Work in Progress

The intricacies of our idiocy. Its filigree. It’s delicacy, even. Idiocy could be quite a refined thing. Like some complex confectionary.

The taste of such delicate idiocy. The savouring of such idiocy. Only a connoisseur of idiocy, like Cicero, could really appreciate it. It’s too bad we never learnt to appreciate it ourselves. Too bad that we were incapable  of enjoying our idiocy. But that would require a non-idiocy that none of us possessed.

 

To dream of greatness! Despite everything: to want greatness! To think that we were capable of it, greatness. That because we could recognise greatness, and even appreciate greatness, that we thought we could become great.

Us!? Great!? Hope against hope. Hope, despite being near certain of its impossibility, that we might become great. Hope, even as knew, pretty much, that we would never achieve it: greatness. But hope nonetheless.

Hope that it might happen still. That it could surprise us in the final hours. In our later years. That we might awake, like Kant, from our dogmatic slumbers. But we were sleeping very deeply, that’s the thing. We were nothing but slumber …

 

Which meant that we were condemned to idiocy. That we could only ever be idiots, when our idiocy measured against greatness. Because we could only ever be less than great, and therefore – by our own measure – idiots.

Non-idiocy was not in us. Non-stupidity.

Shouldn’t we have been content to stay with our idiocy – within its confines? To keep to our stupidity – to be reconciled to it. To accept it. To start a plan a life of non-greatness.

But there we were, working under the delusion that we might become great. Didn’t we spend hours in our offices in search of greatness? In the hope that … With the dream that …

What could we feel but thwarted? But deprived? What could we conceive but that greatness had been stolen from us? Our birthright!

How could we not be resentful at our idiocy?

 

Couldn’t we learn to be happy with our idiocy? Happy within its limitations. Wouldn’t then our sense of our idiocy begin to fade?

After all, we were not especially unintelligent. We weren’t low in IQ. In problem-solving. We didn’t have special needs in real life. We could function, after all. Hold down jobs. Go about our daily business.

Didn’t we have jobs? Flats? Didn’t we live in a real city? Couldn’t we afford our mortgages. Our bills? Our weekly shop? Did we live with our parents? We weren’t scrabbling anymore. We weren’t living hand to mouth? We stood on our own two feet.

We’d launched! We’d made something of ourselves! We had jobs. Open ended contracts. We weren’t failures in that sense. Wasn’t that consolation enough? Shouldn’t we be happy enough? We had summers – open summers!

But the worm of failure ate at our breast. Devoured inside us. And isn’t that what Cicero loved?

 

The genius shatters the world. The genius breaks the world – this world. The genius is the wrecker of all the mundane pieties. The genius is the re-maker, the reconfigurer. The paradigm-shifter.

The genius is the re-forger. The one who transforms. Who awakens. The genius is the overcomer – and the self-overcomer. The halo of the genius! The aura of the genius!

 

And wouldn’t we leave ourselves behind as geniuses? Wouldn’t our lives be burned up in genius? Wouldn’t everything that happened to us be justified? Everything to led us to the genius-thought, the genius-idea?

Nothing else would matter. All this, the years of struggle, would be a distant memory. What would matter was the work – the labours of genius. The great making of genius.

 

And the feeling that we owed everything to genius – to the genius that had possessed us. That life was simply a clearing away of all the obstacles of realising genius. That wasn’t even our genius. That had touched us from on high. That was heavenly fire. That traversed us. Burnt through us. So that we were capacitators of genius, merely. Conductors of genius. Genius is always apocalyptic, or nothing at all.

We had to embrace our failure. We had to become our failure. Be nothing other than our failure – that’s what Cicero thought.

We had to move from lamentation to affirmation. Defiant affirmation! Like stupidity pride.

 

That’s what I had to write about she said: my philosophical failure. That’s how my philosophical failure would become a literary success. A miracle!

But really, it would only become yet another kind of failure: a literary failure. For how could it be anything other than a failure? How could I suddenly exhibit literary talent, I who had shown no talent for anything whatsoever?

And that aside, the age of literature had passed. Just as the age of philosophy had passed!

 

So really, the move to literature would mean only redoubled failure! Failure once again! Which was impressive in its own way.

To fail – and so enormously – not once but twice! To run aground once – and then again. To come up against my limitations for a first time and then a second time.

It could only be a disaster. It could only end poorly. It could only ever be on a hiding to nothing, my literary project. My literaro-philosophical project!

 

There’s a quality of failure that she treasured, Cicero said. There’s a complexity of failure. That can really only come from failing once, in one area, and then failing again, in another – precisely at the moment when you thought you’d found success. Precisely at the moment when you thought you’d eluded failure. Tricked your way out of it.

In the end, failure was waiting for you. Failure was a step ahead of you. You’d be permitted no escape from failure, only a greater failure. Only a deeper failure.

It’s not as if Cicero was trying to correct some injustice by giving us jobs. She wasn’t trying to give us a chance. It wasn’t about letting us show of what we’d be capable if we had full time positions – if we had time to think.

Because she knew what would happen if we were allowed time to think: nothing. Because she knew that time would only reveal to us the extent of our stupidity, and let us lament our stupidity.

 

Cicero knew she’d raised us too high, had given us too much time. She knew that our kind wouldn’t benefit from this kind of freedom. She knew that we’d only experience our limitations. That our sense of our limitations would only grow more intense. That we’d only experience them over and again.

She knew that we’d only have our confinement confirmed – in our own stupidity. Would look up at her, with infinite sad eyes. As if to say, stop it. Kill us now.

 

Cicero wanted to torture us. To give us just enough freedom, enough space, enough time, to really discover how stupid we were. For us to fail at philosophy. At what we most loved. To fail to become philosophers. To fail, at what we most admired.

 

She knew how badly we’d fail. She knew what we wanted to be, and couldn’t be. She knew how we wanted to think, and that we could not think.

She knew what we admired, and how we could never achieve what we admired. She loved our sadness. She liked nothing better than to hear our lamentations, on nights at Trillians. Our drunken cries.

 

There was a particular quality to our sense of failure. A taste – for the palate of her mind. That mixture of sadness and lamentation and so on.

 

Our absence of learning. Our cultural illiteracy. Our general inarticulacy. Our tendency to excitement. To use exclamation marks. Or to wistfulness. Letting our sentences fade off into ellipses. The emphases we placed on certain words. As though they were italicised. As though they’d been underscored a dozen times. Our repetitions. At the beginning of sentenes. At the end of them. Anaphoras! Epistrophes!

The way we seemed to think as one. To mind meld. To speak in the first person plural. As though we were undivided. As though we experienced exactly the same thing, which we probably did.

 

Cicero was the appreciator of our sadness. The connoisseur of our laments. Which is why she encouraged our drinking. Our incipient alcoholism. She wanted us drunk. She wanted us ruined, or nearly ruined. For us to break through into pure lamentation. It’s a great art, lamentation, she said.

 

The cry of our stupidity, of knowing our stupidity: that’s what Cicero enjoyed. That came from knowing our idiocy. The immensity of our failure. And of suffering it, that immensity!

The thwartedness of our aspirations! The defeat of our hopes! Our terrible knowledge of what we were not. Of what we could not be.

Our dread and horror at ourselves, which is to say, of our own stupidity. The way we obstructed ourselves, stood in front of ourselves. The way we couldn’t escape our own shadows. We couldn’t leave them behind, our shadows.

Because we were in the wrong element: a philosophy department. We were out of our natural habitats. We were we shouldn’t be. Fish, thrashing on dry land.

 

Were we thinking we’d get away with it? That we were getting away with it? That we were going places? That we wouldn’t be noticed?

But of course we’d be noticed. We’d notice ourselves. It was inevitable! It had to happen!

We were intelligent enough for that, weren’t we? Smart enough to know our lack of smartness. Successful enough to know how we’d failed! Wasn’t that our curse?

But it’s what Cicero loved.

 

Cicero’s sadism – was that it? Or was it our masochism?

It’s what we made each other: a sadist, a bunch of masochists. That’s what we became, when we were together. A perfect fit.

 

How we fail ourselves! And how we fail to do anything other than fail ourselves! And disappoint ourselves!

Our half lives, postgraduates.

Don’t live like us! Don’t learn from us! Look at us! Look at what we’ve become! Our type is increasingly … ridiculous.

The more we’re out of time … The more the times are against us … Because they are against us. They don’t want us, the times. There’s no time for us in these times. We’re out of place. And increasingly so!

Perhaps you mistakenly find a kind of beauty to our irrelevance. To our anachronism. It’s like we have halos, or something. We’ve survived from another time. We’ve come from elsewhere. We’ve landed in his world – we couldn’t help it.

 

Don’t learn from us, postgraduates. From our mistakes. Because we’re nothing other than our mistakes, not really. We’ve only ever been mistaken. And deluded. And foolhardy.

 

We were lucky, that’s all, postgraduates. Or unlucky, depending on the way you see it. Will you be lucky, too? Probably not.

It’s going well for us – relatively well. We never had great expectations, it’s true. To be allowed to do what we do – that’s all. Whatever we do. And however we do it.

Allowed to muddle along, as best as we can. With our books. With our notebooks. With our reading and our writing. Indulged! But not for much longer.

 

Don’t think anything of us, postgraduates. Don’t think we deserve this life, or that we’ve earnt it.

We were lucky, in our way. We blundered unto it. We stumbled and were lifted up and found ourselves here. In Newcastle! In the far Northeast! We uprooted ourselves. We came all the way.

Are we making anything of ourselves? And what are we doing with ourselves? Just what we were doing before. Stumbling. And blundering. And pretending to be … lecturers, or whatever we are.

 

Look at us, postgraduates. Let it be a warning to you. Who you should not be. What not to be. Where you could go wrong.

We grow old during the academic year. We grow ancient. And then we need to be grow young again, at the end of the academic year.

Then we need to find it again, our innocence. The Promise.

 

We need to die down, at the end of the academic year. We need to lie fallow. We need Time. We need to go larval. We need slow incubation.

Summer is a dreaming. A recovery. Summer is contemplation: a preparatory state. An attempt to re-enter the Origin.

 

Thoughts will rise from the summer earth. Thoughts incubated there. Thoughts waiting for us, until the end of the academic year.

 

Wasting time – it’s important. Squandering it. Cycling out. Drinking … without aim. Without expectation. This is not about a project. It’s not about our future, out writing.

It’s about achieving stupidity. Finding it. Attaining it. Sinking to its level. Falling to it. Failing to it. Letting ourselves be sucked down.

 

Incremental becoming. The nutrients of study.

Dream of the coming summer. What we’d Do, in the summer. What we’d do with the summer.

To reclaim it – our potentiality. Our youth! Our faith! To take it back from everything that would put it to work.

Our perpetual beginning, forever ahead of us. Our hidden childhood. The spring. The Originary. That hadn’t been crushed in us. That had been lost in us. That could still breathe in us.

Wasn’t that what we always sought, with our dreams of summer? Wasn’t it that with which summer work would reunite us?

 

Possibility: that was to be our element. Potentiality – that’s what we were to experience.

We’d be brought back to ourselves. Given ourselves – all over again.

 

The summer in us. Our summer.

The perfect coincidence of ourselves and the Origin. And the Beginning. And the Inexhaustible.

What we’d Do, at last. What was to come. What Opened.

 

Wasn’t that why we wrote: to experience it, potentiality? To return to it: the beginning, upstream of everything?

To coincide with at last. To find your way back to it at last.

 

That’s the other summer, the impossible summer, where you’d find your way back. Where you’d contemplate your way to the Origin.

The summer you’d never reach. The summer you’d disappoint. The summer that was the promise of writing. The promise to recover what was lost at the beginning. In the Division from the beginning.

 

So lay your head on the summer earth. Lay it on the summer sand. Rest your head.

Forget your thoughts, so you can remember them again. Forget your Philosophy, so you can return to it again.

 

If you fell asleep in the sun, what then? If you closed your eyes, of what would you dream? Where would your dreams lead you?

 

That’s how our stupidity would join hands with our genius. That’s how our idiocy would marry our brilliance.

No longer panic flight. No longer rush. No longer lost in this and that and this. No longer heart-tremors. No more panicked breaths.

Catching up with ourselves. Pausing. Taking account. Looking back through our notebooks. Resting. Consolidating. Pulling our thoughts together, such as they were.

Reviewing the thought-path we’d taken. Coming to ourselves.

We’d planted the seeds. Now was the time for the Harvest. All our work. Everything we’d written, or tried to write. The papers we’d published.

Now it was time to bring it all together. That was the groundwork, merely. (Sounds better in German: the Grundwerk.) Now it was time to see what we could Do. What would Open, if we were given time. How our work might blossom.

Now that there was light pouring into us. The warmth in us. No that we had time. Now that time was opening to us. Now we were included in time. In the timing of time. In summer time.

 

Six weeks, without mooring. Six weeks, into the open. Six weeks of summer voyage. Six weeks for the summer wind to catch our sails.

 

Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. A summer stretching of limbs.

 

Summer peace. Now we’re out of peril. Out of our mire. Now we’re uncrushed. Unbroken.

 

Summer thoughts – there are those. Summer ideas. That seem to float upward. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons.

 

Sometimes becalmed. Sometimes, no wind, nothing happening. Sometimes, the desire to move forward, but no ability to move forward. Sometimes, days spiral into themselves, lost. Sometimes, days just falling into themselves. Collapsing into themselves.

Sometimes, a kind of summer introversion. No summer expansiveness. No summer extraversion. No summer openness. Sociability.

 

Summer, rising. Summer, buoyant. Rising higher than itself.

Summer, opening summer eyes. In us! In our writing!

 

Would it buoy us up, too? Would it carry us up with it? Would we stop our sinking? Would we free ourselves of solitude? A warm wind, across our bodies. A zephyr. What was happening? What was growing?

 

Sometimes, scarcely a direction to time. Time seemed to sink into itself. Time seemed to lie down. There were time pools. Time puddles. Sometimes, time seemed to catch a breeze.

 

Time, moving forward. Time, pressing into the future. Opening future for itself. But idly, not wilfully. Curiously, not wilfully.

 

Gesturing. Extending a hand. Testing. Seeing what it could become, the summer. How it could live in us. How it might work through us.

Work – unwork. Undo. Loosen. Let us go, in some sense. Set us free. Free ourselves into … what?

 

A summer dimension. A summer thickness. A summer cloying. A summer viscosity. Like honey.

Summer thick, like honey. Summer, runny, like honey. Summer you have to spoon out. That dripped slow drips. Rolling drips, down the jar of summer. Was that what we were to write with: summer honey?

 

Was there a special summer reward for us? Was there something being given to us, as a special summer favour?

The capacity to work. To believe ourselves to be working. A summer confidence. A summer swelling.

Belief in ourselves; was that it? In what we could do?

A summer pride. Was it real? Should it be? Should we feel that way?

Wasn’t it pretence? Wasn’t it obliviousness? Where was our sense of failure now?

Did we really believe that we wouldn’t fail? That summer wouldn’t wreck us?

Summer delusion: was that it? Summer pride before a summer fall ….

Summer made us believe we were geniuses: was that it? That we had summer haloes. That it would come together – everything we were. Everything we’d tried to think. That it would make sense at that moment: the meaning of our lives. The fruit of our lives.

The sense that there was something we were up to. That there was something about us worth attending to. Worth watching.

That we were up and comers. That we were people whose career was to be followed. That we were interesting in some way. Intriguing. That our thoughts were … new in some sense. That they hadn’t been thought before.

So that older philosophers could see our promise. So that we could sit with them at conferences as they bitched about everyone else. As they put down everyone else, witheringly. Wittily. As they made catty remarks about this or that speaker.

We were in the circle of intimates. We were deemed worthy enough to bitch in front of. To gossip before.

We were included. We weren’t targets of obvious contempt. Judgement was deferred. They looked upon us tolerantly, even a little warmly.

We’d earnt our place. We weren’t just no ones, no marks. We could even make a few catty remarks ourselves. To make them laugh, these older philosophers. These philosophers who’d done the rounds. Done all the big conferences. Who’d even hung out with the big names – the big European names. Who’d hung out with Zizek in the Alps. And Badiou on Malta …

 

We had the beginnings of a Reputation.

Players: that’s what we were. Taken half seriously. Given advice.

Thinkers of particular potential! Of special promise!

Because we weren’t part of the general magma. We weren’t run-of-the-mill types.

We were recognised as going to be around for some time. As worth getting to know, a little.

 

And didn’t we have glamour now, as full-time lecturers? Weren’t we were eligible, in the academic world at least?

We were taken seriously. We were players. Up-and-comers. Our speaking slots at conferences weren’t first thing in the morning. People would even come to our papers out of curiosity. What were these Newcastle people about? How come they were hired? Were picked out from all the other hopefuls? There must be something about them …

 

We were part of the continental philosophy scene. We weren’t ignorable. We weren’t just magma. We weren’t disposable. We weren’t there then gone, like so many other post-PhDs.

We weren’t passers through. We were fixtures, of a sort. We were going to be here for the long haul, or at least until our departments were closed down.

Which meant that we were worth getting to know. We might be needed as external examiners, or something. A PhD examiners. As external degree validators. As guest speakers, who knows? We might have something to say … And we couldn’t be worse than X, or Y …

Mutual advantage things. Player to player favours. Lecturer on lecturer boosterism. Wasn’t this how things were done?

 

We were going to be around for a while. There was some curiosity about us. What was happening up there at Newcastle? What was going on?

We weren’t just part of the crowd of post-PhDs, looking for work. Desperate for work.

We’d Made It in some sense. We had Status. We were In. We weren’t fly by nights.

We were part of the crowd. Worth getting to know. Maybe even worth taking seriously.

 

We had a glamour about us. People were curious. Who were we, anyway? What were we about? What were we working on? What were we Up To?

Worth having an affair with. Worth romancing, maybe. Worth entering into some Intrigue with.

 

Who knows what we’d do in the future. Could be asked to run a learned society. Become Treasurer of the British Society of Continental Philosophy. Join the Executive of Hermeneutica Scotia. Become the Secretary of the European Philosophy Circle.

We’d be part of the UK continental philosophy furniture – no question of that.

 

Our Rise. Our Ascent.

We were suddenly Attractive. Post PhDs approaching us. Wondering if we could offer them part-time work. Would there be an entry level jobs with us? Was Newcastle philosophy really expanding? Might there be an entry level job or two coming up?

We understood. We were once desperate. And pretty recently, too.

 

We’d be like them, the in-crowd. We were at home at conferences. Greeting friends at conferences. Greeted warmly.

 

Once you were in, you were in. Once you’d got your full time job, you were on the ascent, unless there was something really wrong with you. So longer as you published a few things. Gave a few papers. Your institutional standing would take care of itself. Your reputation, among your fellow lecturers … were you a bon vivant? Were they glad to run into you at conferences? Could you give a good paper?

 

Popular! Imagine that! We’d be popular! We’d be people to meet! From one of the power bases of European philosophy in the UK!

Eventually professors. Eventually, heads of department. Eventually, people of influence.

Eventually, heads of learned societies. Eventually. Editors of academic journals. Eventually, eminence grises.

Eventually, delivers of prestigious lecture series. Eventually, book series editors. Commissioners of books for book series. Contributors of essays to collections.

Reference-writers. People of influence. Promotion external assessors. Part of the European philosophers in the Anglophone world-machinery.

 

There must be something about us. We couldn’t be complete idiots. We were just fools. We’d made our way to lectureships – wasn’t that something? In this climate! In these times!

Lectureships in philosophy: gold-dust! How had we done it?

 

And what was happening in Newcastle, anyway? Everyone else, departments were closing, but in Newcastle?

 

So it wasn’t all disaster, after all. So it wasn’t just closure and ruination and devastation and Analytic hegemony. So the cause wasn’t quite lost. So Continental Philosophy wasn’t just fallen.

 

We were worth googling. Worth reading something by, so you could curry favour with us.

We were part of the scene. Postgrads told to cultivate us. Post PhDs … To get themselves known.

 

We’d be on the Inside. Recognised. Greeted. Nodded to. Waved at.

We’d become Known Quantities. Familiars.

We weren’t on the Outside anymore. We weren’t Ignorable. We were In, not Out.

Worth being nice to. Worth a Smile. Worth buttering-up after our papers (‘Very rich. Very interesting.’) Worth Flattering. Worth Cultivating. Worth Attending to in general. Worth sitting next to at conference meals.

Worth having a chat with. Worth spending half an hour with.

 

They’ll be attributing Cunning to us. Canniness. Player-ism. Careerism. They think we must be Clever. Just because we had a job. Just because we were gainfully employed. They’ll be deducing that we were Smart, after all. That we weren’t idiots, as we might have appeared. That we were in the Game, as they were. Where the stakes were Careers – proper careers.

That we were Going Somewhere. We weren’t on a hiding to nothing.

That they should Notice us. That we were worth Politeness. Even a kind of Respect for us.

 

Newcastle! A Russell Group university! Surprising. They didn’t expect that. The opening of a new philosophy department. A European one! How could that happen?

 

We were going to be People of Influence. We were to be Cultivated. Greeted.

 

And now we were part of it, the Anglophone Continental Philosophy machine. The European philosophy in the UK operation.

Now we might be Invited to give a talk at this department or that. Or to continue an essay to this special edition of a journal or that. We might be invited to another conference to speak.

 

There was even a kind of mystique about us. The Newcastle people. The European philosophers of Newcastle.

 

Newcastle!? Our university was ranked much higher than theirs. Our university had much more of a reputation!

 

They were shaking our hands – people we used to look up. People who’d spoken as keynote speakers when we were postgraduates at our first conference.

 

We were of the Establishment.

Busy with our projects – with what we might realise, might do.

Leave us alone. Let us see what we can do. What we might write. What we can think. How clever we can be. Give us a chance …

 

We’re in the chrysalis – the scholarly chrysalis. We’re busy transforming. Seeing who we can be, if given the chance. Testing our potential – to see whether we really have potential.

 

Leave us to do our thing, to do our work, to get on with stuff. Leave us to find out who we are as thinkers. Who we could be as philosophers. As philosophical anthropologists (Sophia.) As theologians (Io.) As writers! As literaro-philosophers (me.)

 

We’re all tribute acts, and not just you, Helmut.

 

Let us imitate the European greats, and learn through imitation. Let us busy ourselves with our tribute acts to Levinas and Blanchot and the rest. Let us try to write with flair.

 

We can still indulge all our fantasies of being thinkers of promise. Young academics to watch.

We haven’t run up against our limits yet – not really. We don’t know who we can’t be – not yet. Not really.

We talk a lot about our idiocy, but do we really know our idiocy? Have we really experienced our idiocy?

 

Would we able to make the transition, post PhD? Who might we become? Would we reveal a secret genius, furled until now?

If we work hard enough. If we keep our heads down for the summer. If we keep going, day after day.

 

Couldn’t we will ourselves to greatness? Just us and our books. At our laptops, tip-tapping our way to greatness.

Were we late developers, after all? Would we come into ourselves? Do the foundational work for our future careers.

 

Intensity. Focus. We were not to be idiot professors, focusing on this and then that. On this thinker, or that one.

We were to drive ourselves through the days and nights. Find ideas to live or die for – was that it? To develop … intuitions. Thoughts. In a British context! Here – in our benighted country. Thoughts, native to our country. That arse from the benightedness …

 

Weren’t we looking for a politics? And what political philosophy did we want to develop?

Was it Marxism, or something? Were we left wing, after all, after all the tyranny? Should we read the rightists?

Was there anything left in Marxism? Something no one had noticed? Something no one had noticed before? What about the Frankfurt School? Is there some corner of Frankfurt School thought that no one’s done anything with? What about the Italian automonists? The operarismo types? What about the Invisible Committee? Or the Anonymous Committee, or whatever they want to call themselves? Or some other group of radicals?

Maybe we should be the radicals. Maybe we’ll be the new political thinkers.

Do we have any political-philosophical ideas? Feelings? What do we have to work with?

 

We’re waiting for idea. We’re looking to discover our Idea. That would be all our own. That would give our thought an individual physiognomy. That would be all about us.

The sense that we were thinking something worthwhile. That only we could think! That only someone with our particular … histories. Backgrounds. Idiocies …

That only we could think, we idiots. We stupidismos …

Idiot summer. The summer when idiocy could breathe out. Be what it was. Stop pretending.

When we no longer tried to escape our stupidity. When we accepted it. Merged with it. Became one with it.

 

Stupidity summer. When summer was a diving bell. When you could sink into your idiocy. Explore it. Discover its depths.

 

Stunned summer, like a blow to the head. Summer stunned, reeling, staggering all around us. And we were staggering, too.

 

Our stupidity, joining the great stupidity. Our idiocy, joining the cosmic idiocy. The idiotic Creation.

And isn’t God an idiot, too? Wasn’t God always an idiot? Didn’t God sing his idiot’s song?

 

And we were being paid. We were being paid for this. Money credited into our accounts for this. Monthly salary payments for this.

 

Summer was working through us. Summer was thinking. Summer, reading. Philosophising. In us and through us.

 

Books whose pages turned in the sun. Books, left in fields. Books, lying open. Books, abandoned. Being read by the sky.

 

Trust in summer. That summer was Eternal. That summer would be there tomorrow. That the weeks would turn in summer. That weeks would pass in summer.

How many weeks before the start of the term? Before the start of the new academic year? Infinite weeks.

 

Weeks and weeks in the eternal. Weeks squared in the eternal. Turning there. Kept by the eternal. Held by the eternal. In eternity’s rhythm.

 

Summer strength. Summer weakness. Lying back into summer. Lying back, beneath the summer. Under it.

 

Summer passing over us.  Vast summer skies. Vast clouds. That we could watch from our offices, our summer offices.

 

No one knocking on our office doors. No one calling for us. No one on the phone.

No meetings in our schedules. Rare emails. Just from subscriptions. Just from jobs.ac.uk. Just from Philos-l. No urgent academic matters to attend to.

 

Time – the gift of time. Time’s timing. Time’s whiling. The turning of time.

 

Wanderings. Trips to Marks and Spencers, for lunch. Trips to Beatdown Records, to browse LPs.

Gaps – but part of study, the rhythm of study. Trips out, but trips that would bring us back to study. Refreshed for study.

 

And didn’t we even go to the beach? Didn’t we even walk on Longsands. Walk at Blyth. Walk at Seaton Sluice. That was part of work. That respired in work. Afternoons, but part of work.

And evenings? To the Ouseburn Valley? To catch a film at the Star and Shadow? Evenings, but back by eleven. Back in bed. So we could be up at six, and ready for work.

 

And weren’t we ready for summer intrigues? For summer romance? For adventures in summer, now we were all wearing less?