Wittgenstein Jr (3 page)

DOYLE: How are we meant to know what lies behind your remarks?

WITTGENSTEIN (the quote marks audible): Nothing lies ‘behind’ my remarks.

DOYLE: Is there some theory you’re trying to express?

WITTGENSTEIN: I am trying to think, that’s all. I am trying to ask questions.

DOYLE: Then what are we supposed to learn from your lectures?

WITTGENSTEIN: Structures. That’s all I want you to see.
Depths
.

DOYLE: But I can’t see anything!

Wittgenstein turns over the most ordinary words for inspection. He insists on beginning anew. On starting again, all over again. On discarding
false
beginnings. On struggling to a yet more originary beginning, on pushing back to ever deeper fundaments. On swimming against the current, against all satisfaction.

There are moments of apparent progress in his class. Moments of clarification, when he smiles bleakly. But then, there is the perpetual return of doubt. Of despair. Of
failure
.

He leans forward in his chair, eyes closed. Then, opening his eyes, he looks up at us, with a pained expression on his face.

There is something he hasn’t yet
realised
, he says. Something he hasn’t
seen
. If only it could be
shown
to him.

His torment. Halfway through class, he utters a loud cry. He’s giving up logic for good, he says. He’d have made a better
clown
than logician.

A long pause, before he starts again.

If a man could write a book on philosophy, which was really a book on philosophy, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world
, he quotes.

He
is trying to write such a book, he says. The
Logik. Die Logik
.

Wittgenstein, on his chair at the front of the room. Who will come with him to wash off his brain?

Outside. Wittgenstein, walking ahead of us. Students in surging groups. Students everywhere, a sea of them, moving in fast currents.

Posh students everywhere. Rah boys in gilets and flip-flops, with piles of bed-head hair. Rugby types, as big as fridges, all red-cheeked health, their voices booming. Rah girls dressed down in gym gear and pony-tails. English roses in horse-and-hound clothing, as though fresh from the gymkhana. Yummy not-yet-mummies in fur-lined Barbour. Ethno-Sloanes, with string tops and slouch-bags. Sloane-ingénues with big cups of coffee, sweater sleeves half pulled over their hands …

EDE: The
Cambridge type
. Revolting! When was the last time you met anyone
working class
at Cambridge?

DOYLE: There’s Benwell.

EDE: He’s hardly typical. Besides, he wants nothing to do with us.

We consider the enigma of Benwell. Why does he always scowl at us, though we, too, attend Wittgenstein’s class? Why does he ignore us?

Ede thinks it must be a northern thing. Things are grim up there.

DOYLE: Peters is northern!

EDE: Well, Benwell is from farther north. The real north.

Ede conjures up an image of Benwell in his old pit village, wandering past slag heaps and barred factory gates. Past rasping ex-miners on mobility scooters, past workless lads and
grey-faced mothers, past the drug-addled and the muttering mad, up to the lonely moorland …

Ede says he’s always wanted to come from the north. It would legitimate his sense of despair.

MULBERRY: Despair about what? You’re as rich as Croesus!

EDE: About everything! If I were Benwell I’d want to blow all this up—the river, the Backs, all of Cambridge … Actually, if I were Benwell, I’d like to blow
us
up.

Luckily, there are drugs to dull the pain, Ede says, popping a mogadon and taking an extra one for luck.

EDE: This is how I got through Eton.

Wittgenstein, ahead of us, hands behind his back.

DOYLE: What do you suppose he’s thinking about?

EDE: Something very, very difficult.

DOYLE: Why does philosophy have to be so
hard
?

EDE: You don’t know you’re doing philosophy unless it
hurts
. Feel the burn, Doyle-o!

Wittgenstein points out the faded names of firms on the sides of buildings. Names carved from building stone. Buildings once had a
purpose
, he says. People, too. There was a time when the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker
really were
the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. When the Cambridge don
really was
a don, he says. And when the Cambridge student—any student—
really was
a student.

Trinity Street. The gatehouses, with their turrets … The filigree of the pinnacles, spires and domes … The stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel …

EDE: They put the cobbles in to impress the tourists, you know. Ye olde Cambridge and all that. It’s like a stage set. The spectacle of the upper class in their natural setting.

WITTGENSTEIN (turning to face us): The beauty of Cambridge is meant to
lull
you, to make you let down your defences. The eye is only
distracted
by beauty. It is only
deceived
by beauty. Because the old alliance between beauty and goodness has long been broken, and the treaty between beauty and truth was torn up some time ago.

EDE (quietly): That was
my
point.

King’s Parade. Teenage tourists pose against the college walls. One pretends to hold the gatehouse of St John’s between his fingers, another does handstands. A clump of child-tourists are ushered away from the grass by a security guard.

Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is
only there to be photographed
: that’s what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective
fantasy
 …

Ede’s rooms.

EDE (doing his Wittgenstein impression): Cambridge dissolving ist. Like ein Alka-Seltzer.

ME (doing my Wittgenstein impression):
Die Logik
mit ein kicking
k
!

Laughter. How absurd Wittgenstein is! How pompous!

Still, it would be really something to make an impression on him, we agree. To say something startling in class, to make him look up, surprised.
Perhaps you have something there
, he’d say.
You have put your finger on something
, he’d say. Or:
You have said something much more important than you realise
. Or:
Yes, that is certainly worth thinking about
. Or:
You have identified a genuine issue
. Or:
I must think about this further
.

Imagine Wittgenstein making reference to you in class.
As Ede said to me the other day …
Or:
Peters raised an interesting point with me …

Imagine walking through the cloisters with Wittgenstein, solving some logical problem together, voices echoing. Or standing on the library steps, exchanging ideas with hushed vehemence. Or walking silently in thought alongside him on the Backs, musing on some great Problem …

EDE: Wouldn’t it be nice to be brilliant?
Philosophically
brilliant!
Logically
brilliant! Wouldn’t you like to show
witty
brilliance, at least? A brilliance of repartee at the dinner table? Wouldn’t you like to be a
savant
, who people fear for and look after? Or a
drunken
genius, who comes into his own in kebab shops at 4 AM?

We speak of brilliance
stumbling
as night becomes dawn. Of brilliance passed out in a flowerbed. Of brilliance sick on the cobblestones … Of
stray
brilliance, wandering from every track …

We speak of burning yourself up from the effort of thinking. Of being
spent
from thinking, like an exhausted horse … Of your life being merely the
husk
of thought, of the effort to think …

And for Wittgenstein himself to sit at your bedside, as you expired from thought. For Wittgenstein himself to watch over you, mopping your brow, as you
died
from thought …

Wednesday evening. Ede tells me about his visit to Wittgenstein.

He knocked at the door, exactly on the hour, and almost instantly felt watched through the grille. Then the door opened, and there was Wittgenstein. He seemed
frail
, despite his height, Ede says. Vulnerable.

Ede felt nervous, he says. A little drunk, though he hadn’t drunk a thing. He thought he was going to say something stupid.

Wittgenstein asked his usual questions. Ede let out that he was heir to a duchy—he’s not sure why. Wittgenstein nodded. He, too, has known privilege, he said.

Ede needed the loo. He asked him where the toilet was, and felt vulgar.

So Ede stood pissing in Wittgenstein’s toilet. He felt he ought to have
sat
on the toilet to piss, he says. He noticed the dried lavender in a little pot in the bathroom. A tube of Aquafresh beside a toothbrush.

EDE: Genius uses Aquafresh.

Ede felt like a dolt through it all, he says. He couldn’t express himself. He couldn’t say anything witty. Anything memorable. But then, there wasn’t much
space
to speak. It’s
Wittgenstein’s
show, not yours, Ede says. Wittgenstein’s the star, even if he pretends he isn’t.

But his rooms really are different from other dons’, Ede says. There’s no wall of leather-bound books. No clutter of collectibles. No kitsch souvenirs as talking points. No bottles
of college sherry, one dry and one sweet. No bottles of beer for undergraduates. No
shabbiness
—no sagging armchairs, no coffee-stained rugs. It’s very clean, very austere.

EDE: He told me about his hot baths. He boasted about the temperatures he can stand. And he said something about his hatred of carpets.
You can’t keep them clean!

There was a flowering plant on Wittgenstein’s windowsill, in a little pot, Ede says. And he heard the sound of a piano being practised, a couple of floors down. And he caught a glimpse of Wittgenstein’s neatly made bed, through a half-open door. And he saw the views from Wittgenstein’s rooms, which look out over the red-tiled roofs, towards the river.

I tell Ede about
my
visit to Wittgenstein. The same stairs, the grille, the tea, the quiz. Wittgenstein set the tone, and I told him all sorts of silly things. My parents’ farm. My scholarship. My hatred of boarding school. My nostalgia for the hills of Yorkshire, as compared to the flatness of Cambridgeshire. My fruitless search for the so-called Gog Magog Hills in the Cambridgeshire countryside. My poetry …

EDE: Your poetry! What a sensitive young man you are, Peters.

ME: He quoted Blake. And Cowper.

EDE: Yes, yes, but did you get anything interesting out of him?

ME: He said he doesn’t read philosophy any more.
If a book doesn’t make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it?
, he said. And another thing: he has a brother.

EDE: Really!?

ME: Yes, he mentioned him in passing.
As my brother said of Oxford
 … Something like that.

EDE:
Very
interesting.

Ede opens his laptop and googles
Oxford
, coupled with Wittgenstein’s real surname. A news article:
Oxford Don Suicide
.

EDE:
Very, very
interesting—doomed genius. (Then, summarising): The brother was a brilliant young mathematician. A prodigy. Went up to Oxford at fifteen. Finished his doctoral studies at nineteen, when he became a Junior Research Fellow. Took his life at twenty. Well!

How old is Wittgenstein?, we wonder. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Definitely a potential suicide, we agree.

Ede googles
logic and suicides
, but gets nothing. He googles
maths and madness
.

EDE: Cantor sent himself mad, when he was investigating infinity, apparently. Gödel, too—he starved himself to death …

The framed picture of Descartes on the classroom wall. (A
degenerate
, Wittgenstein says.) The framed picture of Leibniz. (A
monster of thought
, Wittgenstein says.)

The philosopher
looks
different from other people, Wittgenstein says. The philosopher’s face has secrets. Hiding places. The philosopher is incapable of a simple smile.

There are no signs of philosophy in
our
faces, he says, looking round the class. Because we know nothing of
fate
, he says. Nothing of
fatality
. We do not understand what it means to be
destined
.

We are parts of things: that’s our luck, he says. The philosopher’s misfortune is to be a part of nothing. To stand apart from everything.

To renounce the pomps and vanity of the world, as St Paul said.
I die daily
: just think what that would really mean, Wittgenstein says.

The great risk is that we will lose our souls, Wittgenstein says. There are very few people who do not lose their souls. It will happen to us. Not now, perhaps, but
eventually
. We will be tested. We may gain the whole world, he says—and he’s sure many of us will, with our well-off families and our wealth of connections—but this matters little if we lose our souls.

Okulu’s organ recital.

Dim light. Medieval glass. The fan-vaulted ceiling.

We’re supposed to feel awe, Ede says, looking round the gloom. We’re supposed to feel dwarfed.

EDE: The
mysterium tremendum
. Transcendence and all that. The depth of history! Of tradition! Of religion! The mystique of old England, and so on. Well, there is no mystery. We’re all out in the open now.

We survey the audience. The Kirwins, in tracksuits. (EDE: You would have thought they’d have made
some
effort!) Scroggins, half asleep. (EDE: He’s high as a kite. You can see it.)

A spotlight over the organ.

EDE: Oh God—
culture!
Remind me why we came again?

Okulu, bowing to the audience. Taking his seat.

Rolling waves of Bach in the near-darkness.

The low notes get him right in the gut, Ede says. They’re loosening his bowels.