Do you remember what Wittgenstein said on his deathbed: ‘Tell them I lived a wonderful life’. We have lived wonderful lives, haven’t we? The last readers. The last kind-of readers. Who have a memory of what books once were. Of what reading once was …
We’re glad we lived, aren’t we? Maybe not glad we’re alive, but glad we lived. And that we read all these things. All those authors, all those books: what they’ve meant to us! And their vanished worlds. Worlds in which people read. Worlds where books were important.
And the melancholic knowledge that our world, too, will vanish. And that no one will remember this time, when we could still remember a time when people actually read.
Unless you write your book, Shiva. Unless you save us all in your memory. To you and your book falls the burden of resurrecting all this. Afternoons like this. Days like this, which don’t mean anything. Which are of no importance.
For a time, we were allowed to play at being academics, that’s all. For a time, by some miracle, we slipped through – got jobs. But that was only keen to no one was watching … When there were no guards on the gate …
Work in Progress 