Spurious - Lars Iyer [3]
But it happened again. ‘Which one of us blurted it out’, W. asks, ‘you or me?’ Regardless, the spell was broken. We had spoken to him of what we lacked and what he had. We spoke of cosmogony and the opposite of cosmogony, of the beginning of times and of their coming end …
Then there was the third leader.—‘Ah, our third leader’, W. exclaims, ‘the greatest one of all’.
Everyone knows to keep quiet when he speaks, W. says. He speaks very quietly himself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. He lives in a different way from everyone else, that much is clear. He lives another kind of life, and his quietness is a sign of his elevation.
It’s what everyone in the room knows when he speaks: he’s better than the rest of us, cleverer; he occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand, by what it would be impossible for us to think by ourselves. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in northern forests!
We lean in, listening. He speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to hear. And for a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.
And then it happened again. We told him all we wanted was a leader and to be led by a leader. We told him about our first leader and our second leader, and our desertion by our first leader and our second leader. We told him of the tohu vavohu that comes at the beginning and will return at the end. We told him of the apocalypse and of waiting for the Messiah …
Will we find our new leader in Freiburg? It’s unlikely, we agree as we sip our piña coladas.
Wandering back to the hotel, we lose ourselves in the streets, chancing upon the same section of waterway again and again, the same weir. The city’s closing itself against us, we decide. Against the likes of us. It doesn’t want us here. Should we throw ourselves in the river? Is that what it’s telling us?
Kafka was always our model, we agree. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. says, again and again. It’s always at the end of the night when he says this, after we’ve drunk a great deal and the sky opens above us, and it is possible to speak of what is most important.
At the same time, we have Kafka to blame for everything. Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature itself! We were finished. What could we do, simple apes, but exhaust ourselves in imitation? We had been struck by something we could not understand. It was above us, beyond us, and we were not of its order.
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 of Kafka, but it’s had a bad effect on us. Besides, he says, he bets Kafka was good at maths. He was good at law, after all, which is probably a bit like maths. Perhaps we should drop out and become lawyers. Perhaps that would be the making of us.
Literature destroyed us: we’ve always been agreed on that. The literary temptation was fatal. Of course, it would be different if we read literature alongside philosophy, W. says, but literature, for us, could not help infecting our philosophy.
But doesn’t W. admire the fact that we feel something about literature? Doesn’t he think it’s what saves us? W. is not persuaded.—‘It makes us vague and full of pathos. That’s all we have—pathos’.
Once, W. thought of himself as a writer, a literary writer. He filled notebook after notebook. It was in his early twenties. Everyone wants to be a literary writer in their early twenties, W. says. Of course no one ever is. W. realised it pretty quickly. He knew he was no Kafka, he says. That’s what I don’t know yet—I don’t know I’m not Kafka. I don’t have a sense of myself as a failure, which is ironic because