The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  ‘Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you promised to cut down on the ranting.’

  He recovered himself and we went to get a drink and a sandwich at the Mitre. Jim was quite reasonable throughout lunch and I was almost prepared to forgive him his outburst in the street. There was no talk of waiting at all, even though the bar service was pretty appalling and there was a five-deep press of double-breasteds around the bar. On the way back over the viaduct I said to Jim that I’d see him around.

  ‘Yeah, you’ll see me around. Around 6.00 at Houghton Street; we’re going to a lecture.’

  ‘A lecture? What lecture?’ He shoved a crumpled A5 flyer into my hand. It was blue-bordered and had the University of London shield at the top. It read as follows:

  Meaning and Millenarianism

  Transition to Another Era

  An open lecture by Richard Stein, Emeritus Professor of

  the History of Ideas at the LSE.

  6.00 p.m. The Old Lecture Theatre

  &c.

  ‘All right, I’ll come.’ Jim looked shocked. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to hear someone else give a lecture besides you.’

  I left Jim outside the doors to his office and walked on up towards the Central School on Southampton Row. I turned back at the corner to wave goodbye, but Jim didn’t notice. He was deep in conversation with two despatch riders whose bikes were pulled up to the kerb. One of them was short and ginger-haired with a slack, gap-toothed mouth. The other was black and angular, with his hair shaved into a tight triangular wedge on top of his head. Both of them were dressed in the couriers’ uniform: ribbed leather jackets, leather trousers and high rubberised boots, complete with ridges and crenellations. I studied them for a while. It was clear that Jim knew them well. The way the three of them stood, gestured and smiled indicated friendship; and yet I knew Jim well, I was a close friend, but he had never mentioned his despatch rider friends. I turned and walked back to my office.

  Both phone calls and Post-it notes have a life cycle of their own. They are not mere servants of man, but clever parasites that use human industry to further their own growth as a species. That at any rate is the way I felt by the time I reached Houghton Street to meet Jim after work. I found him standing outside the Australian High Commission. He was standing at the tall, plate-glass window, staring into an aquarium of humans, as they snaked slowly towards the visa application counters.

  I was expecting some kind of tirade, but he desisted and instead led me across the Aldwych to Houghton Street. However, rather than turning left into the main lobby of the LSE, he turned right into the Students’ Union Building. He walked as if he knew the place. Rounding a corner we came to a lift with a difference.

  It was more like a vertical escalator than a conventional lift. A series of compartments moved slowly but continually past the landing where we stood. All we had to do to get on was jump through the opening. To the left the compartments descended, to the right they ascended. We stood for a couple of minutes in silent contemplation of this mechanical oddity, then Jim turned on his heel with a vague gesture and said, ‘No waiting.’ We started back towards the entrance.

  The Old Lecture Theatre must have been purpose-built as such when the Houghton Street building was erected in the Thirties. It was far wider than it was deep, and curiously wedge-shaped, like a slice of cake a compulsive eater might cut themselves. The lecture was sparsely attended; up in the gallery I could just see the round heads of a few diligent students, already bent and scribbling, while the scattered audience we sat among in the stalls seemed to consist of an odd assortment of octogenarians and the kind of slightly featureless black and brown men who one can tell immediately are perpetual students from the developing world. Men who have been spending years on writing doctoral theses on public policy in Coventry, while diligently sending a proportion of their grant money home to the family in Bangladesh.

  Professor Stein and the academic who was to introduce him were already seated up on the podium when Jim and I came in. The podium took up the whole front of the theatre and was faced in the same dark brown wood as almost every other surface in sight. The overwhelming impression was one of enclosure and stultification. A dusty decanter of water and a cut-glass vase of wilted flowers stood on the podium table, behind which the Professor regarded the audience with mild, mournful brown eyes as if he were a cow with no milk to give. In the hard, cramped, tip-up seat I tried to compose myself for sleep.

  The chairman rose to his feet. ‘Errumph … It’s er … 6.15 and it doesn’t look like we’ll have too many more people coming so I think we’ll make a start.’ My eyelids felt gummy and heavy. ‘Most of you are, no doubt, familiar with Professor Stein’s work. For those of you that aren’t I must apologise at this juncture. The Professor has asked me especially to refrain from a long recitation of his publications and the academic positions he has held and confine myself purely to those works that have a direct bearing on the lecture he is going to give us this evening. That being so, let it suffice for me to say that since Professor Stein retired from the chair here at the LSE some three years ago, he has spent the vast bulk of his time on organising, administering and teaching at the Centre for Millenarian Studies which he himself founded at Erith Marsh. His publications during this period have reflected his preoccupation with the coming end of our era; I refer to his paper “Wittgenstein and the Arterial Road System in the Southeast of England” and, of course, “Mirror Image: Reductive Cultural Identity in Late Twentieth-century Britain”, both published in the BJE2.

  ‘The occasion of this particular lecture is to give us all an opportunity to, as it were, preview Professor Stein’s new book Meaning and Millenarianism; and to hear from the author himself some of the arguments he puts forward in the book, in advance of its publication next week. I’d like to say at this juncture that there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of the lecture, but this period will of necessity be circumscribed as we need to clear the lecture theatre for the Students’ Drama Society, who, I believe, are rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma. Err … Professor Stein.’

  The Professor mooched over to the lectern and stood for a while several feet behind it, regarding his audience with baleful eyes. I was shocked to see that he was dressed rather nattily for an emeritus professor in a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. He was also quite a bit more virile in appearance than I had at first supposed. Although over sixty his hair was still intact and ungreying, his jaw was set and two veins rode up his temples and seemed to visibly throb in the wan light of the lecture theatre. He hovered over the lectern as a surgeon might an operating table. He carried no notes.

  ‘Picture the future. Picture it like this.’ His voice was sonorous, insistent and persuasive, more spiritual than academic. ‘An orderly phalanx of flagellants some four hundred in number march down off the Marylebone Flyover. They chastise themselves with the precise, timed strokes of their leather lashes. They take up the entire inside lane of the road. The chastisement is considered and vicious. Each stroke on each back brings forth blood, which spatters the windscreens of the cars that are backed up in the two offside lanes, all the way from Lisson Grove. The morning air is full of a pink, frothy spray as the passive commuters put on their water jets and windscreen wipers in an attempt to stop their windscreens coagulating.

  ‘Or, if you prefer, picture this: Speaker’s Corner is in full swing on a Sunday afternoon. There are the usual crop of eccentrics – cranks and people with extreme political views – but on this Sunday, to their chagrin, they are wholly eclipsed by bands of ragged men and women wearing filthy grey shifts. These people move among the crowds enjoining them to enter a state of grace immediately and to throw off the restrictive chains of mere human morality.

  ‘ “Rejoice! We are already saved!” they cry. They shamelessly roll on the ground, fighting, copulating, and drinking to prove their point. Together with other adherents they are forming a secessionist commune in Hyde
Park, dedicated to the anticipation of the Apocalypse.

  ‘Can you picture this? Or is it beyond your comprehension?’ Stein paused and raked his meditative gaze over the darkened theatre. I could imagine it all right, I was rapt. I hadn’t expected anything like this. Jim was clearly imagining it too, he sat hunched forward on his seat, panting. I looked round the rest of the audience: the octogenarians still slept, the perpetual students took notes. Stein continued, ‘My purpose in this lecture is to briefly outline the central argument of my forthcoming book. Obviously time will mean that this outline will be incomplete, but nonetheless I hope to make it reasonably clear that the kind of scenarios that I just asked you to envisage are not accurate predictions of the way millenarianism will affect the populations of Western societies as we move towards the third era since the death of the Christ-figure. These things may have occurred in the past, but I believe that there are now certain overriding factors that make a recurrence of such phenomena distinctly unlikely …’

  And there I lost him. The rest of the lecture became increasingly involved, turgid and difficult to follow. Stein didn’t help matters by continually digressing from his central argument in order to inveigh against other academics in the same field. The digressions themselves had digressions. As far as I could gather they related specifically to the difficulties involved in the exegesis of certain recondite texts, penned in the closing years of the ninth century by monks scattered across Europe. Stein raised his voice, he moved out from behind the lectern and came to the front of the stage, as if intending to embrace his audience like an ageing singer having a Las Vegas comeback.

  For me, it was all to no avail. The sheer weight of detail eroded my attention. His digressions began to resolve themselves into a series of Post-it notes stuck fluttering in my mind … I began to tune out. When I tuned back in again it was 6.50 and Stein was summing up.

  ‘… To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms – nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics – means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely possibly imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, or even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form or another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.’

  Before the chairman could get to his feet and ask whether there were any questions, one of the perpetual students was already on his and asking. He was a grey-black man, tall and rangy in a slightly unravelled raglan sweater, with three neat fish-shaped scars on either cheek.

  ‘Professor Stein. Sir, to what extent, sir, can the arguments you have just presented, sir, be held seriously. In view of the fact’, particular emphasis on ‘fact’, ‘that such arguments have themselves been present in other cultures during the end of other eras. Does not the fact, sir, that this is not the first time that people have believed they had the power to destroy their own world to some extent invalidate your argument? Well, sir, what do you think of that?’

  The cicatrised African sat down as abruptly as he had stood up. There was an uncomfortable pause. Professor Stein was straining forward. From the expression on his face it was quite clear that he hadn’t heard a word the African had said. At length the chairman leant forward and whispered into his ear. Stein nodded several times and then rose to his feet.

  ‘I think the answer is no. As to why, the answer is that although previous cultures have thought that they possessed the power to destroy the world themselves, they in fact didn’t. We are dealing in this instance with a reality which can be empirically verified.’

  I was aware of Jim batting about in the seat next to me. He was sweating profusely and his long, mechanical arms gripped the back of the seat in front of him as if he wanted to rip it off the ground and throw it at the podium. Jim didn’t give the African a chance to respond to Stein’s reply – he was on his feet.

  ‘Professor Stein. You say that the difference between this and previous eras is that humankind now possesses the real ability to destroy the world in which we live – and that this fact means that the wilder manifestations of millenarianism are unlikely to occur as we move towards the 21st century. However, could this lecture itself not be said to be an even wilder manifestation in its own right? This surely is the first era in which the historically literate have felt free to say “Well, in the past people got over-excited about the millennium and expected Armageddon and all sorts of other terrible things, but we’re beyond that.” Is this not the purest form of hubris? Do you not agree that there is an aching feeling in our society, people are desperately waiting for something – anything to happen! Look at these people,’ Jim swept an arm around the lecture theatre to embrace the ancient Fabians and the perpetual students, ‘aren’t they waiting for something to happen? I don’t think your lecture, your calm, measured reasoning will serve to dampen down the great currents of expectation which are bound to flow with increasing strength throughout the population. Well, what do you think of that?’

  Jim sat down, still quaking and sweating. I wasn’t sure that what he had said could altogether be classified as a question. However, Stein seemed to be taking it seriously enough. As Jim sat down, the Professor set down his pen and scrutinised us.

  ‘What you say has a good deal of emotional force, young man. And I think you may be right – but only in a very limited sense. The involutions of thought and reflection you draw our attention to are just that: thought and reflection. They bear no real relation to the motivation of the great mass of people. A few years ago when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had ground to a halt and before the rise to power of the current General Secretary, there seemed to be some real cause for alarm and the manifestation of some fringe political groupings was undoubtedly millenarian, but now, pshaw! All the political crises of the past forty years have served only to underline the fact that the dialectic imposed by technological advancement is irrefutable, unstoppable; more primary than thought itself. Although you express yourself eloquently, young man, I am more inclined to view the seeming irony you draw our attention to as a perception of marginalised youth, contemplating the grey power of middle age. It is an attitude rather than a timely perception. And perhaps for that reason it is all the more to be admired.’

  Jim didn’t wait for the end of Stein’s answer. He was already disappearing through the brown swing-doors. It was left for me to inch my way out of the row of seats where we were sitting, grating past, and offering my bunched crotch to a number of disapproving faces. The last thing I saw as I went out the door was the chairman doodling with a finger on the dusty tabletop.

  Jim was pacing back and forth in the lobby, in front of a noticeboard covered with a tatter of posters, flyers and hand-lettered advertisements. A flyer for next week’s open lecture was prominently displayed. ‘An authoritative exposition of recent developments in the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Obviously the School’s policy was to offset one dull, minority interest lecture, against another, popular, general interest one. It was strange, it hadn’t really occurred to me before, but for a culture that was supposedly unaffected by the end of an era we certainly showed a lot of interest in esoteric theories. Jim shot an angry glance at me and shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect anything better from him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, it didn’t seem like such a bad lecture to me. Admittedly I dozed through a lot of it.’

  ‘Oh yes, Stein is clever all right, but he just doesn’t understand. He’s an academic. Even if he does study contemporary events, he still renders them microscopic by looking at them through the wrong end of his theoretical telescope. Waiting isn’t like that. It’s
an immediate, physical experience. If he saw Carlos in action, then he’d understand.’

  Jim turned on his heel and walked off towards the exit. From behind I noticed how strange he looked, with his long muscular torso and silly little legs. He reminded me for a moment of nothing so much as a PG Tips chimp. His millenarian rants could easily have been a voice-over. Perhaps the real Jim had just been going, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ahh! Ahh!’ His tartan shirt was coming out of his trousers and the collar was dandruffy. He wasn’t looking after himself. I followed him out through the lobby feeling guilty, as if Jim had heard my thoughts about him.

  Outside on the pavement. In the cold, dark, night-time canyon of Houghton Street, I found Jim standing with the two couriers I’d seen him with at lunch. Ginger was expostulating as I came up, while the character with the triangular hairdo stood back, arms folded. They were all too preoccupied to notice me. I heard the following:

  ‘Carlos doesn’t want anyone else in on it. Carlos couldn’t give a fuck about anything but the job.’

  ‘But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to convince. Sooner or later Carlos will need to reveal himself… and then …’

  ‘And then, cobblers!’

  ‘I’m not waiting around to listen to this bollocks.’

  This was hairdo. He had a peculiar falsetto voice for such a large man. As he voiced the sentiment, he picked his helmet up off the saddle of his bike and pushed it down over his head, with a hermetic ‘plop’. This was effectively the end of the conversation. Ginger put his helmet on as well. And without any farewells the two of them turned over their engines and peeled off, out on to Aldwych. Leaving behind an acrid smell.