The World as I Found It (16 page)

Eyeing him, Wittgenstein replied disdainfully, They had their lives taken.

Took
their lives, you mean?

Russell didn't mean to correct his English. But then as he saw Wittgenstein's black look of affirmation, Russell found himself emotionally back-pedaling. I'm very sorry …

No need to be
sorry
, retorted Wittgenstein, correcting in turn Russell's emotional grammar. They have not died yesterday.

This stung but Russell took it, not saying another word. And absurd as this apology was, it was no less absurd than Wittgenstein's need to imply that his was a great and otherwise normal family. Not, Wittgenstein seemed to hastily add, that their greatness had in any way rubbed off on him, the most unworthy of their subjects. Nor, Lord knows, was this to imply any criticism of his august father. At the mere mention of his father's name, Wittgenstein's voice would drop to the muted tones of a courtier anxious that his sire appear in the best possible light — meaning, so far as Russell could see, in no light whatsoever.

There was something else that nagged Russell: the nature of Wittgenstein's character.

Specifically, he was mystified by this insular, fugitive quality in Wittgenstein. Russell could see it wasn't mere reserve, nor the manner of a young man who invests himself with a false air of tragedy. Without being able to explain how or why, Russell sensed that Wittgenstein's beliefs and character were all of a piece. After all, for Wittgenstein to refuse to admit the existence of anything except spoken propositions — this, as Russell saw it, went beyond the stubbornness of the usual self-styled solipsist or nihilist. Another young man might have said this to be bizarre or fanciful, to butt horns with authority. But in Wittgenstein it seemed part of a deeper rupture. Wittgenstein didn't just argue, he argued for his life.

But why all this thrashing to arrive at new ideas? Russell wondered. It was a question Russell might as easily have asked himself. In logic, there is the law of identity, by which whatever is, is. There is the law of contradiction, by which nothing can both be and not be. And there is the law of excluded middle, by which everything must either be or not be. Besides these laws, there is also Ockham's razor — more a practical aesthetic than a law — by which logical entities are not to be multiplied more than necessary. But for the thinker, Russell saw, there is what might be called Willy-Nilly's law, by which the act of seeking or desiring, like a kind of propulsion, is accompanied by a simultaneous avoidance or dread. Seeking, Russell knew, was never simply seeking in itself; it was not only that one blessed thing in the distance but also the momentum behind it, adding exponentially to the eventual impact.

Whatever else, Russell sensed danger, and yet he found it oddly thrilling. But here Russell forgot the corollary of Willy-Nilly's law, namely, that this condition was far more thrilling for him, the observer, than it was for Wittgenstein, for whom this necessity was something else, something else entirely.

There was another capacity in Russell, however, that was antithetical to Wittgenstein's character — namely, his sublime ability to ignore certain unpleasant areas of his life.

This was not a mere difference in temperament; it was also a function of their difference in age. Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell had attained that age at which men are adept at psychically treading water, treading for days and sometimes weeks on end. Emotionally, he might be lost in the middle of the North Atlantic, but it
wasn't so bad
. Cozily bobbing along as a wave hits …
pfffftttt
— gasping. Then another wave. And another.

At times it was hardly a dog paddle, barely keeping his head above water. And lately, Russell was so busy swimming along that he hardly noticed this new current that was slowly sweeping him out to sea. Besides, it was this fear, this heroic struggling in the foam of experience — this was the fatal discharge whereof life is created.
This
was what he lived for. And, blast it, the point was, he
was swimming
. Yes, in a pinch all Noah's critters swim, but none tread water better than shipwrecked, middle-aged men.

Wittgenstein was a different story. He was a ghost who would appear at Russell's door late at night, unable to sleep.

For two and three hours at a stretch, sometimes, the ghost would talk and pace. During these vigils, Wittgenstein could be brilliant, both in what he said and in that passion and excitement that Frege had first noticed. Just as often, though, he would be slack and boring — depleted. But never did he drift contentedly. He was too young not to fight the current.

Russell would be struggling not to nod off, his eyes watering as Wittgenstein endlessly paced the floor, locked on some idea or other. Russell had never seen the like of him. He himself had worked
with
logic, but until Wittgenstein he had never had the sense of someone locked
inside
logic, struggling to escape like Houdini shackled inside a trunk. For Wittgenstein, logic was not merely a problem, it was the
problem of his life
. Sometimes Russell would try to prod him out of it, saying in a kindly voice, I'm not sure what you expect, Wittgenstein.

But of course I expect everything.

And again, Wittgenstein would raise his eyes, flashing that bitter little smile, so fatal and dark. Wittgenstein was daring him, Russell thought, and again he would feel that thrill, and
pfffftttt
— another wave. Carrying him out farther still.

But then Russell was approaching the task from another angle, one of British liberal parlor empiricism mixed with an Enlightenment sense that most things in life could eventually be explained or justified by virtue of reason. The skepticism was there, of course, but it was a comparatively sober skepticism leavened with a quipping practicality that blew away so much moon dust while accepting the not unreasonable premise that, at any given time, fully nine-tenths of the world's business was pointless lunacy in the cause of general employment. For this world view, Russell could thank the Russell legacy and in particular his paternal grandmother, who on the flyleaf of the Bible she had given him as a boy had written the injunction,
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil
.

In Russell's character, there was also the agnostic, freethinking tradition of his parents, especially that of his father, Lord Amberley, who knowingly scotched his political career by supporting birth control. Russell was very much a man in his father's mold, and had he not been orphaned, he certainly would have grown into a much different man. But first his mother and sister died of diphtheria, and then a year and a half later, his quietly inconsolable father, prematurely aged and depressed, followed them into the ground.

Russell was three then, not yet old enough to fully understand but old enough to remember in the way that sorrow remembers. His father left Russell and his older brother, Frank, in the care of a tutor who shared his unconventional views, but their grandmother's solicitor soon put an end to that. Instead, Lady Russell took the boys to Pembroke Lodge, a grace and favor house outside London that the queen had granted to their grandfather, Lord John.

Twice prime minister under Victoria, Bertie's grandfather had counseled Napoleon at Elba and shot grouse with Bismarck. The old earl was also the same slippery politician whom Henry Adams remembered as such a liar and intriguer, soothing the American legation in London while conspiring with Gladstone to aid the Confederate cause. But those days were far behind Lord John. Lost in the forests of bewildering, compounding age, the old man paid scant notice to the boy, who best remembered him either immersed in his old parliamentary papers or dozing as a footman perambulated him down the garden path in his rickety bath chair.

The force in the family was Lady Russell, a hardtack puritan who eschewed ease and derided joy for its vanity and transitory nature, advocating cold baths, plain food and service to men who, like the beasts, needed to be governed. God for her was impersonal, but for a Russell the British government was anything but impersonal. It was through his grandmother that Russell learned to think of England as
his
England and to speak of the government in the royal
We
.

For some reason, Lady Russell felt it critical to the boy's moral development that she disguise her love, and she was very, very good at it. He was too clever by a deuce, she said, and she kept him in line with dry ridicule, that sovereign sport of adults. What is mind? she would ask with a prim and joyless smile when he first evinced an interest in philosophy. What is mind? —
sniff
— no matter. What is matter? —
sniff
— never mind.

Life, she seemed to say, had been duly debated and decided by elders who knew far better than he, a callow boy, what bore serious examination. For Lady Russell, even words were an extravagance to be parceled out parsimoniously, as if each day one was granted a hundred, of which ten were worth anything. The boy felt like a snuffed candle in her house. Brought out in tumbrels like the condemned, ideas rumbled down that long dinner table to the old woman's docket, there to be duly affirmed or denied, then forever banished with a little catch phrase, a hollow nugget meant, so far as the boy could see, to spare the trouble of further thinking. Yes, Lady Russell once said distastefully, Darwin was indubitably
correct
, punctuating this pronouncement with her off-with-his-head sniff; subject closed.

Being of the opinion that public schools were morally corrupting, Lady Russell kept the young boy home under the instruction of governesses and tutors — mediocrities whose main qualifications were solemn adherence, or at least lip service, to Her Ladyship's religious views. The tutors were quite unnecessary. Her Ladyship's joyless prig of a grandson soon required no supervision, and with an inward sneer he learned nothing from them. Lord Russell's vast library was the boy's school, and this too took its toll. Cold, clever, solitary, the budding polymath kept a diary and even developed a sort of mathematical code to hide his teeming inner life from his grandmother's prying eyes. In this code, the boy recorded his first impure thoughts, analyzing his emotions in much the way that Galvani used electrodes to stimulate the legs of dissected frogs. In code, he plumbed the laws of dynamics and the ontological argument; in code he despaired and fell from faith; and in code he began to seriously contemplate suicide, deciding, after due deliberation, that he most preferred the idea of throwing himself under a train. Her Ladyship's visitors did find the boy a bit unreal, but they approved of his tireless industry as he sat at his grandfather's big bureau, working away at his trifling boy's doings. Dour, diligent Bertie — one more product of a sentimental education at home.

* * *

Still, Russell was learning not to always take Wittgenstein's pronouncements at face value — that is, he was learning to listen not merely for what Wittgenstein said but for what he implied.

For instance, at one time or another, Russell had seen most of his philosophy students flirt with the idea of solipsism as an extreme metaphysical possibility. He had done so himself. But it was not until he met Wittgenstein that he had heard anyone argue it as a deeply felt predicament.

Several nights when Wittgenstein was in a bad way — raw and restless, distracted — Russell saw it: nothingness made palpable. Russell had long felt that there was something fearful and disfiguring in solipsism, a willful blinding, like Oedipus dashing out his eyes. And it pained him to see Wittgenstein clawing to get a foothold on something, a crevasse of life or logic — himself. At night in his rooms sometimes, Russell could see Wittgenstein's eyes welling up with the doubt and drift of that murky ocean. They told one story, and they also suggested the other, unspoken part of the story: the part about death, the ultimate solipsism.

What the solipsist
says
— that the world is
his
world — this seemed to Russell disagreeable and somewhat boring; above all, it was
lonely.
But still it contained more than a grain of truth about the nature of our lives, of how we view life from the inside, peering out through crabstalk eyes. Wittgenstein talked and talked about this, but that he spoke at all, Russell thought, gave the lie to his contentions. If he spoke at all, it seemed to Russell, then he must believe there are ears to listen. For Russell it was an article of faith: despite what the solipsist says, people's hopes and sensations
must
somehow be connected, however haphazardly, like beads on the slenderest of threads.

Listening to Wittgenstein, Russell was reminded of the old dictum that says to trust the tale and not the teller. Wittgenstein was the proverbial Cretan calling himself a liar in the service of a truth about the unknowable inwardness of our lives — that and the fundamental obscurity of lives not our own. The Cretan warned of how the soul may crimp under the life that cannot break its own shell. And equally the Cretan showed how the life that does burst free may eventually be smothered by its own dark fullness, to the point that it speaks and sees darkly, singing like a mockingbird to populate the night.

In this vein, Wittgenstein began talking one night about the Grimms' fable of Rumpelstiltskin.

So distasteful, chided Russell. Clearly a folktale about the usurious Jew extracting his pound of flesh.

But Wittgenstein did not respond to this. Instead, he said, But such a great truth it shows! Do you remember the story?

Vaguely.

Remember it? To the king the grinder boasts —

You mean the
miller
boasts —

Miller,
yes! To the king the miller boasts that his daughter can spin to gold the straw. So the king locks her in a room full with straw and tells her to spin it into gold. If not, she will be killed. Wittgenstein's eyes grew wide. She despairs! She cannot spin gold! Then the little dwarf Rumpelstiltskin comes and says he will spin to gold the straw in return for her first-born child. There is nothing she can do. She agrees and, ziff! — Wittgenstein snapped his fingers — the room is filled with new gold.