Don’t you think there are more important things than all this … philosophy or literature?
Do you?
How about … romance?
Romance!?
Is romance real? Does romance happen? Can there be romance? For the likes of us?
For the likes of you, maybe.
Can romance ever trump … writing … and reading? And dreaming that you’re a genius …
This could be a beautiful day, of we could ever manage to live in it. The most beautiful day. If we could stop thinking about the so-called future. About realising our genius …
We need to get off the eschatological train – that’s how Agamben puts it. Dismount the eschatological push-bike.
Where do we think we’re going, with all our projects? Carried forward by … our desire for genius. Our will to realise … whatever it is.
Where will we be when you’re forty-five? Or, God knows, fifty-five? Where will we be then? What will you have achieved?
How would being a lover fit into your project?
It’s not a zero sum game. You can have both.
Can you?
You could be a genius lover.
Perhaps I could.
A brilliant of romance. Perhaps that’s where your true genius would lie: being a brilliant of romance. You’d actually be happy.
Fat chance.
Did you ever read those pages by Levinas on livre de, living from? We live from good soup, spectacles. Enjoyment is always about enjoying enjoyment, he says. About savouring it. He thought it all up in a prisoner of war camp, you know. Five years as a prisoner of war, in Nazi German. So he’s worth listening to. I’m never happier than reading those pages on enjoyment.
But what does that make me? An enjoyer of a philosophy of enjoyment. Of a philosophy of enjoying enjoyment. Which means I get to enjoy things third hand.
And what better feeling is there than writing, rushing along? Than being able to write. The most beautiful feeling in the world. Because it’s so rare, isn’t it?
You wait for days and days. You sit at night, just waiting. You get up in the morning, waiting. And days go by. And then, suddenly: it’s possible. Then the impossible happens.
I’d like to give it all up. I tried once – giving up writing, giving up reading. I went overseas. To begin a new life. Without all that literary stuff. Or the philosophical stuff. I didn’t last long.
We can’t bear the thought that we wasted our time. By studying. By reading. By taking notes. Writing them up, in solitude. When what would we have spent our time doing? What was better than reading and writing, or trying to write.
Have we been happy? Has there been happiness in our lives. I’ll answer: Yes there has. Unspeakable happiness. And so much of it. Who could understand our lonely happiness. The happiness of reading and writing, or trying to write.
We were able to read, and to write. We found the time to read and to write. We weren’t lost, so long as we had reading and writing.
Never mind the disaster. Never mind the endless end of the world.
Joy … secret joy. Unexplainable joy. Just like Wittgenstein said: tell them I had a wonderful life’. We’ve had wonderful lives, Shiva …
Work in Progress 