The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker

Author:Martin Riker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2023-01-13T19:56:31+00:00

8

If I’m not more careful, I will make myself very unhappy.

If I keep letting everything into my head, I’ll be awake like this all night.

Why did I want to remember things?

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to fall asleep.

9

Finally, we arrive at the door to my office. Those were some long and treacherous stairs. Remind me to take the elevator next time.

“Obviously, you do not have an elevator.”

Keynes! I won’t have an office much longer, either.

“So melodramatic.”

That’s what happens when you leave me alone for too long.

“Whose fault is that?”

I just mean that you’re a calming influence.

“I should hope so. It’s the only reason I’m here.”

You’re here to keep me company.

“Same difference.”

And to keep me on track.

“How has that been going?”

And because I always work better with feedback, but Ed is asleep.

“You rely on him for feedback.”

It helps.

“Except that I, being you, am not ‘feedback.’ I’m a sounding board.”

So?

“So, if I am standing in for Ed, that suggests that what you rely on him for is not really to give feedback, but only to be a sounding board.”

I think he understands that.

“What he perhaps does not understand is that you do not really even need him as a sounding board. Evidently, you can do ‘sounding board’ all by yourself.”

He’s a very good sounding board. Things sound better bounced off of him than off of other surfaces.

“Acoustical Ed.”

Also loving.

“Acoustical, also loving, Ed.”

Men have done worse.

“Much worse.”

Now stop talking.

I am in my office.

A converted sunroom, small but spacious. All-white walls. Wood floor. Great big windows along two sides. Simple white curtains. Plain office chair and work desk with computer and piles of books on one side of the room. Cozy reading chair on the other. A half bookshelf, chest-high, next to a door that leads to a closet. A few leafy plants. And a really tall floor lamp that rises up over the cozy chair from behind. That’s all. That’s it. Nothing else in this room. Airy as an operating theater, clean as a very clean kitchen. Clean feeling anyway—I can’t remember the last time I actually cleaned it. A writing room. A reading and thinking room. A “room of one’s own”—which was my first Virginia Woolf book, incidentally, and remains a favorite example of how a conceptual argument—in this case about female autonomy, living your own life—can also be a practical argument, in a way Keynes probably appreciated. A woman’s autonomy is not just about rights or laws, she’s saying. A woman literally needs her own room.

She was your friend, Keynes. You were housemates and friends. Then she drowned herself. How did you feel when you heard about it?

“We were close,” says Keynes, who is standing by the closet door with one hand on the bookshelf. “There were always falling-outs among the Bloomsbury people, but Leonard and Virginia and I stayed friends. Even after Lydia and I moved to the country, we spent Christmases together.”

It must have been very sad. And confusing. The death of a very gifted person is strange for their friends, even if they haven’t seen each other for a while.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.