The Afternoon

The afternoon’s what’s left over. Just time. Just banality. Just the great slackening when even you, philosopher, might become like anyone else.


You won’t have the strength to resist it, the afternoon. Philosophy won’t help you. You’ll have forgotten all philosophy, in the afternoon. You won’t be able to string your thoughts together. Nothing will add up, or make sense.

You’ll be lost in forgetting – afternoon forgetting. It’ll erode you. Erase you. You’ll just fall through the afternoon, like the rest of us. You won’t have your great project – your idiotbuch. You won’t be able to read. The afternoon will just flood over your defences.


You’ll be full of afternoon amnesia, philosopher. Like being some stunned animal, ready for slaughter. A blow over the head. Staggering. And waiting for the blow, only the blow will not come. Waiting and waiting, without knowing what you’re waiting for.


It’s the time of day when you’re most like anyone else. When you’re the most typical, philosopher.

Your DVDs and blu-rays won’t save you. Your books. Your learning.


That’s what I am, to you: the afternoon. The invasion.


We’ve only even lived half lives and quarter lives.


Are there times of day when you can’t write? Of course. When the sky’s too wide, too vast. When you yawn. When you want to lie down – and perhaps that’s what you do: lie down. Beneath your skylight. And look up to the white, white day.


Are we supposed to be alive? Is that what we’re pretending to be? is this supposed to be real? Are we supposed to be real? The afternoon, in which even philosophers become average. Become just like anyone else. And perhaps more like anyone else than anyone else.


These are the hours you cannot own. This isn’t your time. It isn’t for you. You couldn’t even concentrate on one of your arthouse films. You put down your book. You close your laptop. You can’t think of anything to write in your journal. Nothing’s happening. You’re planless.


Nothing’s going to happen, philosopher. Nothing, ever again.

That’s the afternoon. That’s afternoon entropy. When the gap between atoms gets wider and wider. Raw time.


It frightens me, too, philosopher. It threatens to invade me, too. I’m going to go mad with it, too. We can both go mad.

Anyway, I drive out in the afternoon. To find things to do. To distract myself. Because I’m afraid of it, the afternoon.


Everything’s on pause. Everything’s paused. And so are we. We’re on the threshold. The whole afternoon’s a threshold. It’s a way being lifted as in a giant’s palm to – what? The scrutiny of the sky. The sky’s blind eye. The white sky’s eye, that sees nothing.


Do you like my mad thoughts? Could I be locked up for this? Perhaps I’m being profound. But profound means deep, and I don’t feel deep, philosopher. I feel shallow – terribly so. I feel stretched out under heaven.


I’m lying here, under heaven. Under the wide sky. And I want to laugh. But if I began to laugh, I’d never stop.


And I don’t know how these sentences link up to one another. I don’t know how they follow, one from the other. I don’t know why I’m speaking like this. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Or whether I’m trying at all.

I don’t know, philosopher – I don’t know anything. I don’t know the words for the simplest things. I don’t know how to speak, but I’m speaking.

I don’t get the logic. I can’t follow my own words. I’ve given up trying to follow them. And you license this. By sitting so quietly. By looking at me in that way. Expectant, in some sense. Like some kind of therapist. What do you want me to say? What are you waiting for? Are wasting time? Am I wasting your time, and are you wasting mine? What are we experiencing? Who’s here to experience it? Who does it befall? Who does it happen to – and who doesn’t it happen to? And what happens anyway?