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& even today I may not be able to produce anything better than a jumble of incoherent sentences
Oh, God, I may have used Wittgenstein to cure a moral fault in myself. I'm not sure which of us that's going to embarrass more.
While in Raven Used Books on Wednesday with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks, I bought Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958), the second edition with Wittgenstein's letters included.1 I'd never heard of Malcolm as a philosopher, but the memoir is affectionately and seriously written and unless they were popular anecdotes, looks like the source for several scenes in Jarman's film. He is trying both to honor and to demystify Wittgenstein (who had a hero-cult in his lifetime already) without whitewashing him; I think he succeeds, since Wittgenstein by Malcolm comes off as brilliant, depressing, electrifying, exhausting, a restlessly unhappy man, and a weirdly lovable one, which about fits what I've gathered from other sources, including Wittgenstein.2 I am afraid the letters are just incredibly endearing. There are fifty-seven of them, written over a period of eleven years (1940–1951, the last dated thirteen days before his death); they tend toward the rapid-fire jotting stream-of-consciousness and generally give the impression that if blogging had been available in Wittgenstein's lifetime, no one would ever have pried him off the computer. He loves the American detective magazines which he can't get during the war, so the Malcolms send him care packages of Street & Smith—he seems to have bounced hard off Sayers, but he spends several letters trying to track down further stories by Norbert Davis, author of Rendezvous with Fear. He has a thing about schmaltzy holiday cards. ("Tell Doney his Christmas card wasn't soupy enough.") He drinks a lot of instant coffee. He has to tell Malcolm he's sent him a surprise present—"I thought you mightn't have it & that it might interest you"—because he's afraid it got lost in the mail from London, which it didn't. He can never quite stop talking philosophy. And he cannot go three letters without starting to apologize for how useless and uninteresting he is:
—As a matter of fact I've been feeling pretty rotten most of this summer. Partly because of bad health, partly because my brain was no d . . . good at all and I couldn't work. I'm feeling a bit better now. That's to say, my health is entirely all right & my mind seems a little more active. But God knows how long that will last.
My work is going damn slowly. I wish I could get a volume ready for publishing by next autumn; but I probably shan't. I'm a bloody bad worker!
Talking of philosophy: my book is gradually nearing its final form, & if you're a good boy & come to Cambridge I'll let you read it. It'll probably disappoint you. And the truth is: it's pretty lousy. (Not that I could improve on it essentially if I tried for another 100 years.)
But now my brain feels burnt out, as though only the four walls were left standing, & some charred remains!
I felt exceedingly depressed for many weeks, then fell ill & now I'm weak & completely dull . . . I shan't write more today, I'm much too dull.
. . . & as I'm anxious to make hay during the very short period when the sun shines in my brain . . .
I hope all of you are well, & I hope you won't find me a terribly disagreeable companion & bore when I come.
I'm saying this because I don't want him to believe that I'll be a sociable person.
This letter is probably frightfully stupid, but I can't write a more helpful one.
My mind's completely dead.
That's a selection. By the fourth or fifth disclaimer, the reader wants to reach through time to Rosro, grab the philosopher by his shirtfront and start shouting, "For God's sake, you're bloody Wittgenstein, knock it off already!"
I do this all the time.
In posts. In conversation. In e-mail. I'm pretty sure I told people my name when I introduced myself at Arisia, but I'm also pretty sure I told them I'd slept about three hours and was completely brain-dead. It's my own reflexive οὐ δεινὸς λέγειν. And I don't even have the excuse of being bloody Wittgenstein! If it's that annoying in one of the acknowledged minds of the twentieth century, I can only imagine how much it ticks people off in me. It doesn't matter that I feel as though my brain decamped years ago: I need to figure out how to stop telling everyone about it. It's either that or revolutionize philosophy.
In other news, I have a fever and sore throat (and have just this sentence begun to cough, which I consider completely unnecessary), but yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of the latest annual not-Not One of Us publication, Under Review, which contains both my poem "Theseid"—the one that starts with the kouros of Poseidon—and a review of A Mayse-Bikhl by Erik Amundsen that I should probably write a poem to thank him for, because it's possessed. "The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves" has been nominated for a Rhysling Award.fleurdelis28 has uncovered evidence that I should have a hereditary feud with the Daily Mail. I have survived this week. I just wish TCM were showing something I could stare at. I suspect I'm going to read Transcendentalist biography instead.
1. I had to give up Victor Serge's Conquered City (1932) and a volume of the letters of Robert Graves in order to afford it, but I am seriously thinking about trying to go back for the latter. The letters to Siegfried Sassoon are interesting especially after reading Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991), but it's the one in which Graves worries about what his researches for The White Goddess are doing to his mental health that really charmed me: "I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men. Help!"
2. I had one disagreement with Malcolm and it was linguistic: "A characteristic remark that Wittgenstein would make when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was 'He is a human being!'—thus implying that most people fail even to be human." Well, yes, that's one reading. Around here, though, we just mean someone like that is a mensch.
While in Raven Used Books on Wednesday with
rushthatspeaks, I bought Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958), the second edition with Wittgenstein's letters included.1 I'd never heard of Malcolm as a philosopher, but the memoir is affectionately and seriously written and unless they were popular anecdotes, looks like the source for several scenes in Jarman's film. He is trying both to honor and to demystify Wittgenstein (who had a hero-cult in his lifetime already) without whitewashing him; I think he succeeds, since Wittgenstein by Malcolm comes off as brilliant, depressing, electrifying, exhausting, a restlessly unhappy man, and a weirdly lovable one, which about fits what I've gathered from other sources, including Wittgenstein.2 I am afraid the letters are just incredibly endearing. There are fifty-seven of them, written over a period of eleven years (1940–1951, the last dated thirteen days before his death); they tend toward the rapid-fire jotting stream-of-consciousness and generally give the impression that if blogging had been available in Wittgenstein's lifetime, no one would ever have pried him off the computer. He loves the American detective magazines which he can't get during the war, so the Malcolms send him care packages of Street & Smith—he seems to have bounced hard off Sayers, but he spends several letters trying to track down further stories by Norbert Davis, author of Rendezvous with Fear. He has a thing about schmaltzy holiday cards. ("Tell Doney his Christmas card wasn't soupy enough.") He drinks a lot of instant coffee. He has to tell Malcolm he's sent him a surprise present—"I thought you mightn't have it & that it might interest you"—because he's afraid it got lost in the mail from London, which it didn't. He can never quite stop talking philosophy. And he cannot go three letters without starting to apologize for how useless and uninteresting he is:—As a matter of fact I've been feeling pretty rotten most of this summer. Partly because of bad health, partly because my brain was no d . . . good at all and I couldn't work. I'm feeling a bit better now. That's to say, my health is entirely all right & my mind seems a little more active. But God knows how long that will last.
My work is going damn slowly. I wish I could get a volume ready for publishing by next autumn; but I probably shan't. I'm a bloody bad worker!
Talking of philosophy: my book is gradually nearing its final form, & if you're a good boy & come to Cambridge I'll let you read it. It'll probably disappoint you. And the truth is: it's pretty lousy. (Not that I could improve on it essentially if I tried for another 100 years.)
But now my brain feels burnt out, as though only the four walls were left standing, & some charred remains!
I felt exceedingly depressed for many weeks, then fell ill & now I'm weak & completely dull . . . I shan't write more today, I'm much too dull.
. . . & as I'm anxious to make hay during the very short period when the sun shines in my brain . . .
I hope all of you are well, & I hope you won't find me a terribly disagreeable companion & bore when I come.
I'm saying this because I don't want him to believe that I'll be a sociable person.
This letter is probably frightfully stupid, but I can't write a more helpful one.
My mind's completely dead.
That's a selection. By the fourth or fifth disclaimer, the reader wants to reach through time to Rosro, grab the philosopher by his shirtfront and start shouting, "For God's sake, you're bloody Wittgenstein, knock it off already!"
I do this all the time.
In posts. In conversation. In e-mail. I'm pretty sure I told people my name when I introduced myself at Arisia, but I'm also pretty sure I told them I'd slept about three hours and was completely brain-dead. It's my own reflexive οὐ δεινὸς λέγειν. And I don't even have the excuse of being bloody Wittgenstein! If it's that annoying in one of the acknowledged minds of the twentieth century, I can only imagine how much it ticks people off in me. It doesn't matter that I feel as though my brain decamped years ago: I need to figure out how to stop telling everyone about it. It's either that or revolutionize philosophy.
In other news, I have a fever and sore throat (and have just this sentence begun to cough, which I consider completely unnecessary), but yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of the latest annual not-Not One of Us publication, Under Review, which contains both my poem "Theseid"—the one that starts with the kouros of Poseidon—and a review of A Mayse-Bikhl by Erik Amundsen that I should probably write a poem to thank him for, because it's possessed. "The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves" has been nominated for a Rhysling Award.
fleurdelis28 has uncovered evidence that I should have a hereditary feud with the Daily Mail. I have survived this week. I just wish TCM were showing something I could stare at. I suspect I'm going to read Transcendentalist biography instead.1. I had to give up Victor Serge's Conquered City (1932) and a volume of the letters of Robert Graves in order to afford it, but I am seriously thinking about trying to go back for the latter. The letters to Siegfried Sassoon are interesting especially after reading Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991), but it's the one in which Graves worries about what his researches for The White Goddess are doing to his mental health that really charmed me: "I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men. Help!"
2. I had one disagreement with Malcolm and it was linguistic: "A characteristic remark that Wittgenstein would make when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was 'He is a human being!'—thus implying that most people fail even to be human." Well, yes, that's one reading. Around here, though, we just mean someone like that is a mensch.
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You great ones have your own peculiar quirks...
Congratulations on the Rhysling nomination!
Nine
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Thank you!
If the book's still there and I can afford it, I'll copy out that letter for you. His friends never did stage an intervention.
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I will be in the minority, but the angsty, insecure Wittgenstein is oddly encouraging to me - and endearing.
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Thank you! It's shared, but I'm still very happy.
I will be in the minority, but the angsty, insecure Wittgenstein is oddly encouraging to me - and endearing.
Oh, hell, yes. I'm very fond of him. I don't mean it's annoying that he's always writing about his low self-esteem because no one wants to hear about that sort of thing—it's annoying because he was never boring (and never stupid) even when he was depressed and he can't bring himself to believe it! But of course that sort of thing is easy from the outside, hence this post.
It was actually very strange, reading his letters. He talks about chronic illness and depression and frustration with his brain in very much the same ways as much of my friendlist, or myself. It was the first time I'd read something of his that wasn't professional. I recognized a lot. I hadn't expected that.
I'll copy some out for you in a minute.
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c/o Rev. Morgan
Cwmdoukin Terrace
Swansea
15.12.45
Dear Norman,
Thanks for the detective mags! They are rich in mental vitamins & calories. It was nice getting them from you & also your Xmas card!
I'm in Swansea again over Christmas & probably over New Year. The weather's foul, but I enjoy not being in Cambridge. I know quite a number of people here whom I like. I seem to find it more easy to get along with them here than in England. I feel much more often like smiling, e.g., when I walk in the street, or when I see children, etc. Just now I feel very stupid. I ought to do some work but I don't. Last term my lectures didn't go too bad, on the whole. At the beginning of the term I thought I wouldn't be able to manage them. I felt a queer kind of exhaustion, sometimes coming on suddenly. Then a doctor prescribed me glucose & that helped me enormously & I was pretty fit afterwards.
I'll stop now. This letter's lousy, I know. But it's as good as I can do just now.
Good luck! Be good!
Affectionately,
Ludwig
Trinity College
Cambridge
15.1.46
Dear Norman,
Your parcel containing cocoa & peaches arrived today. Thanks ever so much. And is the cocoa good!!—I've had almost a month in Swansea & I haven't done a stroke of work. I wish all your food for my body & mind could go to a better person. My lectures begin in 3 days. I'll talk a lot of rubbish. It would be nice if you could come to Cambridge for an academic year before I resign my job! It might be a good thing, & a good conclusion for my dubious professorial career.
Thanks again! & let me know how you're getting on.
Affectionately,
Ludwig
Trinity College
Cambridge
25.4.46
My dear Norman,
Thank you ever so much for the mags I got from you yesterday. It was good to feel that we are still in contact. I feel very perturbed in my mind. I haven't done any decent work for ages apart from my classes. They went all right last term. But now my brain feels burnt out, as though only the four walls were left standing, & some charred remains! Let's hope that I'll be in moderately good condition when you'll be here! I'm looking forward to seeing you. I spent most of the Easter vac in Swansea. I saw Rhees there & had discussions with him. I came up the day before yesterday. I haven't yet seen Smythies. Tomorrow's my first lecture. Oh hell!!
I wish you a better head & a better heart than I have.
Affectionately,
Ludwig
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c/o Mrs Kingston
Kilpatrick House
Red Cross
Wicklow
Eire
9.12.47
Dear Norman,
Thank you for two letters, or rather a letter & a Xmas card. I was very pleased to get them. I have only today moved into the above address. It's a little Guest House 2½ to 3 hours by bus from Dublin. It's not too bad & I hope I'll acclimatize. I'm the only guest. Of course, right now I still feel completely strange & uncomfortable. It's been pretty cold the last fortnight & looking for a place was very depressing. That I haven't worked a stroke for ages goes without saying. I'm looking forward to receiving the det. mags & the book. I, too, have sent you a very small present. I don't mean that yours is small. I hope you'll get it.—The idea of staying with you & Lee some day appeals to me very much. I have plenty of money, though. If I were as rich in other respects I'd be very happy!
It was very kind of Lee to write to me on the Xmas card. Give her & Ray all my best wishes. I wish you lots of luck & know you wish me the same. Both of us need it like Hell.*
Affectionately,
Ludwig
*And other people do too.
Kilpatrick House
Red Cross
Wicklow
Eire
15.3.48
Dear Norman,
Thanks for your letter which I got a few weeks ago. v. Wright wrote to me about his putting in for the professorship & asked me to write him a recommendation. I did, & it won't be the recommendation's fault if he doesn't get the job. I don't know at all what his chances are. I'm slightly doubtful because of his being another foreigner.—My work is progressing very slowly and painfully, but it is progressing. I wish I had more working power & didn't tire so very easily. But I have to take it as I find it—Your mags are wonderful. How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain in the detective stories.
That'll be all for today because my brain feels very stuffy indeed.
Good wishes!
Affectionately,
Ludwig
—I have not transcribed the later two or three letters in which he attempts to convince the Malcolms that he'd be more trouble than he's worth as a houseguest despite their very kind invitation to put him up for a couple of weeks, but I may. I need a Wittgenstein icon. Then I can worry over whether it should be actual Wittgenstein or Karl Johnson.
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. . . All right, thanks. I'm better at this with Wittgenstein than with me.
For that matter, if Wittgenstein has that low an opinion of himself, he might just be mildly bewildered to find you disagree with him.
This is probably also true.
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Thank you!
And please, tell us more about the hereditary feud. I love a good feud, especially with the Daily Mail.
There are no more Viscounts Taaffe for two reasons: as far as I can tell, the direct line went extinct in 1967 with the death of Edward Charles Richard Taaffe (the gemologist and discoverer of taaffeite), and his father Heinrich had lost the Irish peerage in any case with the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 on account of being on the wrong side from the Crown in World War I. (The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a few years later took care of the Austrian titles, although both Heinrich and his son styled themselves "Count" till the ends of their days. Which is fair; I probably would have, too.) Last night,
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Or, best of all, both! :-)
I have a fever and sore throat
So sorry to hear. :-(
"The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves" has been nominated for a Rhysling Award.
Ooh, exciting!!!
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Hah. Thank you. I may have to settle for revolutionizing literature.
So sorry to hear.
It was probably inevitable: I traveled by plane on very little sleep and post-convention burnout and my immune system is a mess anyway, so I should just be thankful that I have a cold and not, I don't know, the Antonine Plague. I'm drinking lots of tea and chicken soup and goat's milk cocoa. Okay, that last is not a traditional remedy, but it makes me feel better.
Ooh, exciting!!!
Thank you! It's the epic three-way collaboration, so I'm glad to see it recognized.
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Thank you! That whole knot of thinking is something I am trying to work on.
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Of course they picked last night to screen The Invisible Man! I was showing Mike The Cuckoo (Кукушка, 2002) and then I was unconscious. What was Possession?
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I just never want to find out I've turned into King Gama: "—And I can't think why!"
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I think I'd have adored Wittgenstein. Shake him by the shirtftront too, but I'd be a bit hypocritical, being an over-apologetic worriwart myself. Thank you for transcribing some more of his letters in the comments. I must re-watch the Jarman! And keep an eye out for this memoir.
(Oh, unrelated, but we discussed Downey Jr's Holmes a little while ago; I now have the first film, and will let you know soon.)
Good luck on the Rhysling!
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I'm glad to know it's an honorable tradition!
I think I'd have adored Wittgenstein. Shake him by the shirtfront too, but I'd be a bit hypocritical, being an over-apologetic worriwart myself. Thank you for transcribing some more of his letters in the comments.
I find him impressively adorable and I have no idea how he'd have felt about that. The fact that I also find his philosophy interesting—the Remarks on Colour (1950–1951) are terrific and while I have not been able to find his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1931), Rush has and we'll probably have to draw straws or duel if we ever spot a copy in a bookstore—probably wouldn't have cleared anything up. "Only by a miracle will you be able to do decent work in teaching philosophy."
And keep an eye out for this memoir.
It doesn't look rare, but I'd recommend finding it used. The combination of Wittgenstein and Oxford University Press seems to render it expensive for a paperback when new.
Hell: I think I am going to want this book. At least the paperback is affordable. I clicked on the hardcover first and despaired.
There is some kind of online archive, but I don't think I have access to it.
(Oh, unrelated, but we discussed Downey Jr's Holmes a little while ago; I now have the first film, and will let you know soon.)
Cool. Let me know what you think of the second one, too, if you see it before I do!
Good luck on the Rhysling!
Thank you!
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Library?
For some reason I love Wittgenstein, not sure why -- his philosophy is so extreme. He's just like one of those radical saints or holy men who is so sure of the RIGHT THING, and yet so doubtful too.
I'm not attracted to his perfectionism so much as it's something I recognize in lesser degree. There are in ways in which I cut myself slack now only because I feel that I have irretrievably failed my life—not in the internet sense—and nothing I do can make a difference anymore; if I thought I still had a chance, I couldn't afford it. It's one of the patterns I'm trying to fight. At least I don't believe that if I get a laboring job in Russia, that will solve everything. And I like the ways he looked at the world and language, especially later in life when he came to think of the limits of communication as the boundary conditions of different kinds of games rather than trials by ordeal, and he could write both lapidary conundrums and goofy thank-you notes, and he did things like visit the Malcolms and insist on fixing their toilet when it broke because he liked mechanical problems, comparing it unfavorably with the more soundly constructed toilets at Trinity College all the while. I don't know if he ever forgave himself for being human. Maybe at the very end. But it made him much more interesting. I can say that about other people.
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If this ever bothered me, I would be a filthy, filthy hypocrite. Also, even when you are flickering like the light over the layaway section in the dustiest Kmart in existence (it was in Dayville CT until 1996), you're still pretty damned brilliant.
Exhibit A:
"The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves" has been nominated for a Rhysling Award.
And that's very, very good.
Excellent.
Wittgenstein sounds like an interesting fellow. I know very little about him. Scarcely more than what you have written and that he was allegedly a "beery swine" and "just as schloshed as Schlaegel," and this from a Very Unreliable Source.
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Thank you. I am trying to believe it.
Also, I admire your extended simile.
Excellent.
Go congratulate
Wittgenstein sounds like an interesting fellow. I know very little about him.
I seem to have discovered him through a weird alternation of nonfiction and fiction over the course of several years: Jarman's film just absolutely sealed it. I find him both an interesting philosopher and an interesting person and many of the ways in which he was famously eccentric are not actually out of orbit as far as I can tell; Cambridge university culture of the 1910's and '30's often reads as stranger to me than intense, antisocial, self-lacerating creative types who can't admit they're wrong except when they can't stop apologizing (and then not necessarily for the things they should). There are unbelievable amounts of secondary scholarship on his life and work, which can't really be separated in any case. He seems to have looked a little different to everyone who knew him and if his grocery lists haven't been published, that's only because no one has sorted them out of the archives yet. What he looks like to me is much less alien than he might even have felt himself to be. I actually don't think Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993) is a bad place to start.
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Congratulations on the Rhysling nomination!
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Thank you!
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As
But seriously, yes. Because here is the thing. Imagine that you were exceedingly dull (that day because of lack of sleep or otherwise). You telling people this before speaking on a panel for an hour would improve their experience not one jot. They would still be about to see an exceedingly dull person, and they would somehow just muddle through and deal with it. I cannot imagine that you have ever said this and a significant portion of the audience has said "Oh, no, not a zombie with no sleep! I'd better go see a different panel instead!" and left.
Now, what actually happens is that you get up on panels and say brilliant things and read the sorts of poetry and stories that make people nominate you for things like Rhyslings (yay, go you!). Which means that all you have done by warning them of your exceeding and mythical dullness is waste some of their limited time available listening to you say interesting things. Which is a shame, really.
Now, I would say that well, this is a very minor annoyance that everyone can just bloody deal with, which is true. But my own experience has also been that the less I say self-deprecating things, the better I feel. Lila broke me of the habit some time ago of saying "I'm an idiot," when I mean "I'm sorry," and "I'm sorry" when I mean "thank you." It was profoundly helpful with the stopping feeling like I was wasting everybody's time by existing near them.
So... yes. I am very glad you have noticed this habit, and I think that changing it will make you happier, and you should totally try to do so. Go you, and good luck!
Also, *hugs* @ Wittgenstein.
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The other problem is that it sounds like a rhetorical trick: lowering the audience's expectations so they'll be especially impressed when whatever I come out with is above the barely competent line. Which it isn't: I feel like an idiot. But the other person doesn't know that.
So... yes. I am very glad you have noticed this habit, and I think that changing it will make you happier, and you should totally try to do so. Go you, and good luck!
Thank you! I am trying.
Also, *hugs* @ Wittgenstein.
You know, he probably would have appreciated them.
Kilpatrick House
Red Cross
Wicklow
Eire
5.2.48
Dear Norman,
I had your letter of Jan. 6th a good long time ago. Thanks! I am now in very good bodily health & my work isn't going bad either. I have occasionally queer states of nervous instability about which I'll only say that they're rotten while they last, & teach one to pray.
I've neve read 'The works of love.' Kierkegaard is far too deep for me, anyhow. He bewilders me without working the good effects which he would in deeper souls.—Years ago Drury read to Skinner & me the beginning of the 'Conquest of Mexico' which we found very interesting indeed. That I didn't like the parsonish point of view of Prescott's is, of course, a different story.—I am not reading much, thank God. I read in Grimm's fairy tales & in Bismarck's 'Gedanken & Erinnerungen' which I admire greatly. I don't mean, of course, that my views are Bismarck's views. It's written in very excellent, though rather difficult German, as the sentences are very long. Otherwise I'd recommend you to look at it.
I wish you lots of good luck, & I know you wish me the same; & do I need it!
All the best to Lee & Ray.
Affectionately,
Ludwig
I haven't anyone to talk to here, & this is good & in a way bad. It would be good to see someone occasionally to whom one could say a really friendly word. I don't need conversations. What I'd like would be someone to smile at occasionally.
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I don't even know what that means!
I have no idea why.
I have this happen most often with actors: not contemporary ones, either. Actually, it kind of happened last year with Wittgenstein.
I am currently trying to read Young Ludwig to get an idea of what he was like, because the bits and pieces from hither and yon sound so fascinating.
You'll have to tell me whether I should check that out. The only formal biographies I've read so far are Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein (2008) and this memoir by Norman Malcolm. I can recommend without reservations Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), which is not in almost any sense a conventional biopic, but continues to feel truthful (and sometimes even factual) the more I learn about the historical Ludwig, not just his beautiful Karl Johnson avatar. Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It (1987) is a very well-written biographical novel, but already I think I like it less than reading Wittgenstein's letters.
I think my local university library may have the essay on The Golden Bough -- am hoping to get hold of that next week.
Lucky! Enjoy!
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Maybe it also indicates that whatever he *did* think and say, he felt he was capable of thinking and saying more, and better. That's rather intimidating.
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He could, of course, be titanically and unthinkingly arrogant on other grounds of his life. But I don't think the crushing sense of worthlessness was a pose. I know people in whom it is.
Maybe it also indicates that whatever he *did* think and say, he felt he was capable of thinking and saying more, and better. That's rather intimidating.
It's something else I understand.
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I'm not worthy