Descriptions of Wohl vary a great deal. Indeed the few we have tend to contradict each other. The most detailed comes from the diary of April Ponsard, a student in Paris during the mid-1950s. She’d been to a seminar given by Sartre at the Sorbonne. After a long and rather rambling disquisition on the unethical behaviour of those who did not take responsibility for their own choices in life, Sartre asked for questions. Two students leapt in with convoluted and poorly prepared queries that the sage dealt with in a cursory and almost brutal manner.

Ponsard writes: ‘As he smoked his second cigarette the room became very quiet and the still air seemed to solidify around us. I noticed in one corner, slightly separate from us, a shabbily dressed but very elegant figure. His short grey hair, receding around two deep bays, framed an unruffled brow, a firm nose and a neat faintly-smiling mouth. A grey moustache and goatee beard completed a picture of someone alert, sensitive and rather removed. A kind of familiar strangeness hung about him. Part of this strangeness was the clarity of his eyes, almost the colour of dry hay in vivid sunshine, and the oriental set of his features. But he wasn’t Chinese or Mongolian or Korean because he spoke French with a German or an English accent, but he could have been a cousin to Li Po or Tu Fu.’

Ponsard describes the growing embarrassment of Sartre’s audience as no one spoke and the master waited. Eventually the familiar stranger slowly nodded his head and spoke softly: ‘Sometimes we have to accept choices that are made for us. The apple falling on a particular day and hour did not choose the head of Newton upon which to fall. The child does not choose a mother, but loves her nonetheless. The poet does not choose his muse or the dream that fuels his poem. The teacher does not choose her pupils but lavishes care upon them all. The philosopher does not choose his audience but they have chosen him and so often go away disappointed.’

At which point Sartre stubbed his cigarette on the plastic tabletop and took a gulp of water from the glass before him. All eyes were on the stranger who nodded gently, smiled very sweetly and turned to leave.

Sartre at his most caustic called out: “And who my friend, are you?” To which the stranger replied, courteously: “I am from another country. A fact over which I have no choice. My name is Wohl and I choose to leave. Au revoir.”

Sartre sneered as he often did and asked for more questions. But there were none that could be spoken. But silent questions were in everyone’s minds: who was the polite stranger with the endearing smile? where did he come from? and why was Sartre so irritated at what he’d said?’

Ponsard notes a few pages on in her diary that she met a librarian two weeks later who’d also been at the seminar and recognised the stranger as ‘Heinrich Wohl, a poor scholar and itinerant philosopher from somewhere outside France.’

Silence rarely leads to misunderstanding; speaking nearly always does.

All knowledge is interpretation.

To understand is to translate. Translation always involves loss, change and reconstruction.

All seeing is an act of translation: light into meaning, energy into understanding.

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’?

On the back of an old photograph, perhaps a Venetian montage, Wohl has written: ‘we all live in the shadows under a bridge between here and there, between now and then, between this world and another. We yearn to cross over the bridge. But the bridge is only a reflection formed by shadows on water.’

*

The purpose of dialectics is to dissolve all dualism, and to dissolve dualism we have to embrace dualism at its most extreme, in paradox.

*

It is important always to hold in mind the contrary of what one is saying.

*

Between what I say and its opposite lies the truth - or rather what I say and its opposite is the truth.

A rare verbal snapshot of Wohl comes from a concierge at a small ivy-walled Paris hotel who remembered, ‘an oriental German who spoke French like an Englishman. Always courteous, very tidy and quiet, but never seeming as if he belonged.’

A gallery owner in Rotterdam remembered, ‘the inscrutable smile of Herr Wohl and the clear eyes that noticed everything’. A wealthy couple, who held dinner parties for ‘interesting’ characters they and their friends met on their travels, remarked on the curious well-mannered guest who sat through three such parties, eating sparingly and listening intently, but never saying a word, except ‘good evening’ and ‘goodbye’.

*

Only language can make connections because only language divides; nature is above both.

*

Definitions are maintained by common consent; meaning by individual dissent from the norms of definition.

*

Language is a defective tool for acquiring knowledge of the world - it can only be used for acquiring knowledge of itself, to extend itself. Language is only indirectly related to the existential world - and that relation itself is linguistic. (1950)

Wohl is reported as occasionally taking on the persona of an amateur painter. He was seen in Paris and Amsterdam at well-known tourist spots making paintings which were never completed. Most of his time seemed to be spent in long conversations with passers-by, who complimented him on his technique but were puzzled by his reluctance to finish anything. One or two brave souls asked if they could buy a painting, offering quite large sums for a completed work. Wohl’s response was on each occasion the same. He quietly pulled from his paint box a heavy old pistol and fired it into the air, saying he would shoot himself if he ever saw them again. Not surprisingly these transactions, like the paintings, were never completed.

*

All circles return to haunt you.

Amongst Wohl’s papers there’s a passage torn from Chesterton’s small book on St. Francis. Written on the obverse side, in an excited scrawl, is the following short note. It casts a faint light on the process whereby Wohl’s writings and thoughts emerged out of his readings of an odd assortment of sources:

There was not a rag of him left, only a foolishness – a small fool maybe – but a ragged fool, luminous with unknowing, speechless with feathered sense of light and transparency. In a world hanged upon nothing what can be written except in invisible ink on paperless pages? We cannot say. Writing is a beautiful pretence, a foolish pleasure, a small building of walls to catch the dust and light.