Spurious by Lars Iyer Page B

hold on to their conversations, let alone make them up. Yes, the other person is always Kafka, W. says, even me. He knows that, says W., why don’t I?
    You have to know you’re not Kafka, says W., that’s the first thing. But you have to know that the person you’re speaking to might be Kafka, that’s the second. This is why conversation, for W., is always a matter for hope. The very ability to speak, to listen and respond, is already something, he says.
    Of course, to speak to the other, to respond, is already to betray. Whatever you say is a betrayal, even if at the same time it is suffused with hope. That the other person might be Kafka is a perpetually present possibility , says W. And that you are also the Brod who betrays Kafka is the destruction of this possibility, its disavowal.
    In what sense is he Brod?, W. wonders. He knows the answer, he says. He never listens enough. He never gives himself over to what is being said. He always comes up short, says W., very short, which is why he always feels troubled when he speaks, yet at the same time always wants to push conversation towards the messianic.
    ‘Even you’, says W., ‘even you might be Kafka, which would be a great miracle’. Of course, on the other hand, I’ll never be Kafka for myself , but only for him, my conversationalist. The other person is never other for himself , says W. Or only rarely.
    For haven’t we along the way met thinkers—real thinkers—who speak without a concern for themselves, without any sense of self-preservation? It’s as though what they say is indifferent to them, we agree. As though they are borne by thought, thought by it, rather than the other way round.
    Yes, we have been fortunate to meet real thinkers, W. and I agree. It was our great good fortune. But wasn’t it also our curse? Didn’t we have confirmed for us that of which we would not be capable, that of which we above all would not be capable? It’s important to know your limitations—on that we’re agreed—but to have them reconfirmed so often; to have the sense of them closing around you like a cage?
    We’re being suffocated, we agree. How can we breathe? But an encounter with a real thinker is precisely that breath. How is it possible, the sense that, with a thinker, a thought is shared between us? How is it possible that we believe ourselves to participate in thinking? Thought seems to occur between us. It seems to flow there, as though we were gathered around a mountain stream, around thought in its freshness, eternally streaming.
    Ah to be near the source, at the beginning point! To have reached the highest, widest plateau with only the flashing stars above us! That’s where these thinkers bring us; that’s the vista their thought provides. Yes, we have seen the heights; thoughts, pure and fresh, have passed beside us.
    Were we the condition of thought? We were only its occasion, alas. Someone spoke to us; we looked interested. Someone spoke; we listened. That was it. And thinking welled up around us like a great flood, and there were fishes in that flood, fish-thoughts streaming by us.
    That was it, and nothing more. And with what were we left when the flood subsided? Where were we beached but on the valley-bottom of our stupidity, on the parched sands that no thought might cross?

 
    W. sends me a quotation from his notebook:
For the youth of the world is past and the strength of creation already exhausted and the advent of times is very short. Yea, they have passed by, and the pitcher is near to the cistern and the ship to the port and the course of the journey to the city and life to its consummation .
    It’s from the Syriac Book of Baruch , a pseudo-epigraphic text from the period of the destruction of the temple, he says. Then he sends me another:
The world endlessly becomes itself, but because this process is endless the world never is the end towards which it moves. Similarly, God endlessly becomes himself by not being what the world has