Read Online The Pages by Murray Bail - Free Book Online Page A

is not remarkable.’ He had a pedigree rare enough to excite envy. One Sunday afternoon in Cambridge, 1913, in amongst the deckchairs on a don’s back lawn, Ludwig Wittgenstein had patted him on the head when he was a boy still in shorts, which was enough later to land him tenure in philosophy departments in England and North America, and finally at Sydney University.
    Renmark went about in nothing but an open-necked shirt, even in the middle of winter, bringing inside to the lecture hall and the corridors the rude good health of the long walk, the heath, the stout walking stick, and all that. Wide open and crisply ironed, the shirt exposed a hungry look. Renmark had a gaunt throat. He was sixty-plus. And he was hungry – forever leaning towards something out of reach.
    Here was Renmark at the lectern. Wesley Antill took his seat in the front row. By way of introduction… Philosophy was nothing less than a description of the impossible. If it was close to anything it was close to music. You had to be porous to allow it. Therefore, noble – it was a noble enterprise . He spoke of the ‘Everest of thinking, the pinnacle’. Approximation, that’s all you could expect. It was a climb – towards what exactly? ‘Forget the exactly,’ he said, glancing in Antill’s direction. It is more in the realm of being ‘precise about imprecision’. Other words he threw at them were ‘maps’ and ‘mapping’, and ‘blindness’, ‘on all fours’, ‘the candle flickering and almost going out’, ‘stumbling about in the dark’. A common candle, he told them – here Antill underlined – was closer to philosophy than electricity could ever be, the ‘spurious certainty’ of the light bulb. ‘What sort of serious light is that?’
    Philosophy was a by-product of the Northern Hemisphere. Nothing much has happened down here. Why so? Dark forests, the cold, the old walls, the shadows of superstitions worrying the darkened lives, windows closed, all were pushed about by words which joined up into propositions to let in light, a little, a dark light . ‘Too much light is fatal for philosophical thought.’ But some light is necessary. To leave the dark room led by the faltering light of philosophy. It was the way out ‘to somewhere else’.
    After that, Renmark introduced the main western philosophers by describing their lives. Without fail their stories were strangely interesting. He revealed how they managed to earn a living, and drew attention to the rare instances of a philosopher being married. It was up to the philosopher to become a singular person, he said more than once. Initially, some had been soldiers, or physicians, or tutors; there was the gardener in the monastery; others would remain disgruntled university workers or public servants; more than one went mad; suicides. With each lecture he summarised an individual’s achievements, declaring this man, always a man, seemed to have found the answer, or perhaps half-pointed towards a possible answer. Running his tongue over his front teeth, nodding at the lectern, Renmark then proceeded to dismantle him, or rather his philosophy by introducing his successor. Each philosopher stirred another.
    The Germans, he added mysteriously, were not always guilty.
    Among the faces before him, Renmark had noticed Wesley Antill in the front row. While the others remained more or less motionless this one’s head kept going up and down, from the lecturer to his notebook. He wrote more sentences at a faster rate than anybody else. To have at least one person hanging on your every word like a stenographer gave pleasure to Renmark, and he slowed his delivery, at one point pausing to blow his nose, and to look thoughtfully up at the ceiling, only to watch as Antill scribbled still more in the same time.
    He never missed a lecture, and always had the same seat – front