Spurious - Lars Iyer [12]
To think it will all end so soon! To think we’re on the edge of the greatest catastrophe! The oceans will boil, the sky will burn away into space. And won’t we be the first to be swept away? Won’t we be the first to go under?
The apocalypse is close, we know that. The apocalypse is coming, of that we are certain …
As we walk towards the lido, W. tells me about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says, to form a great defensive wall. Their bronze-tipped spears would poke out of the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W.—‘Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this’, he says. ‘You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx’, says W. ‘You’d be the first to break it’.
W.’s great fantasy, and he must admit, he says, that it is a fantasy, is of forming a community of writers and thinkers, linked by mutual friendship. Together we’ll be capable of more than we might do on our own. That’s what he’s always hoped, says W. It’s what he’s always dreamt of.
Above all, we have to avoid the traps of careerism, says W. Loyalty and trust, that’s what matters: we have to be prepared to die for one another.—‘Literally that: to die for one another’, W. says. ‘It’s all about the phalanx’, W. says. ‘The phalanx you would immediately betray’.
That’s the ultimate paradox, W. observes: that one with such faith in friendship should end up with such a friend. Would I die for him? No. Would I immediately betray him, given any opportunity? Yes. In fact, I’ve already done so several times.
Where did it all go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same answer: me. It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.
‘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’m like the idiot double of an 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 year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. It amuses W., who knows I will never escape and nor will he. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like everybody else’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism. And what was it last year? It was music, wasn’t it? I was going to become a great scholar of music.
But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music?—‘Nothing at all’, says W., ‘about either subject’. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music?—‘None at all!’, says W. ‘Not one bit!’
There’s no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I’m stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?
W. has been lost in bureaucracy, he says on the phone. He tells me about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been.—‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When W. was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, he says.
In W.’s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it’s the key to great thoughts, he says, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that.
Still, he’s disappointed that