The World as I Found It (95 page)

Now you, he said to his young friend with a chopping motion of his hand. You, then, will be the earth. You will circle round your wife, the beautiful sun, and I, the little moon, will circle round you both.

But you will wear yourself out, his friend protested. The moon is the most strenuous part.

I assure you, I'll be fine, Wittgenstein insisted with a smile. Now catch her. Very well, then! Here we go …

The moon, it's true, is small and comparatively insignificant, but it circles both earth and sun and causes the tides to well. The husband gamboled around his wife. Ambling stiff-legged in daft circles, flushed and laughing, Wittgenstein had to run twice — three times — as fast, revolving around the husband, around the wife, around the meadow high with summer, with the grasshoppers sharply churring out before him like bits of chaff. Whirling in his round, Wittgenstein wanted to marry the world. Two solar years they covered, the wife looking cautiously forward, meeting the eyes of her revolving husband. And whirling around them in incantation, dizzily spinning in his own outer orbit, Wittgenstein was wishing, as he had wished for Gretl, that he could make life good for just these two, that one good thing might stand, fixed like a star in benediction over this fragile time. No, no! he insisted, so daftly happy when his concerned friend, the earth, protested that they must stop. Running and spinning and waving his arms, he continued until he collapsed on the warm clover, laughing and panting with the sun in his face.

* * *

Wittgenstein had been back in England for some months when he felt a pain in his groin. Stoic that he was, he ignored it for several weeks, until one of his young friends, a psychiatrist, prevailed upon him to see a very good older doctor by the name of Bevens. This was in early March of 1950.

Wittgenstein went to see Dr. Bevens, but he allowed the doctor to examine him only after having secured his solemn promise to tell him the complete truth, whatever it was. Such precautions proved unnecessary, for Dr. Bevens was a blunt man. After some tests and a second examination, he told Wittgenstein that he had cancer of the prostate and had, at most, a year to live. At this Wittgenstein only shrugged. He was not surprised. He had long suspected that something like this was happening, and he was strangely relieved to know the truth. It was as if, after having lived for years as a fugitive, he had been caught by the rightful authorities. Yes, Wittgenstein was tremendously grateful to Dr. Bevens for his honesty, and when he left, he gave him his heartfelt thanks, as if the doctor had given him something of inestimable value.

Dr. Bevens warned Wittgenstein that he would have only a few good months before he would need looking after. This was what Wittgenstein feared most: despite his experiences working in the wards during the war, he shared his sister's aversion to hospitals. As a rule, he didn't think much of doctors, either, but he was highly impressed with Dr. Bevens, who, it turned out, was no less impressed with him. Dr. Bevens knew that Wittgenstein had no family left, and he could see his visible distress at the thought of ending his life in a hospital. This troubled the doctor, and the next day, after discussing the matter with his wife and several of Wittgenstein's friends, Dr. Bevens told Wittgenstein that he and his wife wanted him to live with them when the time came.

Wittgenstein gratefully accepted the doctor's offer, and eleven months later, he died in the doctor's house. It was a painful death, but it was still a fairly good death as deaths go. Besides Bevens and his wife, most of Wittgenstein's friends were there, and until almost the very last, Wittgenstein was conscious, with a copy of
Black Beauty
on his night table, along with the philosophical remarks he had written out that morning.

In the months before, while he was still able, Wittgenstein had made the rounds, saying good-bye to various people he had known. Moore and Dorothy were first among those he visited, and it was a good visit. Unlike that night when he had come with Francis to make his confession, Wittgenstein was matter-of-fact and strangely cheerful as he told them about this thing that was so certain — he rather gave the impression that he was going on a trip. Although he walked a little slower than usual, he did not look, or act, infirm, nor did he dwell on his illness, which he treated more like a minor inconvenience as he spoke to Moore about his philosophical papers and other business that he wanted to put in order.

In another man, such matter-of-factness might have seemed strange, a mere mechanism of avoidance. Yet Wittgenstein was so genuinely at peace that he put them at ease and left them feeling oddly hopeful, as if at last he had laid some hard things to rest. He told the Moores that he was leaving the next week with a friend for his hut in Norway. Red-faced and ailing, Moore was now seventy-seven. Dorothy was a healthy fifty-eight. Moore had long relinquished thoughts of travel, but he told Wittgenstein that it sounded magnificent, his plan to go north late in the summer. Yet even as he said this, Moore thought of the indescribable loneliness he had felt on that Norwegian mountainside thirty-six years earlier, reft from his wife. The memory of Wittgenstein shipwrecked in that hut as a young man reminded Moore of the loneliness that Christ must have felt when the devil took him on the mountaintop and showed him the world below in all its glory. But St. Luke, it seemed to Moore, had it wrong. It was not godliness that had made Jesus spurn the devil's temptations. It was not mere goodness nor spite, nor had Christ been holding out for something higher. Rather, thought Moore, Christ spurned the devil because to accept what the devil offered was not in his nature. That was all. It simply was not his nature.

Wittgenstein promised the Moores that he would see them when he returned, but it didn't turn out that way. Moore missed the funeral, but several times he visited Wittgenstein's grave in St. Giles's churchyard, in Cambridge, where in 1958 Moore was himself buried, and where in 1977 Dorothy was buried beside him, just a few feet from Wittgenstein's grave.

In the intervening years, neither Moore nor Dorothy ever contributed, as Russell did, to the various memoirs or gospel accounts about Wittgenstein. But for Moore and Dorothy there were those odd, insignificant things one remembers about the last time one sees someone, things that only later take on significance. Thus they would recall how he took a second piece of cake on that last visit, and how, as if they had just then noticed it, he would sometimes gently slap his forehead when he thought of something. They likewise recalled watching him walk down the street afterward. Walking in quite his usual way, really. And yet in his step there was something, em, so telling or
mortal
, or so
something
(though he was just walking), as memory moved in and began its subtle redaubing of the thing remembered.

* * *

Before he died, Wittgenstein did make that last trip to Norway.

A young poet named Tony accompanied him, the two of them arriving in August, when the nights were growing colder and the sky was still smoldering at midnight, still that same pooling, whorling red.

Fourteen years had passed since Wittgenstein had last been there with Francis, but the hut was still in good repair, its tangled sod roof having been patched repeatedly through the years by a succession of hikers or hermits who had passed by or pilgrimaged there.

A full set of pots and skillets were neatly stacked in the pantry, along with matches and scouring powder and a mildew-spotted note in English kindly asking the guest to clean out the ash box of the stove and leave wood and matches for those who came next. There was a peculiar human history about the place. On one wall hung an old guitar, on another, a set of binoculars. In the cubby they found cards and a chessboard, while behind the bunks there was now a long shelf lined with books in various languages, including a German edition of the
Tractatus
and an Agatha Christie that Wittgenstein, now addicted to detective stories, was pleased to see he had not read.

It was almost eerie, the place was in such perfect order. Even the damp, smoky-earthy smell of the place was as Wittgenstein remembered it. Unwittingly, he and Pinsent had even begun a tradition in August 1914, when they had carved their initials on the beam above the door. Now the beam and door and sills, the eaves and rafter poles, were scarred with initials and dates, with limericks and formulas, stories and riddles, jokes.

Here I am, Wittgenstein said excitedly to Tony, pointing to his L.W. above the door beside the D.P. And here I am again — with Max this time …

They were all there — his initials with Pinsent's in 1914, then alone in 1921; later with Max in 1925, 1926 and 1938; alone again in 1933 and then with Francis in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Over the course of an hour, while Tony sat tunelessly strumming the five-stringed guitar, Wittgenstein found them all, superstitiously running his finger over the deeply incised letters, then going out to walk, a little overcome.

Wittgenstein had his morbid moments, but it was generally sweet for him in its way, the ragged end of this season. He had forgotten how small and concentrated in their essences the hardy mountain flowers are at that altitude — how they gouge the eye with their spectral brightness. In the distance, hot coils of golden red light slowly effused in the darkness over the glowing snow tips of the mountains, the bending sky pressing down over the earth like a wide bowl. Wittgenstein had the old sensation of having his hair slowly being pulled up by the roots. Under the hot magneto of that sky, it seemed the light did not refract or reflect, but rather
extracted
a color clear from the molten depths of the earth, drawing it up through the flossy tips of the grass heaped in the rocky meadows like a manna snow.

There is a certain palette of approaching death, a vividness one sees in the late work of the great masters, when a last few things work themselves free and the colors come fluid and true without much effort. There was something of this radiant, brooding clarity in Wittgenstein's late work. Wittgenstein was writing a series of remarks about the nature and perception of color — of colors as subtle as odors and as mysterious, in the discontinuous light, as the mind's efforts to discern them. To discern: this finally is the holy work of the mind.

In religion, Wittgenstein had once written, every level of devoutness has a certain form of expression that makes no sense at a lower level of devoutness. Beliefs, by virtue of being beliefs, are not reasonable. Faith, then, is not to be explained, or refuted, by reason, nor will faith of a higher order of devoutness always be properly understood by someone at a lower level. Wittgenstein did not think of himself as especially devout, but he was devout enough to realize that he had fallen short of what might be attained in this life, and he was still unreasonable or vain enough to thirst for something outside it. There is beauty outside the mind, and in spite of all evidence or reason to the contrary, there is a stream of life outside this one. Even in the darkness the mind moves. In the darkness the mind can move a long time, moving in almost the way sound travels at night, when an occasional star deigns to drip down. On that mountain, in the stealthy darkness, Wittgenstein liked the way his mind moved, and he was grateful to leave a few thoughts in good order in the modest hope that others might come after him to polish the humble skillets, sharpen the knives and carve something else above the door.

* * *

At the end of a life people assign it a weight or a general trend, a moral trajectory. They ask whether it was sad or happy, failed or successful, asking this just as if there can be some consensus after the self as remembered is safely consigned to the common estate of history, which is ultimately everyone's destiny and thus everyone's business. Like a willing weather, the spirit moves through time, and against its time. Thus the spirit is dry when all outside it is wet, cold when all is hot and confused while all others are certain. The spirit wonders at this difference, while those outside see the spirit coming in the guise of a man and try to form an opinion of what the weather must be like inside, some saying calm, others saying stormy, and still others saying that it is an impertinence to ask and better not to know, though in fact nobody really does.

Just before he died, Wittgenstein said to Mrs. Bevens, Tell everyone that I've had a wonderful life. Of course, it wasn't like him to exaggerate, and his friends found it troubling that he would say this. To them, Wittgenstein's life seemed many things, but not wonderful, and in the end they did not know if he had merely been trying to put them at ease or if in fact he had found his troubled life wonderful. But this, in any case, is what he said.

I would be ungrateful if I didn't thank a number of people who helped with various aspects of this book.

First, I want to thank, above all, my wife, Marianne Glass Duffy, without whom I likely wouldn't have found this world or any other.

I also wish to thank Marjorie Perloff, who was there to continue my wayward education when it really began — out of college. And I want to specially thank Tom Lachman, whose editing, blunt advice and enthusiasm were vital to the most formative stages of the book, and to my very development as a writer. My thanks also to Chris Zylbert for her copy-editing during the formative period, and for many fine comments that helped sharpen the book.

Many people say no to a writer, so I'd like to thank those who were the first to say yes: my agent, Malaga Baldi; Jonathan Brent, editor of
Formations;
Bradford Morrow and Deborah Baker of
Conjunctions;
and finally, Katrina Kenison and Corlies Smith at Ticknor & Fields.

I'd also like to specially thank Martin Morse Wooster for his excellent additional research and advice, and Timothy Dickinson, who offered many other valuable comments and saved the manuscript from some serious errors. My gratitude also goes to Janet Silver, whose manuscript editing, in conjunction with Katrina Kenison's editing, has done much to improve the book.