I have no real idea how to read, W. says. No idea how to approach the oeuvre of a great thinker. He knows that it would be too much for me to approach such an oeuvre head on, as he does, simply reading the primary text in the original, line by line, looking up difficult words in a dictionary. And he knows that it’s even too much for me to approach it crabwise, though the work of others, by way of fellow thinkers, contemporaries, who were wrestling with its ideas as they emerged? I have no idea that it might be appropriate to approach an oeuvre from upstream, as it were, gaining a knowledge of the tradition of which it is a past, of the thinkers that influenced its author. Nor, for that matter, have I any clue that I might approach it from downstream, so to speak, reading backwards from the thinkers it influenced in turn.

I have no sense of the reverence of reading, W. says. No sense that I’ve come across something ahead of me, wiser than me, and which should make me sink to my knees. I have no shame as a reader, no sense that of the limits of my comprehension, of the limits of my education. I lack an exegete’s sensitivity, the hermeneut’s delicacy. I lack the tenderness of approach that would allow me to approach an oeuvre as the work of one who has struggled with thought as I should have struggled with thought, as a thought-brother, as a thought-sister, who also sought to make sense of their time, who also sought to let the great questions resound.

In the end, I am only a ransacker of texts, a kind of reader-marauder, W. says. I pillage my way through them like a Viking raiding party.