It’s like in Solaris. We’re all going mad in our own way. In our own scholarship, our area of interest.
Our scholarship. That’s our compensation, in life. For being slightly too intelligent. Or slightly too unsociable. Or generally slightly too abnormal. To do whatever it is other people do. For ordinary pleasures.
It’s a glorified hobby. Poking around in some European corner. That’s already been poked about thoroughly. Looking through old suitcases in the European loft, that have already been thoroughly worked over. Shining our torches into some dingy part of the European cellar to see if there’s anything left, which there isn’t. Seeing what we can find in the European junkyard. But that’s already been picked clean, more or less.
It’s just self-pleasuring. It’s a way of pleasing ourselves. Is that what philosophy’s supposed to be: our pleasuring ourselves?
Susan Taubes might have meant something once. What links her time to ours? Her early ‘50s, her mid ‘50s. Her early ‘60s.
What links her to this? To us? To here?
You’re just a fan girl. Just like I’m a fan boy of all the stuff I like. And we can dress it up as being all about philosophy, or whatever.
A trap is closing. And it’s vast. And we’re about to be trapped – once and for all. And we’re writing about anything but the trap – which is part of the trap. So we have to do something.
Philosophically?
Turn your great brain to that, Kitten. We need you. Help us make sense of this. Of ourselves. Of our lives in these times.
Work in Progress 