Hannah and Gillel

And the tale of the empty chair continues, the tale of the chair that must always remain empty and whoever would come with a name and occupy the chair would immediately known to be a pretender, the false occupier. Only because we were both left waiting for the chair to be filled one can look forward to anything at all as though the emptiness of the chair, of the third chair would be the only possible fullness.

The chair remains empty whenever Gillel and me speak, whenever Jussuf and me speak. It's the assurance of the most unestranged and present companionship, of the shared worldly artifacts that separate us through political affairs and dissenting opinions, the roaring and the roasting through which from closer than further we can hear the "I" and the "we", this is not an "I" or a "we" of the world and the love's failure, it's the "I" and the "we" of the only possible way to think as we clear up the fog of the ego and advance toward the original motif of our existence, the motif of Eve and her son Cain.

And only because I won't be able to occupy the chair in thirty years, only because I'm untimely, I might occupy the empty chair when not present and because no one can come with a name and fill the empty chair then there's companionship in the comedy of life and in the tragedy of philosophy that come together in a triad, of men and women who have thought that the founding principle of thinking is the actuality of thinking as though no one else did so before and only then learn from everybody else. In this vein and spirit one comes even closer to Augustine, in that even the lives of the saints are lived among other people.

I'm not afraid of the contempt and the anger because whenever one cannnot lie to his companionship one can believe himself to have found one. The details are unimportant now, but what is at stake is that the chair remains empty whenever we sit across one another and talk and only on that account there's any validity to our thinking together.

W.B.