Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘There you have it.’ Jim was triumphant. ‘For that beat and a half I held them, I gauged them. The whole lot of them. I interrupted the cadence of the crowd; they were waiting.’

‘Waiting!’ I snorted. ‘Waiting for what?’

‘For the end of the lunch break, for a nuclear war, for the poisoning of the earth, for old age, for the millennium, for the last judgement, for their hair to turn grey, for retirement, for a big gambling win, for a strange sexual experience, for the hand of God to touch them, for their children to support them, for the right person, for a new car, for the interest rate to fall, for the next election, for their bowels to get back to normal. What does it matter? I’ve said it once, I don’t care if I say it a thousand times — everyone is waiting.

‘There are only two great feelings left in the late twentieth century. Two great feelings that have eaten up all the other, little feelings like love, loyalty, exaltation, anger and alienation; as surely as if they were krill being sucked into the maw of a whale. Immanence and imminence, immanence and imminence. Everyone is convinced that something is going to happen, but they don’t know what it is. Some people suspect that whatever it is will be some implosion of the numen, some great exposure of the transcendent. The rest don’t know … yet. But they will, they will.’

‘Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you promised to cut down on the ranting.’

He recovered himself and we went to get a drink and a sandwich at the Mitre. Jim was quite reasonable throughout lunch and I was almost prepared to forgive him his outburst in the street. There was no talk of waiting at all, even though the bar service was pretty appalling and there was a five-deep press of double-breasteds around the bar. On the way back over the viaduct I said to Jim that I’d see him around.

‘Yeah, you’ll see me around. Around 6.00 at Houghton Street; we’re going to a lecture.’

‘A lecture? What lecture?’ He shoved a crumpled A5 flyer into my hand. It was blue-bordered and had the University of London shield at the top. It read as follows:

Meaning and Millenarianism

Transition to Another Era

An open lecture by Richard Stein, Emeritus Professor of

the History of Ideas at the LSE.

6.00 p.m. The Old Lecture Theatre

&c.

‘All right, I’ll come.’ Jim looked shocked. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to hear someone else give a lecture besides you.’

I left Jim outside the doors to his office and walked on up towards the Central School on Southampton Row. I turned back at the corner to wave goodbye, but Jim didn’t notice. He was deep in conversation with two despatch riders whose bikes were pulled up to the kerb. One of them was short and ginger-haired with a slack, gap-toothed mouth. The other was black and angular, with his hair shaved into a tight triangular wedge on top of his head. Both of them were dressed in the couriers’ uniform: ribbed leather jackets, leather trousers and high rubberised boots, complete with ridges and crenellations. I studied them for a while. It was clear that Jim knew them well. The way the three of them stood, gestured and smiled indicated friendship; and yet I knew Jim well, I was a close friend, but he had never mentioned his despatch rider friends. I turned and walked back to my office.

Both phone calls and Post-it notes have a life cycle of their own. They are not mere servants of man, but clever parasites that use human industry to further their own growth as a species. That at any rate is the way I felt by the time I reached Houghton Street to meet Jim after work. I found him standing outside the Australian High Commission. He was standing at the tall, plate-glass window, staring into an aquarium of humans, as they snaked slowly towards the visa application counters.

I was expecting some kind of tirade, but he desisted and instead led me across the Aldwych to Houghton Street. However, rather than turning left into the main lobby of the LSE, he turned right into the Students’ Union Building. He walked as if he knew the place. Rounding a corner we came to a lift with a difference.

It was more like a vertical escalator than a conventional lift. A series of compartments moved slowly but continually past the landing where we stood. All we had to do to get on was jump through the opening. To the left the compartments descended, to the right they ascended. We stood for a couple of minutes in silent contemplation of this mechanical oddity, then Jim turned on his heel with a vague gesture and said, ‘No waiting.’ We started back towards the entrance.

The Old Lecture Theatre must have been purpose-built as such when the Houghton Street building was erected in the Thirties. It was far wider than it was deep, and curiously wedge-shaped, like a slice of cake a compulsive eater might cut themselves. The lecture was sparsely attended; up in the gallery I could just see the round heads of a few diligent students, already bent and scribbling, while the scattered audience we sat among in the stalls seemed to consist of an odd assortment of octogenarians and the kind of slightly featureless black and brown men who one can tell immediately are perpetual students from the developing world. Men who have been spending years on writing doctoral theses on public policy in Coventry, while diligently sending a proportion of their grant money home to the family in Bangladesh.

Professor Stein and the academic who was to introduce him were already seated up on the podium when Jim and I came in. The podium took up the whole front of the theatre and was faced in the same dark brown wood as almost every other surface in sight. The overwhelming impression was one of enclosure and stultification. A dusty decanter of water and a cut-glass vase of wilted flowers stood on the podium table, behind which the Professor regarded the audience with mild, mournful brown eyes as if he were a cow with no milk to give. In the hard, cramped, tip-up seat I tried to compose myself for sleep.

The chairman rose to his feet. ‘Errumph … It’s er … 6.15 and it doesn’t look like we’ll have too many more people coming so I think we’ll make a start.’ My eyelids felt gummy and heavy. ‘Most of you are, no doubt, familiar with Professor Stein’s work. For those of you that aren’t I must apologise at this juncture. The Professor has asked me especially to refrain from a long recitation of his publications and the academic positions he has held and confine myself purely to those works that have a direct bearing on the lecture he is going to give us this evening. That being so, let it suffice for me to say that since Professor Stein retired from the chair here at the LSE some three years ago, he has spent the vast bulk of his time on organising, administering and teaching at the Centre for Millenarian Studies which he himself founded at Erith Marsh. His publications during this period have reflected his preoccupation with the coming end of our era; I refer to his paper “Wittgenstein and the Arterial Road System in the Southeast of England” and, of course, “Mirror Image: Reductive Cultural Identity in Late Twentieth-century Britain”, both published in the BJE 2 .

‘The occasion of this particular lecture is to give us all an opportunity to, as it were, preview Professor Stein’s new book Meaning and Millenarianism; and to hear from the author himself some of the arguments he puts forward in the book, in advance of its publication next week. I’d like to say at this juncture that there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of the lecture, but this period will of necessity be circumscribed as we need to clear the lecture theatre for the Students’ Drama Society, who, I believe, are rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma . Err … Professor Stein.’