Memory Theater by Simon Critchley Read Free Book Online Page A

received an e-mail from a Dutch university: Tilburg, in North Brabant. They were looking for a chair of ethics and asked me if I’d like to be considered. What did I know about ethics? Was I good? After finding the place on a map, I made a discovery. I told them that I could not teach full-time but would be interested in some sort of really limited, part-time arrangement. They agreed and a contract had already been drafted. The salary was a pittance, but now that didn’t matter.
    I knew exactly what I had to do next.
    I resigned immediately from my position in New York and refused all efforts to return phone calls and e-mails from the dean’s office and saw none of my colleagues. By July of that year, I left Brooklyn for good, placed my books and few belongings in storage in East New York, near JFK, and left for the Netherlands. Itook the train from Schiphol Airport and ninety minutes later checked into Hotel Central, in ’s-Hertogenbosch, which was the full name of Den Bosch, home of the appropriately eponymous Hieronymus. It was just a ten-minute train ride from the university.
    With the money I had made on the dead philosophers book, I bought a small house outside Den Bosch with a plot of land behind it, surrounded by trees. I needed some space. The house was close to an extraordinary series of sand dunes, De Loonse en Drunense Duinen, not far from the village of Vught, which was the location of a concentration camp during the Second World War—Kamp Vught—which was also the patch of heath where the entire Jewish community of Den Bosch had been burnt alive in the thirteenth century. The Germans can always be relied upon for a sense of history.
    I started work on the memory theater almost immediately. It took months to organize, as I had no practical skills and spoke no Dutch. I hired a local architect called Bert van Roermund and two carpenters. Designs were drafted from Michel’s maquette. I even got students from the local art school to help me make a large number of papier-mâché figures, of various sizes, from six inches to two feet high, white andanonymous, looking rather like vulgar gnome-like garden ornaments. They cost a fortune and the students were incompetent, requiring constant supervision. But within three months, despite the persistent drizzle of the Brabant autumn, the exterior work of the theater was finished. I would complete the interior alone.
    The theater was enclosed with a roof like the maquette. It stood about eight feet high and sixteen feet across. I had to stoop a little to enter through a small door into a kind of
parodos
, or entrance, to the left and there was the stage, elevated six inches above the ground with a simple dark wooden kitchen chair. Around me, the mini-auditorium was arranged with its seven gangways and seven tiers. The blank, expressionless eyes of forty-nine papier-mâché statues stared back at me.
    Then the work of memory really began. It was too cold, cramped, and poorly lit to work in the theater, so I took some of the statues into the house and began my taxonomy. In the front, with the smallest statues, I had arranged all the elements of my life that I could remember together with family attachments and friends, such as they were. The statues were brightly painted with sets of initials, number sequences, andsmall diagrams that would call to mind whatever I recalled about my childhood, which wasn’t much, frankly. Having my head ducked in water at nursery school. A broken arm after being thrown off a scooter. Something about brother-sister incest. By cock, she was to blame. That cunt Kevin who bullied me at school. My ancient-history teacher was called Mr. Parker. Assyria and Babylon. The glory that was Greece. H. D. F. Kitto. I lost interest when we started studying medieval systems of plowing. The accident had wiped so much clean and the rest seemed like it belonged to someone else.
    On row two, I had reduced my books and papers first to a series of short