The Philosophers

“We cram into our ancestral sickroom. It is dark and cold: we keep the blinds lowered and the heat down owing to our hereditary light sensitivity and our hereditary heat intolerance, both of which are in fact unrelated to our hereditary neuromuscular disorder. Someone tries to cough but cannot. I sit at the desk and await the next letter, which can take months to arrive. The philosopher blinks or twitches his right eyelid; his son taps a tooth with his tongue; his son raises or lowers his left eyebrow; his son sucks on his upper or lower lip; his son flares a nostril; my grandfather blinks or twitches his left eyelid; my father taps a tooth with his tongue; and I write down the letter. In the past eleven years, I’ve written down the following: CCCONCEPPTCCCCCAAAAACCCCCCCCCCPPCCCCCCPCCCCCCCPCCCCCCC.”

“What to make of this? Perhaps the philosopher has lost his mind. Perhaps there’s been a disruption in our system of twitches and blinks and tooth-tapping and lip-sucking by which a letter is transmitted from his head to my pen. Perhaps—I certainly don’t rule this out!—I have lost my mind: perhaps no matter what my father taps I see only “C”s, and the occasional “P.” Or perhaps our system works perfectly, our philosopher’s mind works perfectly, his theory of knowledge reaches the page just as he intends it, and I simply do not have the wherewithal to understand it. That, too, cannot be ruled out.”