The World as I Found It (7 page)

This little
pensée
, as his father was wont to call these thunderbolts, fell on Wittgenstein's chest with the weight of ten atmospheres. With anybody else, Wittgenstein's rebuttal would have been quick and sure, but this was not to be thrown off so quickly. He suffered three days and five drafts before he replied.

After this letter, Wittgenstein returned to his kites, but the sick feeling persisted and with it a certain floating anxiety. And so he buried himself in his work, looking
out
into the phenomenological world to keep the worsening weather of his boiling inner world contrite and contained.

These were big, aerodynamically curved kites he was flying, wide wings in need of galloping winds. For such winds, the University of Manchester had established the Upper Atmosphere Kite-Flying Station near Absdell, a cottage standing on a point where the headlands shear off into the Irish Sea.

For two days Wittgenstein had been there. For two days this feeling had been building. The kite, a ten-foot-tall red dihedral of laminated spruce and doped silk, had taken him four weeks to build, and in the twenty-knot wind it took right up, the stretched silk rattling like a jib sheet as it tore line from a winch wound with four thousand feet of 150-pound piano wire.

The sky was wreathed with cirrus. The wind was blowing out to sea. Behind him the brass cups of an anemometer whirled. He had a barometer and stopwatch, inclinometer and notebook, science and its methods — all forgotten now as he watched the kite sweep away.

Air desires. Water encircles and engulfs. The scourging waves recurred and pulled, seamlessly merging like stairs, without human meaning, without ever ending. As he looked down from that bluff, the waves seemed as meaningless and futile as the generations, no sooner surging than they were wiped clean of what they had just brought, falling back into an oceanic blackness, with a slow explosion of all that had passed before. Ocean or air — it was either the engulfment of will or the steady pull of desire that destroyed him. As a boy, and even now, he had suffered periodic bouts of agoraphobia, a fear not of height but of space. This fear came in different guises. At times he felt he would actually dissolve, perishing like an open flask of ether into the world's greater volume. Then at other times he saw it was not space he feared but the queasy feeling of
not knowing what he would do
, imagining that, like an unstable substance, he would somehow explode if ever fully exposed to the concupiscent air.

In the rising wind, spears of sharp sea grass were whirring like scissors. Clouds covered the sea and waves battered the rocks, spurting up in steamy plumes as the last birds beat back to shore. Across the sky, like a cornea filling with blood, came a fearful darkening. The piano wire was humming, and ever so faintly he was trembling, thinking what a thing it was to dread one's own self — to see the self as enemy or other, not as companion, guide, sanctuary.

Why is the will so powerless to stop the thing that life has set in motion? he wondered. Did he suppose that if he were to find value, some gloss of value might rub off on him? In all the sea there is a single pearl. In all the world there is a single, mirroring form that binds and reflects all other things. Desire was his crime, he saw. His father was right: surely, it was vain and sinful to want this thing. Surely, for this presumption punishment awaited. The ocean need not be deep for one to drown, nor need the grapes be high to be just past reach and hence all the sweeter. The dream is incomparably stronger than the dreamer.

His stomach sank with the barometer. Sore from thinking, sore from wanting — to him it seemed that even sex was easier. In his head a hum, a rhythm was hovering. On his lips, a question was forming …

Where in the world is value to be found?

It was the question of his life. Using logic as his calculus, he thought he would work progressively
out
from what could be said intelligibly until he reached the limits of what could
not
be said. And once having drawn this arc or limit, he would be able to better behold the logical form, or structure, of the world, isolating it in much the way a sculptor chisels down a block of alabaster, seeking to reveal the form glowing within.

A vain presumption, he thought. He was no better than Archimedes boasting that he could lift the earth if only he had a lever long enough and a planet to serve as a fulcrum. But these self-reproaches did not make the dream desist, they only made it all the more powerful. He could see himself in his vision, which had dimension and depth like a body of water. His vision was so strong that he felt he could stand right out of it. Ascending a ladder of propositions, he would plant his shoes on the last possible rung. And looking down, he would peer, as if through sheer form, into another world darkly mirrored under the aspect of eternity.

Yet how was this undertaking to be practically achieved? Was it to be had in the human heart for desiring — in the will for willing? He saw all too well that will has no power over the world, or its own reckless willing. The dissembling will only blames the hand, which blames the mind, which in turn blames the loins — dumb but no less turgid. And so the thirsting will turns on itself, curtailing itself from the misery of willing by deputizing the hand with its magnetic attraction to poison and sharp objects, to push and precipice and philandering air …

He closed his eyes, wishing his expanding will to be smaller, milder, more reasonable. But the will was not compliant; it would not be ordered about like some cringing subordinate. SAY, ventured the riddling will or mind. SAY, said the soul, which is as various and contrary as it is many. SAY this kite is your will, with this much line and this much scope under the general sky. And just as in an aeroplane there is thrust and drag, so the thrust of will must be factored over fear, chiefly the fear of rampant willing, that hell-bent runaway. And then, as Wittgenstein realized this, he pictured in his mind the following equation:

 

 

It was the same old story. Here and no farther, God commanded the waves. Stand without and come no closer, said He to the barrier clouds, those lifebreakers that separate the earth from what lies beyond.

Wittgenstein could smell the squall, could taste it on his tongue, bitter as blood and rusted iron. Higher and higher rose the silver waves, heaving down and exploding up the beach as the clouds bumped with a fulminating green light. Facing the sky, Wittgenstein thought of the myth he had made up as a boy to explain his life. It was the story of how souls connect with bodies to become people. Before birth, the newly washed soul, then a snowy, sexless nothing, waits for a body. The soul has but one chance. If the soul moves one way, it becomes a male, if another, a female. But if the soul moves wrong or clumsily, the person takes on the impulses of both, so that he is never free or far from torment.

He then remembered how, as a boy, he had watched girls jumping rope, two twirling and a third swinging her arms, waiting to start jumping. Rhythmically, the rope slapped the pavement, walloping through the air. That rope would have sliced him in two, but for the girl it was easy. She was free. She watched the rope, not the intimidating sky. Effortlessly, she jumped in and out, chanting and stamping, turning four-square to the world that spun so tunelessly. And each time he saw how, as she jumped in, she closed her eyes, not in dread but joyously, seamlessly merging with the fatal ebb and slippage of life, chanting:

Straining and humming, the heavy wire curved up into the covering storm. Clouds concealed the kite. Pain congealed in his heart. He saw he'd never vault that chasm. The kite was all out, and the will was at its ecliptic — it would not be denied or cranked down. Rain splashed through his skull. His clothes filled with wind. The cable was stretching, and he could feel his clenched teeth grinding and sparking. Flashing through the lightning glints, the world shone before him like a lucid lake. For one wondrous moment, he could actually
see
it — could actually feel the lightning coils pooling in the hot blackness. In the hollows and vacuums, surges of value were collecting to infuse the loss, the pooling pain. In those holes, eternal value was welling, then exploding into thunderclaps of life. He was less already than the air — his pleasure when the cable snapped was almost obscene. Rain lashed his face, and drumming in his ears he heard that child's chiding chant:

 

My bird, it has a red, red ring,

It sings the end of everything.

T
HAT SAME SUMMER
, on a beach on the south coast of England, Bertrand Russell was witnessing a very different conflagration. Splashing down the shingle, a pack of pranksters were carrying on their shoulders Queen Mab, “Her Modesty” having no sooner been coronated with a seaweed wig and tin-can crown than the young ninnies plunged her, heartlessly, into the cold ocean.

Stop! Dropping her jeroboam scepter, Mab spat and sputtered, pulling slimy green strings of weed from her face. You're all w-orrrr-ible!

Chief among Mab's happy train were some healthy lads clad in woolen black one-pieces. Supple and young, infused with champagne, they stumbled along, their polished limbs glowing like amber in the gritty August sunshine. With these were other friends, prudent dears who by day never went unclad, yet who were so caught up in the merriment that they had dropped their Chinese parasols and soaked their creamy flannels in the waves. Down the beach, meanwhile, several prying neighbors, already wise to Mab and her weekend mob, could be seen peering, hands shading their eyes. Anxious not to further damage her reputation, Mab — Bertrand Russell's new love, Lady Ottoline Morrell — cried, Enough! Put me down!

Mab had relished this play at first, but now she had reverted to the imperious voice of
m'lady
, wife of an MP and mother. Lytton! she cried to the instigator, Lytton Strachey. Do you hear me? Then, in despair, she called out,
Bertie
!

But Bertie just stood there, the lump. Such a dry bob, that Bert, so aghast and emphatically
un
drunk in his white shirt, braces and trousers. Sad, was he, with his big, droopy brown mustache? Sad and feeling — what?

Old? Jealous? A little left out in love's drains, was it, captive to Ottoline's artistic friends? Seeing her on their shoulders, he was reminded of an ungainly nesting bird perched over this clutch that she, mother hen, had laid, as it were. And all men! And all of them young — younger than he, a lovesick forty. And suddenly he felt angry, not at his adored Ottoline, but at her husband, Philip — angry that Philip should be such a blasted fool to permit his wife the dangerous impropriety of a weekend virtually alone with him and six other men, at least if one didn't count her cousin Adelaide and some older woman who apparently wrote novels. But come to think of it, thought Russell, Philip wasn't such a fool after all. As Ottoline obviously knew, there was safety in numbers. Russell had scarcely had a moment alone with her, nor did he dare among such gossips.

By then the lads had had their fun. Setting her down, they fell in a clump on the sand, panting and laughing. Ottoline took her chance to get away. In a long and dripping French bathing gown with puffed sleeves and wadded cotton flowers, she walked emphatically toward Russell. Giggling and swallowing his hiccups, acting the part of Caliban, that professional guest and sporadic author Lytton Strachey called back, Oh, O. Don't be in a wax now.