Note 9

Posted by Genjo on June 26th, 2009 filed in Uncategorized

Written in the flyleaf of Wohl’s well-thumbed copy of Candide was the following enigmatic note:

Voltaire’s first happiness was doubt
and forgetfulness

- the writing of a text
littered with irony
yet devoid of

time. Immobility…

It was this kind of note, scattered throughout Wohl’s writings, which haunted the reader.

The struggle to embrace meaning, to worry the text into revelations only hinted at, provided a dynamic too powerful to resist. Like the stream turning the millwheel, grinding the corn, producing the flour.

Voltaire’s writings do thrive on doubt, on an edgy intellectual uncertainty for which resolution is not sought. The doubts are laid out, handled, raised to the light and replaced. No dust is allowed to settle. The picking-up, handling and putting down are acts of celebration, not acts of despair. The constant chivvying of certainty to yield uncertainty are properties of the Voltairean style, and of Wohl’s own reading.

There is no desire for solidity, for information, for crystalline hardness or absolute clarity. Wohl’s light is the light which infests the dusty room through which someone has moved disturbing the air, rendering everything into a quivering insubstantiality which no amount of staring can immobilise.

But what did Wohl mean when he wrote: ‘yet devoid of time’?