The World as I Found It (93 page)

Wittgenstein had told himself that Max was dead, or as good as dead. Yet this merely helped him dispel any thought of Max: deep at heart, Wittgenstein couldn't imagine a berserker like Max ever dying. Unknown to Wittgenstein, though, Max was dead, killed in the failed assault on Stalingrad along with most of his elite SS Panzer division. Across Russia, they had come to this. Out of the vast yellow spaces, with the villages blazing before them and the
Einsatzgruppen
extermination units working to their rear, they had stormed across the land only to find their tanks stopped by a network of great earthen dikes dug in subfreezing temperatures by thousands of starving women and old men. And there, finally encircled by the Russians, without even the fuel or supplies necessary to attempt a breakout, they died by the thousands that winter. Under a thunderous megadrome of firelit clouds and snow, they threw up their souls in blasts and left behind them only miles of frozen meat under the rubble and eddying drifts. The Nazis did not last. They did not prevail to kill all the miles and all the souls. They did not last, and there was no Easter reunion, and for their comrades who survived there was only starvation and cannibalism and abandonment by their own command. They did not last, but after them, and in spite of them, there was still the all-weathering earth, turning like a gnawed bone into the chemical bubblings of spring with her subtle hygiene, the final disposing of things — elements to the earth, the wild energy to the air — framing the disturbances of things to come.

For Wittgenstein, it was not the sheer extent of the catastrophe that he felt, or the daily news of it, so much as the sheer antediluvian depth of it. It had been so long in coming. For this, whole ages of hatred had been stored up like explosives. For this, whole ages of culture had been in a long and steady decline. Probably the decline was greater than even he realized, but then Wittgenstein had to remind himself that, as a product of that culture, he, too, had been in decline and so had failed to gauge, in even crudely relative terms, the speed of the world's descent. He found it hard to think meaningfully or incisively about these things without succumbing to moral mawkishness, or without merely using the fabled past to cudgel the present for its shallowness and malignity. Nonetheless, he found himself wondering if people of every age had felt this way, or if instead he was living in a Cain time that didn't proceed according to the heart or the logos and that, like language itself, seemed to far outstrip his or anyone else's ability to understand it, much less stand outside it. Philosophically, he found himself returning to the same questions in the way the painter returns to earlier subjects. As a young man he had wondered if there was a prior order to the world and, if so, where its value might be found. But now he wondered not only where value might be found, but how it was transmitted, a path of inquiry that inevitably led him back to that harsh medium of memory, pain.
Where do you feel a grief?
he would write.
Is the absence of feeling a feeling?
…

Like an artist sketching his own immobile hand on the table, Wittgenstein carefully mapped this anatomy layer by layer, drawing with such deep and concerted attention that he might have been startled to see the hand twitch to dislodge a fly — how odd to realize that the hand was, after all, one's own. And finally, he found himself wondering as much what the pain said as where in the world it
went
, the pain of the years and the generations. At Beacon Hill, Moore had been the first to ask him,
Why pain?
And many times since, Wittgenstein had found himself wondering if it was indeed a bit perverse, this effort to classify the variety of pain expression like a naturalist. More, he wondered if this abominably complicated, slippery and amorphous stoop work even really amounted to philosophy — if he was not instead adding to the already rampant confusion. Language was the text, but pain, it seemed, was the subtext. Indeed, he found himself wondering at times if this aspect of his admittedly strange investigation didn't amount to a kind of experiential biography. Like a message inserted into a bottle, the record of this pain could only be flung into the oblivion of one's time in the slender hope that it might eventually drift into a wider sea or better time. And like that message in a bottle, there remained the wish to see one's life and time at a kind of sea level, neither too high nor too low, both within one's time but somehow apart from it, riding high and dry over the sea like a message in a bottle. But the problem, again, was in the communication: it was the sense that this pain must not only be put into words but must somehow be given a kind of emotional “english,” be it a moan, touch or grimace. And then of course there was the notion that the pain is already
in
our words, that these pendulous fruits are already overburdened, poised to fall, so dark and heavy, at the least provocation.

Someone is in pain
, he would write.
Someone is in pain — I don't know who
. The water buoys up, but the pain presses down until we become mostly unconscious of it, displacing the pain as we do the mounting pressure of the air. Peering into his soul, he would try to give this pain a name or make of this pain a lesson, or to make of the lesson a
reason
that might serve to ward off this pain that comes the way of all darkness, filling the world as the light slowly fails. And what had pain to teach, he thought, but sufferance or denial of pain — still more tricks of a mind clotted and dwarfed by its own productions. Or, in yet another variation, there was the desperate and fruitless attempt to fool the pain by creating another, lesser pain to drown the memory of the first pain, that bucket which is the heavier for being so empty. And so out of the emptiness of the past, the pain hurls down. Out of an awful vastness, the pain of the generations descends upon its heirs to be chocked down and sweated out, then blotted out and finally lost in a recurring flood that may yield mystery and even moments of vision, but never the peace and sufferance of eternity, shuddering like thunder against the closed depths of the sea.

* * *

In such an age, Wittgenstein thought, one could only have the will and humility to put one foot in front of the other. Often he would think his impulse had quite dried up, and yet for years, for better or worse, he had not been so productive. But still there were the critics like Russell who said that what he was practicing was not philosophy and in fact was nothing less than the fall of philosophy — the product of a misery almost Miltonic.

Of course, Russell's antipathy to Wittgenstein's work came partly in reaction to his own stormy fortunes. For Russell's work, this was a period of critical “reassessment,” which, he joked, was a kind of scholarly purgatory prior to embalming. Now that his major work was assumed to be safely over and out of vogue, it was being critically declassified and even broken down into saurian periods. But then it wasn't his “work” that the critics spoke of now, but rather of his “achievement” — and then usually in the past tense. And, alas, his achievement, while indubitably “major,” was, like a mountain viewed from a distance, somewhat smaller and less impregnable than it seemed originally, when no one had yet scaled it or even seen it very clearly.

Russell found it eerie at times, walking around, breathing air, being somehow anterior to his own work. But he never lost his sense of humor, and many a Lilliputian tasted the hot cat of his wit. And at bottom, Russell maintained that it was all silliness anyway, this modern fame and reputation business. After all, he had been slandered and vilified for years — especially in America, where as recently as 1940 he had even been publicly charged with lechery and indecency and tried
in absentia
in connection with a course on logic he planned to teach at New York's City College. But now, having undergone a lengthy period of virtual public leperhood in which he could scarcely earn a living, he was suddenly, absurdly respectable! Beyond respectable, in fact. He had assumed Great Man status. Everything was coming back to him. To be famous and young was nothing — a fart in the wind — but to be famous and
old
vouchsafed him a sinecure of public veneration, his days one long retrospective honorarium,
per diem
and podium unto death. Even his old loves were becoming retrospective. In the last years of her life, until she died in 1938, he had resumed his romantic correspondence with Ottoline, sniffing the perfume of her letters and remembering, much to the chagrin of his young third wife, someone much younger and gayer and now ageless. And then, with his third marriage doomed, Russell was fondly corresponding with Colette, loving her better from afar than he ever could for long up close.

Then came the atom bomb.

If the Americans had not invented it, Wittgenstein said, Russell would have to have done so himself. But what was so terrible about this boogie bomb? asked Wittgenstein. If it was an especially bitter pill for mankind, well, so be it, he said, hoping it might spell an end to the hegemony of our disgusting soapy-water science. And it was so safe to hate, Wittgenstein said, this bad boogie bomb! Who didn't hate War and Hunger and Death? Who, for that matter, didn't love and yearn for Peace and Prosperity? These were
safe
politics, said Wittgenstein. What if the sky was falling? To his mind, this bomb business was little more than a meal ticket for Lord Chicken Little, with his Labour card, his fine sentiments and his ladies-in-waiting. And this was the man, Wittgenstein mused, who at the Moral Science Club shook his fist at
him
, saying that
he
was the source of the confusion!

Russell, in the meantime, was flying around the world, lecturing heads of state and exploding small bombs for peace in world assemblies and lecture halls. Then one day he was on a plane headed for Sweden, where he was to deliver a speech on the need for nuclear disarmament. Russell had dozed off when he felt a violent jolt. He thought they must have landed. His attaché case had flown into a bulkhead and his papers were scattered across the floor. Damn — the papers were soaking wet when he scooped them up. Someone must have spilled a drink. He was patting his suitcoat for his glasses when he felt water welling into his shoes. Then he heard someone in the forward section screaming in a loud gargle. Surf was washing over his legs. He tried to stand but was yanked back by the seat belt as he heard more choked screamings. Clawing and slapping at the snap, he broke the belt and slogged down the listing aisle. Waist deep in cold water clogged with bobbing suitcases and pillows, he was struggling out when some young man — one of the crew, he guessed — pushed him violently toward the hatch. And Russell remembered thinking,
It will not be me!
And like a newborn, he took one big, defiant breath, then dove down and somehow pulled himself through the sucking vortex — expelled into the suddenly somnolent sea.

Then his suit was bubbling over his back, and he was wriggling like a polliwog toward the dull light of the surface. And there he found himself in the open gray sea. He was a mile or more from shore, but never did he flag. Fully clothed, he was seen swimming toward the approaching rescue boat — swimming, the papers said, like no seventy-eight-year-old lord had ever swum before.

LORD RUSSELL SURVIVES FATAL AIR CRASH
…
Nineteen Die
, read the headline in the London
Times
.

Below the headline was a picture of him sitting up in his hotel bed in a bunchy borrowed robe, primly holding a cup of tea as he posed for photos and fielded questions from the reporters who had crowded into his room. Yes, he said for the hundredth time, he felt lucky. Yes, he explained, he was most happy to be alive — and yes, he was sorry, most terribly sorry for the dead and their families. No, he never caught cold. Felt fine, truly did. Of course he'd speak that night — so long as he got his wet trousers back from the valet. My secret for living? he asked, cannily repeating the reporter's question. Heredity and lack of worry. Then inclining his head toward the next question, he asked, What? What's that? Will I
fly
again? Why, of course, he said, peevishly. Yes, of course I'll fly, and so should you, young man. Keep flying and you might live to be a hundred — that is, if mankind hasn't destroyed itself by then. Next question.

* * *

After weathering the war in New York, where Mining had died, Gretl finally returned alone to Vienna late in 1947.

It was, of course, a changed city, a captive city destroyed in areas by bombs and shelling. It was also a divided city, filled, in her sector, with rude Russians who both helped and aggravated an already bad situation, bringing with them even more chronic shortages, along with blackouts, queues, bureaucratic bungling and other annoyances.

Money for her was no problem, but her needs and desires were on a completely different scale, and she lived there from sheer doggedness just to be in her native city. As almost everywhere in Europe, there was an acute housing shortage, and it was a triumph for her after a few months to move from her tiny hotel room into a small apartment in a faded three-story building on Rotenstern Gasse. Gretl was hardly overjoyed at the prospect of living in Vienna's Russian zone. But it was an apartment, and the location wasn't too bad, being just a few blocks from the International District, as the Ring was now called. It was an old building, with dirty, shrapnel-pocked wall reliefs outside and a lobby of cracked marble and tarnished brasswork, where in the afternoon the old ladies gathered. Peacock Alley, Gretl called this gauntlet. Perched in their beat-up bent-wood chairs, gravely nodding, they would watch ogle-eyed as she passed —
die Kaiserin
— dressed in her dark prewar furs and smart veiled hats trimmed with sharp feathers.

By Gretl's standards, the apartment was barely servant's quarters, but it was enough. To get back her own house, which the Russians had turned into a police stable, was beyond her strength or desire at that point. Even to seek restitution or simple justice for what was hers would have taken more years and energy than even a far younger person would have had. And why chase the past? She was convinced the house would one day be reclaimed as a monument of sorts; it would not be lost. Without much regret, she let it go.