Wittgenstein's Mistress (31 page)

God, poor Maupassant.

Well, but poor Friedrich Nietzsche, too, actually. If not to mention poor Vivaldi while I am at it also, since I now remember that he died in an almshouse.

And for that matter poor Bach's widow Anna Magdalena, who was allowed to do the same thing....

Ah, me. If not to add poor Andrea del Sarto and poor Cassandra and poor Marina Tsvetayeva and poor Vincent Van Gogh and poor Jeanne Hébuterne and poor Piero di Cosimo and poor Iphigenia and poor Stan Gehrig and poor singing birds sweet and poor Medea's little boys and poor Spinoza's spiders and poor Astyanax and poor my aunt Esther as well. .. .

So for that matter poor practically the whole world then, more often than not. (234-36)

This outpouring of sympathy seems to have a cathartic effect on Kate, however. Nearly two months have passed since she broke off typing the book we are reading, and some sense of balance and renewal seems to have come to her in the meantime. After the first snow falls, she is reminded of "that old lost nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso. / Making it almost as if one could have newly painted the entire world one's self, and in any manner one wished" (233). She seems to be doing just that at novel's end, building fires on the beach after sunset and making believe they are Greek watchfires at Troy, starting over again where it all began. Like the woman in the hypothetical novel Kate toys with writing (a metafictional version of
Wittgenstein's Mistress
itself, obviously), Kate has "gotten more accustomed to a world without any people in it than she ever could have gotten to a world without such a thing as
The Descent from the Cross,
by Rogier van der Weyden, ... Or without the
Iliad'
(232-33). The throat-constricting desolation of the novel's final lines seven pages later discourages the reader from too cheery an interpretation, but civilization seems finally to have been worth it after all. At any rate, I now couldn't become accustomed to a world without
Wittgenstein's Mistress.

—S
TEVEN
M
OORE