Category: W.

W. has been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. You need to get it all out. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

W. hasn't had a thought while he was ill, he tells me. He always thinks he will. It worked for Kafka, didn't it? And what about Blanchot? But W.'s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

I am a sullen drinker, W. says. Not for the whole evening, he admits – not even for most of it, but the time always comes when I refuse to say anything at all and slump down in my chair. That's when your immense belly becomes visible, says W. During the slump. It's like Moby Dick, says W. Vast and white and rarely seen. But there it is in the slump. It always amazes him, says W. It amazes everyone.

I'm not like him, W. notes, for whom every conversation is on the verge of becoming messianic. W. likes to journey with his interlocutor through the apocalyptic and towards the messianic, he says. He believes in his interlocutor, not like me. He believes in conversation. You're slumped, drunk and silent at one end of the table, W. says, while he is waiting for the messiah at the other.

I have no idea how to talk to people, W. says. I lack even a basic sense of the reciprocity of conversation. – 'Come on, let's practice', says W., as we walk out from Dublin towards the sea. 'I'll say something to you, and you say something right back. "Hello, I come from Plymouth"'. – 'I come from Newcastle'. – 'No, no', says W. 'You should ask me something about Plymouth. "Hello I come from Plymouth"'. – 'I've never been to Plymouth'. – 'No!', says W. 'You have to ask me something about my life'. I know too much about his life, I tell him.

W.'s going to write a book of etiquette for me, he says. The art of conversation, that's what I'll have to learn, he says. Give and take. And table manners. – Y'ou never learnt them, have you? And keeping yourself clean. Look at you! You're filthy! When did you last wash your trousers? And that morose expression on your face. Why should anyone want to talk to you?'

Conversation! All real conversation is Messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said – not that at all, but the fact that it is said, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that? You're conversationally lazy. W. says. You can't be bothered, it's obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights.

For his part, W. is never happier pressing a conversation towards Messianism. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life changing. That's what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I'd have no sense of that.

W. looks for the apocalyptic and the messianic in every conversation he has, he says. He attempts to push every conversation towards them: the apocalyptic and the messianic, he says. Nothing matters but urgency and sincerity, W. says. His urgency and sincerity might inspire others to become equally urgent and sincere in their conversation, he notes; conversely, the urgency and sincerity of others, for him, is like messianism itself.

What does he look for in his conversationalists? A sense of the end, he says. A sense we are living in the last days. And a sense of joy, says W. The third level of knowledge. Do you know what that means?, W. asks me. No, you wouldn't, he says, and for the same reason that no one wants to talk to you.

W. reminds me of our third leader. Everything he said, even the most trivial thing, was messianic. He lived a life of complete seriousness, but for all that, he was a joy to be with. He never took himself seriously, W. notes. He took his thought seriously, but never himself, which is a sign of a real thinker.

What he could teach us about conversation! What we could learn, if we saw him more often! But we'd only disappoint him, W. says, though he seemed to like our company. We'd only bother him, and he'd shake us free to ride higher on the thermals of real thinking.

'Philosophy bears upon what matters most', says W. with great urgency, remembering Plotinus. 'What matters most to you?', asks W. 'Your dinner? Alcohol? Chav mags?'

What matters most, W. muses, are the coming End Times. The ecological disaster and the financial disaster. – 'They're nearly upon us', he says. 'Are you ready for the End Times?' Is he? Least of all him, W. says. Least of all us. 

We'll be the first to go under, W. says. The very first. He'll welcome it, says W., as judgement for our miserable lives and the immensity of our failure.

W. sends me some quotes from his reading from the Talmud.

Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail.

W. likes lists, he says. It's a Borges thing.

This one especially for you, he says:

Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.

For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?, says W. Years? Millennia?

Actually, W. says, the explanation is that during the second destruction of the temple, the Romans persecuted the Jews, prohibiting against circumcision and so on. The people despaired and thought there was no point bringing children into the world, so they would masturbate or marry young girls who could not have children. But the rabbis said that if the souls that are stored in heaven from the beginning of creation never come into the world through the birth of children, then the Messiah would not come.

W.'s amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading and writing before going to work. – I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. Then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. But he still managed to learn Hebrew! He still learned classical guitar!

What happened then? asks W. He has no name for it, W. says. A general malaise. A kind of collapse. In part, says W., it was Kafka's fault. How could he, W., write anything as good? He kept notebook after notebook, W. says, before giving them away.

He no longer had an alibi, W. says. He couldn't hold them apart any longer: the writer he wanted to be, and the person he was. It happened with literature for him, W. says, and then it happened in philosophy, which was terrible.

His turn to philosophy was in some way his way of escaping literature, W. says. Didn't philosophy hold out the possibility of a Kant-like flowering of one's powers much later in life? And there was his dawning sense of the apocalypse, too, W. says, of the end of the world.

And the sense that the highest task was of countering the apocalypse, which might indeed be a task of thought, of philosophy, W says. A task for which he discovered himself to be singularly unfitted, which made the distance between the philosopher he wanted to be and the person he was yet more unbearable.

It's was all Rosenzweig's fault!, says W. And Cohen's. All those declarative sentences! All that mathematics! How could he ever approach their brilliance? He fills notebook after notebook, but it's all futile. What is there for him to do in the teeth of the apocalypse? What relationship can he have to the highest that must be thought?

Then he met me, W. says, and things got really bad.

Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It's the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I'll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse – which is precisely a way to avoid it altogether. You have to run up against your idiocy, to plunge into it, W. says. Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy.

We're in free fall, says W. Or Limbo. We must have committed some terrible crime in a former life. We've been reborn into the wrong bodies at the wrong time, that's what you Hindus think, isn't it?

This is our purgatory, W. says, or perhaps it's just his. Perhaps I am his purgatory, says W., and I am his Limbo. Perhaps his friendship for me is only punishment for some great crime he committed in a former life, he's not sure what.

Rosenzweig wrote the entirety of The Star of Redemption on postcards to his mother, W. says. All of it, every line, from the Macedonian front, where he was fighting. Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at the Macednoian front – that's not where the big battles were, but nevertheless. An entire book! Written on postcards! One after another! To his mother!, W says.

Rosenzweig! He's the measure of all things to us. The measure of seriousness. The measure of commitment ('he meant every word'!). The measure of acumen. The measure of religiosity. The measure of integrity. He turned his back on the university, says W. He devised a new form of educational institution! He lived what he thought. He acted on what he thought, which is inconcievable to us now.

Rosenzweig is a guiding star to us, burning brightly above everything. He's our inspiration. To write like him! Wholly in declarative sentences! To let your thought flash out! To write in sentences like bolts of lightning! Imagine him, Rosenzweig, at the Macedonian front, says W. Imagine, shells falling around him. Imagine, in the trenches (were there any trenches in Macedonia?) propped up against a dirt wall, writing another postcard to his mother.

Dear mother, he would write, and then off he'd go, W. says. Dear mother, and then he'd write his thoughts about God or death or Judaism horizontally, in the space left for you to write, and then vertically, as they used to do in the nineteenth century, using every part of the page. Sentences like lightning bolts. Thoughts swift and certain and sure, the shells falling around him (was the Macedonian front bombarded?)

He might die at any moment! A shell might fall and explode then and there! But he's writing horizontally, then vertically and then slantwise across his postcard. What do you think it showed on the front?, I ask W. What view did it show? – Nothing, you idiot, says W. It was an army postcard. Probably some artillery. Or a tank or something. Did they have tanks in the first world war?

By the time The Star of Redemption was published, he'd already left the university, W. says. He'd left it behind! He'd founded a new kind of establishment! He was educating young Jews, says W. Including Kafka. Did you know he taught Kafka?, W. says. Well he did. Rosenzweig taught Kafka. Which is quite extraordinary, when you think about it. Kafka and Rosenzweig, in the same room as one another. The younger man, the older man. Teacher and pupil.

Thought! cries W. What does it mean to think? Why can't we think? Why are we so singularly incapable of thinking? We've cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, W. says, but weren't not thinkers! We've failed at the level of thought!

He knows they're out there, W. says, real thinkers. He knows how natural it is for them, how they glide through the milieu of thinking like a whale through deep water. it's effortless! it's as natural as breathing! they're used to thought, they're fully confident of their ability to think, which might as well be God-given.

They can't help it! They couldn't do otherwise! Thought is their element, their milieu, W. says, just as idiocy is our element and our milieu. They are virtuosos of thinking just as we are virtuosos of idiocy. Do you think they envy us as we envy them? Do you think they even know of the existence of idiocy? They don't know of it and they don't believe in it. They don't need to. Thought is not the absence of idiocy, although idiocy is the absence of thought.

W. and I remember our leaders. Do you think they had a sense of our idiocy? Was it real for them? Did it confuse or confound them? Did it prevent them from thinking? Not at all. Not for a moment. We bothered them, there was no question of that.

Do you remember how he spoke?, of the first leader. His seriousness? He wasn't swayed by us. Our idiocy was annulled. Just for a moment, we were quiet. Just for a moment, idiocy was interrupted and we were calmed. It was marvellous, W. said.

And our second leader. Do you remember what he told us? How he'd dropped out of college. How he'd worked as a pastry chef. How he'd taken up boxing – and all in the name of thought. All because he felt himself unworthy of thought, and tried to turn away from it, but there it was nonetheless: thought. There it was, waiting for him, the most natural thing in the world: the capacity to think.

There was no presumptiousness about him, we both agree. Thought was natural to him, it didn't surprise him and nor did it give him any sense of distinction. He was just like us, we agree, except that he could think. Which means he wasn't at all like us, really.

And our third Leader, perhaps the greatest of them all! Do you  remember how quiet she was? Do you remember how silent the room became, and how we leaned in to listen more closely?

We thought were party to something, we remember. We thought we were in on a Secret, that now, at last, thinking would be here, in person. We though we would be par with it, the emergence of a thought. It was terribly flattering. We were, for once, to be the occasion of thought, rather than its obstacle. Thought had been very close to us that afternoon, hadn't it? Maybe we even believed we could think, which is the greatest illusion.

W. has always liked the story of my intellectual awakening. Tell me again, he says, tell me the whole story. It was Kafka, wasn't it? You started reading Kafka in your warehouse, didn't you?

W. admires my working class credentials. You're more working class than I am, he always says. You're closer to the people. W. grew up surrounded by books, he observes, whereas I have never seemed to know what to do with them. You find them wondrous, don't you? You can't believe they exist!

You were happy in your warehouse, says W. I'll bet you wished you never left it. What was it like, reading your first book? what did it mean to you? Was it like the obelisk in 2001? Were you jumping up and down and hooting?

W. finds the idea of my reading particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming hte lettes as I spoke, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. It's still an effort for you, reading, isn't it?, W. says.

Besides, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. They're like totems to you, says W. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them. It's The Castle all over again, isn't it? It's all a mystery to you, isn't it?

Tell me what it meant to you, The Castle, W. says. What did you make you see? Your limits, that was it, wasn't it? You ran up against your limits like a wall and fell down, didn't you? And then you got up and kept on running, didn't you?

W. finds it all tremendously funny. He can picture me in my warehose, mouthing the words of the title. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E.

Of course, Kafka was also involved in W.'s intellectual awakening. Unlike me, W. was the recipent of a well-rounded grammar school education. Unlike me, W. grew up surrounded by books and book readers, and already had a sense of the full sweep of Western literature.

But he remembers very clearly his first encounter with a yellow, Schoken edition of Kafka in his school library (we had a school library, unlike you, W. says). The Castle. He didn't have to mouth those words to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and pronounce the words out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. It all went wrong with the fatal lure of literature. Didn't he want, immediately, to become a writer? He could form letters, W. says, unlike me. He could actually write a coherent sentence, a task of which I am still incapable, W. says.

Go on, say a sentence out loud, he says, just one, without stammering and stuttering. Anyway, he wanted to become a writer, that was what was fatal about his intellectual awakening, although he came to learn (it took a number of years) that he would never, ever be able to be a writer. Unlike me, W. says, who has never learnt this simple lesson, no matter how many times it's been confirmed for me.

It's come to an end, all of culture and civilization, it's all finished, Rosenzweig and Cohen with it, that's what you think, isn't it?, says W. You see no point in anything, which is why you do nothing. For his part, W. says, he's not sure whether I say these to give myself an excuse for not working, or whether I'm right, and there is no point to anything at all.

Anyway, whether W. is in the wrong or not, working, for him, is like some conditioned reflex. He hasn't got a choice! What's he working on, and why is he bothering?, W. asks himself. What does it matter? Why does he read these books that are too hard for him? Why does he batter himself against the wall of mathematics? What difference does it make? What's it all for? Who could he possibly influence or persuade?

Who will listen to him but me, who has no idea what he is talking about, who can only regard the work of Rosenzweig and Cohen with the awe of an ape before the thundering power of a waterfall? What can it possibly mean to you?, says W. That's what makes it worse for him: the only person paying attention to him, says W. is the one least capable of understanding anything he says.

But then too, W. says, he doesn't really understand Rosenzweig and Cohen either, and he too can only hoot and point like an ape at their mighty oeuvres.

When did you know?, W. says with great insistence. When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything? Did I know?, he asks, because sometimes he suspects I never did. Well he knows at any rate for both of us. Neither of us are going to amount to anything!, he says with finality. Neither of us! Anything!, he says imperiously.

We might carry on as if we're going to amount to anything, W. says, but that does not alter the fact that we're not going to amount to anything. We haven't had a single thought of our own, for one thing, W. says. Not one!

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I say to W., remembering Heidegger. Most thought provoking is that you think you are thinking, says W. Because you do, don't you?

Bela Tarr is to be our leader now, W. says. He's a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about poor, ugly people – they're my people, he always says. The ugly and the poor are always with us, that's what he says, says W. He's like Tarkovsky, only slower, says W., and with less hope. He only makes films with friends, says W. And he hates cinematographers. He had 7 of them for Satantango – 7! They only cause him trouble, says W.

Bela Tarr wanted to be a philosopher, says W., but when he started making films, he stopped wanting to be a philosopher. No abstraction for him, says W. He's completely devoted to the concrete, says W., to what he sees in front of him. He's not like us, says W., who have no idea what's directly in front of them.

He doesn't float nebulously into the most general and most confused of ideas, into our clouds of unknowing, says W. He never talks philosophy, says W. He doesn't believe in abstraction. Film is about the concrete, he says, says W. It can't help but be about the concrete.

Bela Tarr doesn't believe in God, says W. Bela Tarr's seen too much to believe in God. He takes years over each film, says W.. And they're full of drunk people. Full of drunk, aggressive people like you, says W. And mud. His films are full of mud. That's where you belong, says W., in the mud.

He made his first film when he was 16, says W. of Bela Tarr. 16! Imagine it! He had wanted to be a philosopher, but filmmaking cured him of that.

When did you know, says W., when did you know you'd never amount to anything? When did you take refuge in vague and cloudy ideas that have nothing to do with the world?

Perhaps we should have become film directors, W. says, though we probably would have fucked that up, too. What sort of films would we have made? Terrible films! Clouds of unknowing that would have nothing to do with reality!

Ah, said W., who visited recently, that's your writing table, and that's your yard. He looked through the window. It is disgusting, he agreed. And what's wrong with your plants? Why is the concrete green? It shouldn't be that colour. And what is that growing there? Is it a weed? It's too big and serious to be a weed, W. said.

I'll bet it smells terrible out there, said W. It does, doesn't it? You can tell. I'll bet it really hums. You'd never know of course, I tell him, because the windows won't open. They're jammed shut, I tell him, because the flat's changing shape. It's sinking, I tell him. It's collapsing in the middle.

The flat's sinking, W. says, and the yard is rotting. What is that out there? Sewage? And why's it covered in foamy water? The sewage's from the upstairs flat's waste pipe, I tell him, and the foamy water comes from the pipe from their kitchen sink.

W. agrees that Bela Tarr would take a 20 minute tracking shot of the yard. The yard would mean more to him than all our nonsense, W, says. Do you remember when he said that the wall, the rain and the dogs all have their own stories, and that these stories are more important than so called human stories? Do you remember when he said that the scenery, the weather, the locations and time have their own faces? Their own faces! The yard, the horror of the yard, is the only thing around here Bela Tarr would be interested in. 

What do you think your effect is on others?, W. asks. Do you motivate them, inspire them, spur them on? Do you make them think more than they could think on their own? Does the fact of your friendship change the way in which they see the world or vice versa?

Every time he meets someone (except me), W. asks himself how he could have been kinder, better and more gracious. Every time he thinks of his friends (except me), he asks himself what he might to do to help them or look after them better; he asks himself what he might do to further their thoughts or their writing.

What does friendship mean to you, really?, W. asks. Do you think you're capable of it, friendship? Do you think you've ever been a friend to anyone? Can you even conceive of what being a friend might mean?: these questions constantly pass through his head, W. says, as he knows they do not pass through mine.

Friendship makes the highest demands upon him, says W. It's a kind of test. It's the only chance for him, friendship, says W.; that and love. Love and friendship are the only things that might redeem him, W. says. And what about you?, he says. How will you redeem yourself? What are you going to do to redeem your miserable existence?

W. and I are supposed to be thinking about Messianism, but our minds are blank.

What are your thoughts on Messianism?, asks W. I don't have any thoughts on Messianism, I tell him. What about you? W. isn't able to think about Messianism, he says. He's not capable of it, and neither am I.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, says W., and Messianism is one of those thoughts. How is it that we nevertheless have bent our efforts on thinking about Messianism? It isn't as though we know anything about Messianism, or have any kind of religious belief that would give us any kind of personal investment in Messianism.

What, really, can Messianism mean to us, except as the limit of what it is possible for us to think or write about? Perhaps that's all Messianism could mean to us: the possibility that one day we might be changed so radically that we would be able to think about Messianism, says W.

You really inspired me the other night, says W., oh, it was nothing to do with your thought. – What, then? – I bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. Then I sat in the dark having apocalyptic thoughts and thinking vaguely about messianism without knowing anything about messianism. That's how you live, isn't it?

W.'s hair is very long now. It's a year since he last had it cut. Some of it falls in ringlets. It's his Jewishness, he tells me. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

If you're not going to be a thinker, you should at least look like a thinker, he says. And if you're not going to be religious, then you should at least look religious, that's what W. believes. Genuine thinking and genuine religious belief might follow looking like a genuine thinker and looking like a genuinely religious person.

You don't actually know anything do you?, says W. You've got no body of knowledge. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course. – You see, I know something. What do you know? I look up into the sky. – I've read a lot. – Secondary literature!, says W. You're always reading secondary literature! It's your main weakness, says W., or one of them. No one reads secondary literature but you. W. is a man of primary literature, he says, and in the original language. Primary literature, and as obscure and half-forgotten as possible.

Literature softened our brains, says W. We should have been doing maths. If we knew maths, we might amount to something. As it is, we'll amount to nothing.

There's nothing wrong with literature per se, says W. who cannot go a day without speaking about Kafka, and takes his books to read to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe on his own, but it has a bad effect on us. Besides, I bet Kafka was good at maths. – He was good at law, I tell him. – Oh yes, law, it's a bit like maths. Perhaps we should give up and become lawyers. Perhaps that would be the making of us.

Of course it would be different if we read literature alongside philosophy, keeping it strictly for recreation, says W. But literature, for us, couldn't help infecting our reading. That's where it all went wrong. – But don't you admire the fact that we feel something about literature?, I ask him. Don't you think it's what saves us? But W. is not persuaded. It makes us vague and full of pathos. That's all we have – pathos.

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?, W. muses. We're both Brod, he says, and that's the pity of it. Brods without Kafka, and what's a Brod without a Kafka?

We are both Brod, W. says, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, an apostle will not look back; when Brod looks into Kafka, it's only Brod who looks back. You are my Brod, W. tells me, but he is my Brod, too.

I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it's this we share in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

We're Brod and Brod, we agree, and neither of us is Kafka. Neither of us; but we can dream, can't we, of the imaginary Kafka we would fawn over and whose work we would promote? We can dream of our fervid works of commentary and our public statements – always needlessly simplifying, always full of empty pathos and sham hagiography - on behalf of our friend.

We can dream of nursing him through his final sickness and then of preserving his work for posterity. He'd ask us to throw it all away, all his unfinished drafts and private correspondence, but what would we do? Publish it piece by piece for a grateful humanity, with our stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.

Of course, what I lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, I make up for in pathos, W. says. He's learnt everything he knows about pathos from me, he says. He can make himself weep at the pathos of his writing. I must be constantly weeping, W. says, night and day, since my writing is based only on pathos and has virtually no other content. 

W.'s got a higher IQ than me, he's decided. A few points higher: that makes all the difference, he says. Intellectually, he stands slightly higher than I do; he has a wider view, a greater panorama. But perhaps this is why he despairs more than I do, and has a keener sense of his failure.

He can see more, says W.; and he can also see himself in the context of the whole. He can see the great achievements of the past heaving up behind him like a plateau, and the open space from which great achievements will come in the future. And he can see his own inability to contribute in any way to these achievements, and that, indeed, he is a living obstacle to anything that might happen.

If W's on his dung heap perched up and looking around like a meercat, he says, I'm still playing in the dung. What could I understand of achievement or failure or any of these issues?, W. says. What can I understand of the magnitude of our failure?

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 (and Janacek), yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of Kafka (and Janacek) – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka (or Janacek)? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka (or, for that matter, Janacek)?

But then again, didn't Kafka (and to a much lesser extent, Janacek) depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka (and perhaps Janacek, though we're not sure), 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 enthusaism.

My idiocy is theological, W. says. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says. I am that I am, says W., that's all it says.

On the other hand, he says, sometimes my idiocy is only a simple absence, a pellucid sky. Not a thought crosses your mind for weeks does it?, says W. Nothing at all. You're untroubled by thought and untroubled by thinking.

His idiocy, says W. is more a kind of stubbornness or indolence. It's never thunderous as mine can be, and nor is his head ever really empty. It's only a niggling reminder of his own incapacity, against which he runs up freshly each day.

When did you know you were a failure?, W. repeatedly asks me. When was it you knew you'd never have a single thought of your own – not one? He asks me these questions, W. says, because he's constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He's not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.

What amazes him still further, says W., is that I am almost entirely lacking in the same amazement. I am like the idiot double of a idiot, W. says, being of the same intelligence (or nearly the same intelligence; I am a few IQ points behind him), of the same degree of laziness (or nearly the same laziness; I am more indolent than he is), but entirely lacking an awareness of what I so signally lack.

Every summer, he begins work with great ambition, W. says. By the end of the summer, it's all gone wrong. Why does he never learn?, W. muses. Why does nothing change?

It's a great mystery to him, W. says, his eternal capacity for hope and the eternal destruction of his capacity for hope. He lives and dies a whole lifetime over summer, W. says, and is reborn every autumn, a little more stupid.