question of the environment collapse …

Above all, we bewail the fact that the great disasters about to befall us barely leave a trace in the intellectual reflections of our time. It's as if we were going to live forever, but the real thinker, we agree, knows without histrionics thought is fragile and already touched by death.

Isn't that what the young Rosenzweig knew as he reassembled The Star of Redemption in his barracks in Freiburg as he convalesced? It took him seven months, that's all. Seven months, and he was also writing a letter a day to his beloved …

I hole my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it was written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says. Once I was happy on my savannah, he says. I was happy romping about the whole horizon before me. What made me think I could read, let alone write? How did I end up mistaking myself for a writer?

Behold the idiot, that's what my book says, says W. Wouldn't you like go back to my savannah now? Wouldn't you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?

W. sends me a quote to mull over in my stupidity, he says.

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence. 

W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.

I want to escape, that's my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something's wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he's not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. I'm not escaping, says W. I'm going to drown with everyone else, he'll make sure of it. I'm going down, says W.

W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts at the end of his great study of Jewish Mysticism.

When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known – his name, and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery – would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

A generation later, the second Rabbi – his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life – confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and said, We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers. What he wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi – whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure – went to the woods and said, We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi – his name is well known, and he lived as we do - faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

There was a fifth rabbi – well, he wasn't really a rabbi – Scholem forgot, says W. His name is Lars and he writes everything about himself at his stupid blog. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was on Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of times.

We'll stop writing about the Messiah only when the Messiah comes, W. decides. And until then … By what strange chance did it fall to us, who are least qualified to do so, to write about the Messiah? And how, in particular, did I come to write on the Messianic idea, I who am even less qualified to do so than W.? He at least reads Biblical Hebrew; he at least attended lessons on the Talmud; he has some sense of the divine and has always found himself at the brink of belief.

'You're a Hindu,' says W. 'What's a Hindu doing thinking about Messianism?' Of course, I'm not even much of a Hindu, W. says. What relationship do I have with Hinduism? Wasn't I going to learn Sanskrit? Wasn't I going to set out my Hindu stall? I even made noises about becoming a scholar of the Hindu religion, W. says, although it came to nothing. In the end, things have come to a grim pass when a not-quite-Hindu or a non-Hindu with no feeling for religion starts thinking about Messianism, W. says.

What is it that attracts me to the Messianic idea? What beam of light continues to reach me? For it must be quite a beam, W. says, if it's able to pierce the fog of my stupidity. Or perhaps there's something in my stupidity – due, no doubt, to its sheer overwhelming extent, the fact that it seems to cover and occlude the world - that makes a place for the Messiah, he's not sure.

Yes, we have been fortunate to meet real thinkers, W. and I agree. It was our great good fortune – but wasn't it also our curse; didn't we have confirmed for us that of which we would not be able – that of which we above all would not be able? It's important to know one's limitations – on that we're agreed – but to have them reconfirmed so often; to have the sense of them closing around you like a cage?

We're being suffocated, we agree. How can we breathe? But an encounter with a real thinker is precisely that breath. How is possible, the sense that, with a thinker, a thought is shared between us? How is possible that we believe ourselves to participate in thinking? Thought seems to occur between us. It seems to flow there, are though we were gathered around a mountain stream, around thought in its freshness, eternally streaming.

Ah to be near the source, at the beginning point! To have reached the highest, widest plateaus with only the flashing stars above us! That that's where these thinkers bring us; that's the vista their thought provides. Yes, we have seen the heights; thoughts, pure and fresh, have passed beside us.

Were we the condition of thought? We were only its occasion, alas. Someone spoke to us. We looked interested; someone spoke, we listened - that was it. And thinking welled up around like a great flood, and there were fishes in that flood, fish-thoughts streaming by us.

That was it, and nothing more. And with what were we left when the flood subsided? Where we were beached but on the valley-bottom of our stupidity, on the parched sands that no thought might cross?

You have to know you're not Kafka, says W., that's the first thing. But you have to know that the person you're speaking to might be Kafka, that's the second. This is why conversation, for W., is always a matter for hope. The very ability to speak, to listen and respond is already something, he says.

Of course, to speak to the other, to respond is already to betray. Whatever you say is a betrayal, even if at the same time it is suffused with hope. That the other person is Kafka is a perpetually present possibility. And that you are also the Brod who betrays Kafka is the destruction of this possibility, its disavowal.

In what sense is he Brod?, W. wonders. He never listens enough. He never gives himself over to what is being said. He comes up short, says W., very short, which is why he always feels troubled when he speaks, yet at the same time always wants to push conversation towards the Messianic.

In my case, W. says, I am untroubled by guilt, and therefore by the sense of a perpetually present possibility. History is not about to be blown off its hinges for me. There's no escape, no plurality. What can Kafka mean to me? But Kafka means everything to W., and especially the sense that the other person, the speaker, might be Kafka.

'Even you', says W., 'even you might be Kafka, which would be a great miracle'. Of course, on the other hand, I'll never be Kafka for myself, but only for him, my conversationalist. The other person is never other for himself, says W. Or only rarely.

For haven't we along the way met thinkers – real thinkers – who speak without a concern for themselves, without any sense of self-preservation? It's as though what they say is indifferent to them, we agree. As though they are borne by thought, thought by it, rather than the other way round.

You should never hang onto a conversation, says W. Once it's finished, pfft, it's finished. He snaps his fingers in the air. – 'I forget everything you say as quickly as that', W. says. 'You, on the contrary, remember everything, and not only that'. I make things up, W. says. I wholly invent conversations we are supposed to have had, but in fact we never did have. I'm a fantastist, W. says, a dreamer, but for all that, I'm not without guilt. I'm no holy fool, W. says, no innocent. A fool, yes, but holy – not a bit of it.

I am neither an Eckermann or a Boswell, W. says. I'm his ape, says W. and, remembering Benjamin's comment on Max Brod, a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.

Of course, W. never mistakes himself for Kafka, as I do. He's never thought himself anything other than a Max Brod. But the point is – this is W.'s first principle – the other person is always Kafka, which is why you should never write about them or hold on to their conversations, let alone make them up. The other person is always Kafka, W. says, even me. He knows that, says W., why don't I?