The World as I Found It (31 page)

Please, emphasized Moore, who could see this was going over badly. Don't take this wrongly. But do you think Wittgenstein is entirely stable?

Oh, no. He's quite
mad
!

Hoping to combat absurdity with absurdity, Russell then said testily, Come, now. Do you think it's all that grim? Hovering there with a queasy look, Moore wasn't at all attuned to Russell's lacerating attempt at satire. Well, of course I'm
joking
! Russell added with a flaring grin. What I mean is, you must know Wittgenstein on
his
terms. As opposed to
my
terms.
Or
your own.

Knowing he had overreacted, Russell ventured another laugh, to show his easy unconcern. But the patronizing tone that capped off this laugh only antagonized Moore, who waded in, saying, Well, all the same,
I've
wondered. Also, a student of mine, David Pinsent, mentioned some things.

What things?

Again, Moore felt that irritating proprietal tone. With a look of discomfort, he hedged. I misspoke just now — I was told in confidence. Nothing awful, you understand, but still matters of concern.

This student, asked Russell, inclining his head under his umbrella, he's red haired? A short fellow?

That's him. You've met?

No, but I've seen them together. Your student, is he?

No, he's not
my
student, said Moore, giving a dig in return. I'm his adviser. Pinsent's also reading philosophy. He took a first in mathematics in his Little Go last year — quite gifted. Moore's eyes moved up and down. I rather thought you knew him.

Well, I don't —

Well, said Moore, drawing up his shoulders. This can be kept between us, I think. My concern is that Pinsent is young — three or four years younger than Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's already made a sufficiently strong impression on him, if you know what I mean. I'd hate to see Pinsent — shall we say, knocked off course. That's
roughly
my concern —

Feeling that he had made his point, Moore abruptly stopped. Unfortunately, he had said too much and not enough. All he'd done was raise Russell's hackles.

No, Russell wasn't giving in to this meddling. With all the focused attention of a boy pulling the wings off a fly, Russell slowly nodded, watching a bead of rain inch down Moore's brow before he gave a frosty
Good afternoon
.

It did not sit well at all with Russell that Pinsent was one of Moore's lads — one of his “fleas,” as he called them. And this still left begging the fact that Russell was seeing Wittgenstein less at a time when Russell increasingly needed him, and not just professionally.

Russell tried to put it all in proportion. The problem was not them, he thought, it was the nature of the work, advancing one moment, collapsing the next. The work had the nature of a wall — he and Wittgenstein both spoke of it so, saying after a good night's work, There's another piece of the wall we've pulled down.

Russell had long held this image of a wall sundering him from the truth, an intolerable wall that he must pull down. Characteristically, he imagined that he and Wittgenstein must share the same wall, but this was wishful thinking: their walls were not the same, nor could they be. Moreover, their respective walls were always changing in form, shifting in the way of a dream. The problem was plural, one of evolving dimensions: the wall was not one but many, or perhaps many walls that made up one Great Wall. Before a wall one was too close to say.

At least Russell felt he had allies and forebears. Unlike Wittgenstein, he saw himself as part of a tradition, one of a line of thinkers who had stared at various walls, wondering what remained to be done — or more likely demolished.

By persistence or brute force a wall might be assaulted, but it would not be breached by imagining it was not really so high or formidable. Still, even Wittgenstein would wonder at times if a given wall even existed — that is, if a problem was truly a
philosophical
problem, and not instead one of the wards of psychology or science. Russell, by contrast, was more wily. Philosophy, he would say with a wink, was traditionally a case of weighing theft — the theft of assumptions and givens — over honest toil. Wittgenstein despised this attitude. He said the problems must be squarely confronted, not sent a Trojan horse. And here Wittgenstein would see himself as both the betrayed and the betrayer, knowing, as Russell did not, that their walls were really quite different. Shameful arrogance, but true, Wittgenstein would think. Russell did not have his ear to this wall, and if he did, he could not hear it surging with the outer sea.

For Wittgenstein the biggest obstacle was a more all-pervasive problem. For lack of a better term, he thought of it as the riddle of life — his life, life in general, it was pretty much the same. The problem, in any case, was not just one of finding an answer but of first posing the correct question, or questions. And part of the problem, he saw, was the very logic of language, that Great Mirror, which could describe the world but not itself, blinded by its own reflected radiance. One root problem, it seemed, was the mystery of logical form. In even the most basic tautology this form was present. The self-evidence of tautology was of course trivial. But the
principle
of tautology — the logical ability to say that
this
is
this
— was a fundamental logical truth that no one could deny. Cat is mightily cat. George is England's king. Either it is raining or it is not raining.

Clearly, Wittgenstein told Russell, one could hardly disagree that it is either raining or not raining. This was intelligible but it was empty: it said nothing about the weather. But here Russell interjected that a Hegelian idealist might say it was neither raining nor not raining, but rather only
drizzling
— they so love a synthesis. Wittgenstein laughed — Russell was always breaking the tension with jokes — but then he was still lost in that drizzly parenthesis. Stumped.

Like a mountain pushed up from the sea, a wall will sometimes rise out of a life, rising to see the world arrayed below like paradise. But ultimately the wall prevails, while the life becomes at best a kind of residue — the mortar squeezed out between the wall's blocks, or the lowly grass at its foot. Bang the wall. Talk to the wall. A wall remains. A
wall
that is a
wall
that is a
wall
…

B
ENEATH A WALL
is the life, and the life, unlike the wall, must sleep.

Russell hated putting Wittgenstein out late at night, but there was no point continuing. The wall wasn't giving. Even Wittgenstein's own mind had put him out. The life must sleep.

The suicide is sly, he is so secretive he hardly knows himself what the plotting mind has set in store. So many ways to make a hole in the dark, so many ways to slip out of the world. Dread of the razor. Dread of the length of rope or the tower. Lowering guilty eyes while passing the chemist's shop, where a quietus could be had for a half bob and a fib.

They were both so coy about this, Wittgenstein and Russell. To himself each would wonder if the other shared the same shameful dream. One night, seeing Wittgenstein's gloomy look, Russell asked, Are you thinking about logic or your sins? And he felt a thrill when Wittgenstein replied without a hint of irony, Both.

Nowadays Russell fell easily to sleep, the sand running swiftly out his ears; he slept more soundly than he had in years. Still, it was galling for Russell to feel that another must come and undo what he had done — to feel that in some fundamental way he had been reduced. Worse, Russell often could not quite see what Wittgenstein was getting at in his statements about logic, much less how they might agree on a point yet derive from it wholly different conclusions. But what most disturbed Russell was how Wittgenstein's ideas would seem like ideas he himself had once had, dream ideas long discarded or forgotten but now brilliantly recast. It seemed unfair. With the imperviousness of something shattered, Wittgenstein spilled himself only to find himself replenished, brimming over with new thoughts.

But this was another instance of Willy-Nilly's law: Wittgenstein didn't at all see himself in such heroic terms. Breathless, sleepless, he would dream of death, of long-fingered Clotho stripping the life from him, a milty, guilty cloud billowing in the teeming dark. It was a fatal pill upon his lips, this life and its word. Explain, illogician, why loss and past is
form
, and
forever fixed
. Explain, please, why loss, which after all is about nothing, is still somehow
something
. And once you have explained this, then explain why — though we gulp experience whole and molt it as quickly, handling our past like slippery snakeskin — explain, if you can, why nothing is forgotten or forgiven, or why a wave scarcely recedes before there comes its repetition.

Dreams, like walls, do attain different sizes. Dreams do exceed our capacity to contain them. As so as a boy, and even now, Wittgenstein had imagined an acid so corrosive and pure that no vessel could contain it. Error was the sin. Suicide was the result and cause, and life was the first error, an infinite regress. He couldn't stop it. Clear through his ulcerous heart the acid ate, burning through the bedding and dripping blackly on the rug, burning down through the floor and ages of coal, burning clear down to hell where devils dance, then falling through space and never cooling, and never ridding itself of the cutting virulence of truth, black heart, falling and falling and never stopping …

Logic is not forgiving.

T
HERE WAS
a more benign variation of this dream. Lying in bed, Wittgenstein would think of how Jesus, standing like an apparition on the stormy sea, bade Peter to step from the boat and walk to him across the unquiet water. Wittgenstein would imagine himself stepping out on the waves, finding them first solid as planks, then mushy cold like a wet snow in which he sank to his knees, then, abruptly, to his Adam's apple. But unlike Peter, he never cried out. His arms flew up, and he was sucked beneath the waves, blind as a stone and never caring, sinking and sinking and never sleeping because he had no faith, no faith.

B
UT WHILE RUSSELL FRETTED
, then put a nice face on things — declaring it all nerves, evanescent melancholia, unhappiness — in the meantime, David Pinsent, not unlike the Victrola fido, was pricking up his good ear and keeping a careful diary in a precise, piercing hand:

* * *

While playing his own cards close to his chest, Wittgenstein meanwhile was learning a good deal about his new friend. Besides seeing anew Pinsent's contrariness, Wittgenstein confirmed his initial impression that the young man was poor and a public school boy. Once the ice was broken, Pinsent told Wittgenstein all about life before Cambridge — how he'd bounced from school to school, preceded by a well-deserved reputation for taking school prizes, and making trouble.

I never did get on, said Pinsent with a shrug. Because I was so silent, the masters always thought me sneaky and arrogant. Coming in as a scholarship boy did me no good, either. The clever boy was always taken for a swot — anything intellectual was so much rubbish to the other fellows. All that mattered was athletics and
tone
and trousers of the right cut.

To the average public school master, brilliance in a boy was one thing, but brilliance mixed with originality was most troubling, definitely to be discouraged. More disturbing still to the school constabulary was this stubborn impudence, for which the lad was given many a vigorous birching, as when he refused to attend vespers. Like hangings, these floggings were public humiliations, with the school captain and other senior boys present to attest that the headmaster did not break the law by raising the freshly cut switch over his head.

Pitched over, forced to grasp his own trembling ankles, the boy was hardly the first miscreant to fear he might foul his breeches during a twenty-count. Ah, yes, Pinsent said, it gave one perspective to view the world upside-down. Peering between his outstretched legs, he did not miss the rapt, sometimes aroused grimaces of his mates as the master paused at sixteen to dab his fleshy forehead.