Sunlight on My Arm

Abstract

It seems a long time, Herr Professor, since I began trying to take my leave of you, withdrawing into my own solitude from your solitary hut, leaving you to your own, or ownmost, solitude and its profound joys and equally profound darknesses, its spring days and November dusks. I have no ‘ownmost’ place in the sense you would understand or approve. I am city-born, have little knowledge of, or interest in, my ancestors, and my spiritual homes are acquired from without: they are not a deepening of my endogenous being. Your assertion that ‘what is creative grows only out of native soil’⁷⁴ marks a fundamental difference between us: it may condemn me as shallow in your eyes but it also distances me from precisely the kind of Volkisch mythologies of self and nation that sent your self and your nation into the very abyss of Hell.⁷⁵ My spiritual homes are all borrowed. Worse, they are places not of continuous dwelling but of intermittent vacation: the English Lake District, Cornwall, the Greek isles. Does this not confirm your view that ‘an English philosopher’ is a contradiction in terms?