It was an easy enough choice. I'd heard Martin Heidegger's Being and Time was one of the most incomprehensible books ever written, and it was an optional text as well, which was another feature that attracted me: pointless as well as difficult. I went over to the short-loan shelf to see if I could find it, but it wasn't there, so I climbed up the spiral staircase to the philosophy section on the next floor. I didn't go up there very often, but when I did I always liked it and wondered why I didn't use it more. It was a quiet corner of the library where you could stand among the enormous leather-bound volumes and peer over the railings at the people below without being seen. Somehow being up there made me feel secure, as though 1 was observing the world from my stronghold of lofty ideas on high.

I found the book and took it down from the shelf. When I looked at the library stamp at the front, I noticed that hardly anyone had ever taken it out. As I flicked through the pages, I saw that the main text was full of German words, hyphenated phrases, and repetitive, apparently nonsensical sentences, and there were also passages in Latin and Greek. It looked completely impenetrable, which was just the kind of thing I'd been looking for, so I went over to a chair by the window and started to read.

I’d come across this sort of writing before, with Hegel, but Heidegger was farther out than that: so far out that he was almost just a dot on the horizon. Not only did his ideas go round in circles, like Hegel's, but there were also bizarre phrases like 'ready-to-hand', 'present-at-hand', 'towards-which', and 'for-the-sake-of' which jumbled ordinary words together in a way that seemed to make no sense. On top or that, every time he had something really important to say, he went into Greek or Latin, neither of which I understood, so I could only guess what he meant.

I mustered my concentration, but after an hour or so, I was none the wiser as to what Being and Time was about. Reading Heidegger was like listening to two people having a conversation in a foreign language: you occasionally thought you might have understood one or two words here and there, but you had absolutely no idea what they were talking about in general.

Even so, there was something about the text that fascinated me. Perhaps it was the idea that someone would set out to understand what it fundamentally means for us to be here, to 'be in the world' as he put it; and that they'd start by reviewing all philosophy hitherto, from Plato on, and pronounce that everyone else since the beginning of time had got it completely wrong; and that they'd go on to claim they'd finally found what it was that was missing from the history of human thought: and that they’d then dream up new combinations of words for their inexpressible ideas, and string them all together with hyphens, and expect people to take them seriously. It was such an impossible task, and so insanely ambitious to attempt it, that it almost brought tears to my eyes. And then there was the writing, which was so abstruse that I wondered at times if Heidegger was mad, or if this was a case of the emperor’s new clothes and he was just taking the piss out of a load of academics, the way Nietzsche did a lot of the time; but whatever the case, you had to admire the guy's nerve.

Pp. 140-2

¶ 1:47 AM