What was my significance?, W. asked himself, back then when we met. Did I illustrate some broader trend? Was I a man of our times, or against our times? And then the true horror dawned on W.: Lars is ahead of our times, he thought to himself. He’s a prophetic witness. He’s a living sign, such as you might find in the Bible.

W. thought of the later prophets, who are no longer speak with God as Moses and Abraham did – as with a neighbour, face to face, or as the Bible says, mouth to mouth. He thought of the prophets who God commanded to incarnate the message they were charged to deliver.

W. thought of Isaiah, told to wander naked and barefoot for three years, in order to send a message to the king of Assyria to parade his prisoners naked and barefoot to shame Egypt. He thought of Jeremiah, whom God told to make wooden yokes and put them on his neck; and when a false prophet broke them, to replace them with yokes of iron, in order to send a message that Israel will not put its neck under the yoke of Babylon ...

But I was a prophet who didn’t know that he was a prophet, W. says. I was a sign who didn’t know what he signified. Didn’t his own role become clear?, W. says. Wasn’t it obvious what he was put on earth to do?

Philosophy gives substance to our suffering, W. says. Philosophy gives sense to suffering by communicating it to others. Speech, dialogue: that’s what overcomes futility, W. says. That’s what does combat with the senseleness of the world.

W. was going to let me speak: that was his role, he says. He was going to hear the suffering of the world as it resounded through me. He was going to decipher my bellowing. The Jew in him would redeem the Hindu, W. says. His Catholic atheism would redeem my Protestant atheism. He would bring fruit trees to my waste, and calm to my troubled waters ...