Part 1

I didn’t know when I started the job of reviewing the notes that it would consume me, but I did know that it would be a big job, a mammoth task that would require grit and determination to see through, I knew that from the moment I found out that Ludwig had died, I knew immediately that his notes would need reviewing, that the job of reviewing them would fall to me, the only person he trusted by the end, apart from Elda of course, but she could not be expected to review the files, being too weak, in the dispositional sense, to do so, although of course she wanted to, she said to me on the phone on the day that she called me to inform me that Ludwig had died, I want nothing more than to review the notes, she said, and to not just review them, but to glean the essence of them and to transcribe that essence into a record that might then be used by others in order to benefit from Ludwig’s painstaking labours, for the notes themselves, and Ludwig himself knew this of course, are far too dense, too prolific, too metaphysical and, dare I say it, too abstruse to be of any practical use to anyone in their unexpurgated form and therefore are crying out to be distilled into an essence or perhaps it would be better to say distilled into a core set of principles or tenets or axioms, which is something that Ludwig himself was incapable of doing even though he always felt he would one day be able to, thinking, erroneously as it sadly turned out, that the time would come when he had compiled all of the notes he felt needed to be compiled, at which point he would turn his attention to the task of synthesising his notes into a cogent treatise, a treatise that would express perfectly and with tremendous exactitude his Weltanschauung, but alas my disposition, as you know, she said, is not the type to lend itself to the task of reviewing Ludwig’s notes, which, she said, requires a level of diligence that surpasses my capacities, such as they are and stymied as they are by my inherent and very obvious weaknesses, weaknesses that are intellectual and spiritual, not to mention physical, something that I admit freely, as I always have admitted it freely, because there is no shame in knowing and making known one’s limitations, indeed on the contrary, the shame is in not knowing them or worse still denying them or dissimulating about them to others, otherwise I would have been the first to volunteer, she said, to do what is right and proper, namely conduct a thoroughgoing review of Ludwig’s notes, a review that requires the fastidiousness and tenacity of a reviewer with far greater competence than I am able to muster on account of my aforementioned weaknesses, which are well known to my friends, just as they were well known to Ludwig, who showed me in ignoring my weaknesses that he knew very well I had them, but, she said, as important as it is, as essential in fact, that Ludwig’s notes are reviewed, they must only be reviewed by a person who Ludwig trusted, otherwise it would be better if they were not reviewed at all, better if they were left to gather dust, to remain unseen and unknown about, for it need hardly be pointed out that an untrustworthy reviewer might use the notes for their own nefarious and perverted ends, the notes being peculiarly susceptible in fact to being used for nefarious and especially perverted ends, and that is why, in a far too roundabout fashion I am all too keenly aware, I am asking you if you will review them, because as you know and as I know, Ludwig trusted you implicitly, would in fact frequently remark to me how trustworthy you were, how your trustworthiness was something that distinguished you from all of the other so-called friends and acquaintances in his life, mainly acquaintances, as he himself often lamented. I have had enough, he used to say, of my so-called friends and acquaintances, all except you, she said, you he saw as a friend, a true friend, alone among all of the people who knew him, and who he knew, which amounted to a great many people all told, since Ludwig, in spite of his misgivings, was a naturally companionable man, as you yourself know, and drew people to him in their droves, in numbers that were unfathomable to myself but to Ludwig especially, who wanted nothing more than to spend his days on his notes in silent and isolated labour, but who was nonetheless compelled to socialise with the people who flocked to him as if he were a great guru and they were his acolytes, his idolisers, who, owing to his innate companionability he was powerless to turn away, even though it meant he frequently had to work on his notes at night and through the night, that being the only time he was spared for himself and the great project of his life, namely note-taking, which is another way of saying his collating of ideas, observations, hypotheses etc, all with a view to the production one day, a day that never came alas, of a magnum opus worthy of a Schopenhauer or even a Kant or a Hegel, so that he barely slept, save for the odd hour here or there, which I have no doubt contributed to his demise, which came too early and too suddenly; if only, I often think, he had turned these people away, worked during the day and slept at night like a normal person, but Ludwig, as we both know, was decidedly not a normal person. No, I agreed, he was not a normal person, not that in truth I had any idea what constituted a normal person, and, I said, it goes without saying, although I am in fact going to say it, that it would be the honour of my life to take on the mantle of being the reviewer of his notes and I assured Elda that I would endeavour, just as she had intended, to decipher their essence in order that it be set down and hopefully promulgated for the benefit of the many, for I had no doubt that the sine qua non of the notes, their essence as Elda had put it multiple times in our phone conversation, once extracted and refined, would be of monumental importance, Ludwig himself had often hinted as much to me or alluded or implied, particularly when he’d had a few drinks, which he often did when we met each other, normally consuming them over a meal in some mid-grade restaurant, both of us being partial to mid-grade restaurant food, but sometimes also in a bar or a pub where we met for the express purpose not only of conversing but also of drinking, neither of us being the types to shy away from inebriation, just as we would never shy away from conversation, which would typically range across a vast array of topics and involve a robust, even frank exchanging of opinions, not that there was anything ill-tempered about these conversations, which on the contrary were thoroughly agreeable, involving a good deal of banter and uproarious laughter, even when Ludwig was talking, perhaps especially when he was talking, about his project, about the notes that he sedulously compiled and had been compiling for as long as I’d known him, which was a long time, since we went back a long way, having met at Oxford as late-stage teenagers, he a philosophy student, me a history student, he determined to become a philosopher or a teacher of philosophy, me determined to become an historian or a teacher of history, having become friends by virtue of being at the same college, a college that we loved for its greatness and yet disliked equally as much for its aloofness, a college that was pervaded through and through with an atmosphere of aloofness, although also greatness, expressed most vividly in its baroque architectural features, but also in the brilliance of its academics and in the earnestness of its students and in the illustriousness of its alumni, a college that had attracted us because of its greatness but also repulsed us because of its indubitable and entirely incorrigible aloofness, something that we remarked upon frequently to each other and never quite got over, or rather, I myself did get over it, whereas Ludwig never did, Ludwig being the kind of person in whom a feeling or a thought grew in intensity over time rather than diminishing to the point of nothingness or to a harmless husk of what it once was, Ludwig being the type of person to store all of his thoughts and feelings, all growing ineluctably in intensity, in the foreground of his consciousness, each jostling for attention at the same time, each demanding to be heard, which is why, of course, Ludwig had no choice in the matter of his note-taking, a lifelong habit that only ceased when he did, the note-taking being nothing other than an attempt to placate all of these thoughts and feelings or perhaps to exorcise them, although he never exorcised a single one of them, as he would sometimes confide to me, not a single thought or feeling, he would sometimes say to me, have I managed to get rid of, not that he said this by way of a complaint, it was only by way of objectively referring to his state of mind that he said this to me, Ludwig being as stoical as anyone I’ve ever known, in fact far more stoical, which is a quality I admired in him though never understood, being myself far less able to withstand the vicissitudes of life, prone to querulous outbursts and bouts of neurosis, even though for me thoughts and feelings did come and go and stay gone, I still found my mind unbearable at times, whereas Ludwig found his mind bearable, even though it was clogged with thoughts and feelings that refused to budge, that in fact only became more and more prominent and clamorous for attention, which for me would have caused insanity, but for Ludwig was nothing more than an inconvenience that he forbore with dignity and preternatural calmness, and which he channelled, as I have said, into his notes, which he believed would one day lead, once the time was propitious, to the expounding of a credo that others, the world, his imagined readership might benefit from, notes which it was now my job to review, hence why I had moved, at short notice, having quit my job as a so-called accountant, to the house in Hindhead, the house Ludwig shared with Elda for so many years and in which she still lived, though only in the part of it that was hers, the house having been split many years ago into two wings, hers and Ludwig’s, hers being the west wing, his the east, hers light and airy, his dark and cluttered, hers having expansive views across the Devil’s Punch Bowl, his looking out onto a road with some woebegone shops lining it, shops that never seemed to attract any customers through their doors, shops that Ludwig had told me on several occasions he suspected of being a front for illicit activities, though that was pure speculation on his part, well founded speculation it has to be said, I thought to myself as I stood in Ludwig’s office by the window looking out onto the road with the shops, which were in an even sorrier state than I remembered them being, and which purveyed goods and services I couldn’t imagine myself ever needing or wanting, not that I needed or wanted anything that required the exchange of consideration (except the bare necessities, of course, those things I did need and sometimes did want and was prepared to exchange consideration for), that being a feature of who I was as a person and still am as a person and always had been as a person, though my parents did their best to instil in me the habits and the proclivities of a so-called consumer, they never succeeded, they thought they had succeeded, of course, because I led them to believe that they had by acting like an avid consumer, but they never did, even though I purchased a great many things for their benefit and it seemed like they had succeeded, in fact I was only ever pretending to be an avid consumer for their benefit, the truth being that I never wanted nor needed those things that I bought for their benefit in order to make my parents think and, later, other people to think, that I needed and wanted the things that they needed and wanted, the truth being that I thought and felt, and still think and feel, that there is nothing more objectionable than needing and wanting things that you evidently do not need or should not want, although of course, there are basic things that everyone needs, even myself, food, for example, or clothing or warm shelter, the basics required for survival in other words. Not that staying alive is as important as we make out, I have often thought, nonetheless I do not mean to impugn people for having and acting upon these fundamental needs, which must be satisfied if a person is to stay alive, and whilst I do not personally feel that staying alive is as important as people generally believe it to be, I do not begrudge them for having this belief, which is innate to our species and as far as we can tell to other species, although in their case it is not so much a belief as a drive or pure will, the very same will, in fact, that ultimately forms the basis of, gives life to, is the predicate of the generally held belief that trying to stay alive, otherwise known as survival, is an a priori given, the will to live as Schopenhauer so eloquently and (let’s face it) dogmatically put it, the objectification of the thing in itself to itself for itself by itself. But the other needs and the imagined wants, that is quite another matter, these needs and these wants are completely and utterly objectionable, and the people who have them or think they have them, which is most people I am all too painfully aware, are as pitiable as they are pathetic, as deluded as they are revolting, as deplorable as they are dissolute, which is why it had always been so painful for me to pretend that I had the same needs and wants by consuming things that I neither needed nor wanted, I thought to myself as I stood there in Ludwig’s office looking out of the window at the shops and finding myself quite alone and therefore not having anyone to have to pretend to about anything, since there was no one there with me, except Elda of course, who kept to her wing, just as I kept to Ludwig’s wing, it being a strict rule of residing, or in my case lodging, in the house; one had a wing and one kept to it, that was the rule, a rule I understood and respected, though I had always thought it peculiar that Elda and Ludwig had to choose a wing and stick to it, I nonetheless adhered to the rule. Soon, I realised, I would have to begin the Herculean task of sifting through the notes, but at that precise moment, I didn’t feel up to it, I knew that my mind was too febrile to attend to Ludwig’s legacy, the attending to which no doubt would only have exacerbated the agitation in (or of) my mind, although I didn’t know it for sure, I was nonetheless certain that Ludwig’s papers, his notes as Elda referred to them and as I also referred to them, would, if I read them then, or at least started the no-doubt lengthy process of reading them, only perturb my mind further and that that would in effect negate any putative effort expended in the reading or reviewing of Ludwig’s notes, notes that I had no doubt would impart difficult and almost certainly complex ideas that would of necessity demand assimilation into the network of my beliefs, perhaps ramifying the network greatly, and I knew, what with my mind being in a particularly restive state that it would not take kindly to a thoroughgoing complexification and restructuring of its beliefs, that indeed it would very likely and quite understandably, given the roiling state it found itself in, reject the assignment out of hand, so I decided then and there, in the bit of time that quickly receded into the past where it no longer existed and the bit of space in which my body found itself situated, by the window in Ludwig’s office, that I would go for a walk and clear my head, as they say, hence why I put on my coat, hat and gloves and exited Ludwig’s wing through the back door that was in fact used as the only door to either enter or exit that wing, the front door having been barricaded shut with heavy iron struts for some inexplicable reason, soon finding myself going around and also down into the Devil’s Punch Bowl, passing people as I walked who either tried to make eye contact with me and I refused to make eye contact with them or otherwise who refused to make eye contact with me as I tried to make eye contact with them, which reminded me, for some reason that I couldn’t discern just then (although I didn’t try very hard to), of the company I had recently been working for, or more precisely of the people who also had worked and almost certainly continued to work for that company, people who I had been compelled to communicate with for the purpose of performing my duties and who had been compelled to communicate with me in the performance of theirs, even though I had not wanted to communicate with them I had been compelled to do so and even though they had not wanted to communicate with me, they had been similarly compelled, in other words we hadn’t wanted to communicate and therefore hadn’t really communicated, meaning we had merely pretended to communicate solely for the purpose of performing our duties, or to be more accurate, solely for the purpose of appearing to perform our duties, since the appearance of performing our duties was what mattered, far more so than the actual performing of our duties, which was a kind of epiphenomenon of appearing to perform them, an unreliable one at that. And then I got to thinking of my boss and the many ingenious ways in which we had pretended to communicate with each other, in particular, I thought, at that moment as I rounded a bend lined with conifers, of the way in which my boss had acknowledged my efforts whilst also subtly repudiating them, the way in which he would agree with a proposal I might make whilst also obstinately refusing to implement that proposal, the way in which he would commend me for my unerring ability to identify accounting errors, whilst steadfastly refusing to correct those errors, even when he said he would ensure the errors were corrected as a matter of priority, they were never corrected, though he pretended they had been corrected and acted like someone who had presided over the correcting of them, in fact, he never once presided over the single correction of an accounting error, believing (I am sure) that the correction of an accounting error involved the acknowledgement of it, something that might fatally undermine his reputation for running a tight ship, a ship that was in fact full of holes and taking on water and would eventually (I am sure) sink into the inky depths without a trace. I thought of all the many and varied attempts my boss had made to undermine me and all my attempts to subvert his attempts, in particular, I thought of how my boss would either not invite me to meetings or else invite me and never permit me to speak at those meetings, not by out and out telling me not to speak of course, but by always speaking himself in the intervening periods in which the other meeting attendees were not speaking, or if I did have the temerity to speak, which to begin with I did at these so-called meetings, by talking over me, or else if I had managed to get enough words out to make my point before he had had a chance to interrupt or speak over me, by immediately countering my point or pretending to agree with it only to never acknowledge it again, even if all the other meeting attendees agreed with my point and an action was assigned to me to do something because of the point I had made, my boss would simply never address that point again, even when I implemented the agreed action he would pretend that I hadn’t implemented it, not that after a while I bothered about implementing any actions that had been agreed as a result of points I had managed to make in the meetings I was infrequently invited to, because I had come to realise by then that my boss didn’t want me to implement any actions or indeed make any points in the few meetings he invited me to, something I realised very quickly as it happens, although I could never be sure if in fact my mind was simply concocting this realisation, even though it was irrefutably true that my boss was undermining me at every turn, so that in effect all of my efforts or the outputs of my labour were either rejected or ignored, normally both simultaneously of course, but not always, since my boss was very capable of rejecting my efforts or outputs without ignoring them – not that he would outwardly reject them, outwardly he would accept and even endorse my efforts or my outputs – just as he was also capable of ignoring my efforts or outputs without obviously rejecting them, something that was his preferred method of operating in fact, so that to all intents and purposes I became a worker producing outputs for the sake of producing them, without any productive purpose or putative objective in mind. Nonetheless and in spite of the hopelessness of my predicament, I continued to work as if I did have a productive purpose, in fact I worked as hard as it was humanly possible to work, often if not always starting very early in the day, far earlier than my boss, and often if not always finishing far later as well, which I suppose at bottom was nothing less than an attempt to subvert my boss’ desideratum, namely his undermining of me and all of my efforts and attempts to make a difference, however small, at the company that we both worked for and which paid us, me a meagre salary, him a hefty salary (I am sure), me a tiny inconsequential bonus, him a juicy fat bonus (I am sure), me no stock options, car allowance or private medical cover, him plenty of stock options, a car allowance and private medical cover (I am sure), I thought, as I made my way along a sandy track through the trees, having by now descended to the bottom of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, which surrounded me on all sides and seemed to press in on me with an alarming concavity; not only my boss had rejected me, I thought, but all the other people in my department had rejected me, they had pretended to accept me, but had nonetheless not accepted me, just as my colleagues in the company I had worked for before that had not accepted me, and my colleagues in the company I had worked for before that, in fact all of the colleagues I had ever worked with had never accepted me, not for one second had there ever been a glimmer of acceptance, there being something about me, I had often thought or felt, that made it impossible for other people to accept me, or rather my colleagues to accept me, since certain people outside of a work context, Elda for example, did accept me for who I was or thought I was or at least purported to be, but not colleagues, they had never been able to accept me, not that I wanted or needed their acceptance, or so I told myself at that precise moment and had frequently told myself in the past, there being something about seeking their acceptance that I found deeply abhorrent, and which I suppose might not be entirely unrelated to the fact that I had not gained their acceptance, since one must want to be accepted in order to be accepted and I had never wanted to be accepted, perhaps because I had never truly come to terms with the fact that I had ended up becoming an accountant and therefore found myself surrounded by other accountants, which it need hardly be pointed out was an intolerable burden, accountants being the most pedantic, obnoxious and downright odious people you can find in a workplace, the burden being especially intolerable since I myself was an accountant, as abject and objectionable as any other, probably more so (given my error-spotting proclivities), even though I had always wanted, in fact, to be an historian, an aspiration I had had to give up when it became clear that my panic attacks would make it impossible for me to stand up in front of students and impart history to them without falling apart, as they say. I had always wanted to be an historian, but I had had to give up that aspiration owing to my mercurial nervous system, which wasn’t a difficult thing to do, in reality I had only wanted to be an historian because I had been good at history at school and for no other deeper reason, and so it was easy for me to change my aspiration, overnight as it were, as soon as I realised that my panic attacks would impede my ability to stand up in front of a classroom or, God forbid, a lecture hall full of students and perform the pedagogic role expected of an historian.