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always something wrong with me, isn’t there? One day it’s a nosebleed, the next nausea, the next some indeterminate fever … And my stomach, whatever is wrong with my stomach?
    W. never used to believe me about my stomach. He thought I was a hypochondriac. But once he saw my face turn green—green!—he understood. You looked appalling, he said. Everyone was horrified, everyone at the table. And then, for a terrible morning when he was visiting me, W. himself was taken ill.—‘It’s my stomach! My God!’, he cried. He decided it was my lifestyle. All that drinking! All that eating! One night, he saw me pass out from gluttony. I ate like a maniac, he said, plate after plate. And then my head fell back … he was worried, but then he heard me snoring.
    ‘How can you live like this?’, said W. exasperated beyond belief. ‘How?’ I’ve always maintained that this is my five year hole . Everyone should be allowed one of those. Deleuze had one, didn’t he? A five year hole , that’s what he called it, in which he wrote nothing?—‘But Deleuze was working’ , says W., ‘and you don’t do any work, do you? What happened to you? How did you get like this? Why don’t you read anymore? Why don’t you write?’
    W. finds the collapse of his protégé quite fascinating.—‘When did it all start going wrong? When did you first become aware of it?’ There’s something spectacular about my decline, W. decides. Something Faustian.—‘What kind of bargain did you make with the devil back then? How did you appear so intelligent?’ And then: ‘Well, he’s carried your soul off now, hasn’t he?’
    Then, in a spirit of diagnosis: ‘Describe your work day to me. What do you do?’ I tell him I get up very early.—‘How early?’ Never later than six thirty, I tell him.—‘I get up at five!’, W. says, ‘Earlier sometimes!’—Then I do two hours of work, I tell him.—‘What kind of work? What does it involve?’ I read …—‘What kind of reading? In the original language? Primary, rather than secondary?’ I write …—‘Ah, that’s your problem. You try to write too soon. You have to slow down. Read more slowly. That’s why I read things in the original’. Then I go to the office to do my administering, I tell W.—‘Ah, your administration’, says W., ‘that’s what stops you from writing your magnum opus, isn’t it?’
    A little later, in the taxi home: ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ Nothing, I tell him. I have no plans.—‘You should do a book’, says W., ‘if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces’.

 
    ‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk.—‘All set?’ We’re all set. Despite his general inactivity, W. is a great advocate of walking: it’s what we’re made for, he says, and speaks of the long walks he used to take on the weekend.
    We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle. But why is that?, we muse. Why are we content?’—‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ No, I tell him.—‘Well neither am I’.
    We head up into the grounds, the great sweep of lawn running up to the mansion on our right, opening up a great landscape, planned and planted two hundred years ago.—‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, says W. Then, on our left, a beach of pebbles, the sea, and, across the Sound, the distant city, with blue-grey naval ships going to and fro.
    ‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out over the water. There’s a