To leave Cambridge is to return to Cambridge. To try to escape Cambridge is only to be more imprisoned in Cambridge.
Cambridge! he exclaims. Grantchester! he exclaims. Cambridge! Grantchester! The path to Grantchester! The path to Cambridge! The path to Grantchester is only ever the path to Cambridge!
Byron’s Pool. The famous willows, the famous swans, the famous reeds. The concrete weir must be a new addition.
Byron bathed here with his pet bear, we read on a plaque. And Rupert Brooke and the neo-pagans, a century later. And Augustus John came with his gypsy wagon and his clutch of sun-browned children …
Signs everywhere. Explaining Byron’s Pool. Explaining Byron. Explaining Rupert Brooke and Augustus John. Explaining the trees. Explaining the wildlife. Explaining the green and blue corridor through Cambridge — the proposed cycle path and the planned BMX track.
Why must everything be explained? Wittgenstein asks. As soon as there are signs about trees, there are no trees. As soon as there are information boards about wildlife, there is no wildlife. As soon as there’s a Byron plaque and an Augustus John plaque and a Rupert Brooke plaque, the legacies of Byron and Augustus John and Rupert Brooke are entirely destroyed. As soon as there’s a plaque explaining Grantchester, Grantchester itself is wiped from the face of the earth.
But perhaps that’s no bad thing, he says: wiping Grantchester from the face of the earth.
• • •
He has insomnia, he says. Terrible shrieks wake him at night. Screams — which should say, I am being murdered! Help me at once! But which in fact say, I am drunk! My head is empty! Cries — which should be those of dying men, mortally wounded men, lying in no-man’s-land or beneath collapsed buildings, but which are really the voices of students …
Students, bellowing on their phones. Great, health-filled, stupid voices, booming out. Stupidity, echoing from the ancient walls. Stupidity, sounding through his rooms. Stupidity, shrieking through the hollow night.
He can’t work, Wittgenstein says. He can’t write.
His powers are failing, he says. What presumption even to speak of his powers!
To begin — that would be enough. To take a single step forward. To discover a starting point that does not give way … Why do the foundations of his thought always crumble? Why does the path of his reflections always peter out?
WITTGENSTEIN: The will to work is wearing me out. But not the work itself.
He speaks of the joy of work. Of the bliss of work, and of honest exhaustion after a whole day of work. He speaks of the Sabbath of God, of the seventh day of creation. He speaks of the Saturday that does not set.
How will he find his way to the eye of the logical storm? he asks. When will everything become clear? When will it stay still? The heart of logic is terribly calm, he says. True peace, for him, is really logical peace.
Mulberry and Doyle’s spat.
EDE: How did it start?
MULBERRY: He wrote wide arse in Greek on my door.
EDE: But didn’t you write I will fuck both your arses and your mouths in Latin on his door?
MULBERRY: I was quoting Catullus!
EDE: He was quoting Aristophanes.
MULBERRY. Well, he felt-tipped very cheap whore in Greek on my door.
EDE: But you marker-penned hung like a Chihuahua on his door. In English, so everyone could read it! Where’s that from, anyway — Sophocles? (A pause.) There’s a frisson between the pair of you, anyone can see it. It’s like an electric storm.
Mulberry likes that, he says: an electric storm. It turns him on.
EDE: Everything turns you on, Mulberry. But I do wish you and Doyle would settle things. All this tension’s getting wearing.
Wittgenstein’s questions!
Is it actually the case that …?; Would you consider it important to …?; Is it, in this instance, really worth considering …?; Are we entitled to draw the conclusion that …?; Would we be entirely in error to …?
Doesn’t he understand that we do not dwell with these issues as he does? That they do not exercise our thoughts night and day, as they do his?
It would be alright if he didn’t expect us to understand him. If we didn’t need to understand him. If he simply thought for us, in our place. If he simply presented a spectacle—of what it means to think, of what it means to take thought seriously.
No one expects very much of an undergraduate: he should know that. None of us will fail our degrees, it is true — no one fails anymore. But none of us will excel, either. We’re here to fill the classrooms, and pay the fees. We’re here to populate the corridors, and sit decorously on the steps.
What does it matter what we think?
His questions!
Might it not also be the case that …?; Is it worth admitting the possibility that …?
Doesn’t he understand we just want to get things right? To do well? To get high marks? The rest, all of philosophy, doesn’t really matter …
But he demands our attention. He addresses us directly. Okulu, what do you understand by this? Doyle, can you think of a way out of this apparent dilemma?
He asks us the kinds of questions that he would ask himself. Questions beyond our understanding. Questions that soar above us. Questions that graze the philosophical sky … We try to answer, but how can we? We stumble. We stutter. We say silly things. But what else does he expect?
Wittgenstein does not hide his derision.
He knows the Cambridge student is encouraged to talk, he says. He knows the Cambridge student is to be treated as an intellectual partner, even as an intellectual equal, he says. He knows he’s supposed to take heed of whatever nonsense the Cambridge student utters. He knows he’s supposed to say interesting to even the most fatuous point.
He knows he’s supposed to glory in the very fact that we can speak, that we say anything at all, that we’ve even turned up for class, he says. He knows he’s supposed to clap his hands in delight, that the Cambridge student has deigned to add his voice to the great tradition of philosophy.
He knows he’s supposed to fall upon the most trivial comment as though it were uttered by Immanuel Kant, he says. He knows he’s supposed to nod seriously to every word that drops from our lips, as though it were Kant himself who was speaking. He knows all this, he says.
He watches our faces, he says. He looks for signs of understanding. But what does he see? Nothing! Nothing!
What do we know of the struggle to think? What, when everything has come to us so easily? That’s how he sees us, he says: as those to whom everything has come easily.
What do we know of the desire to think? Of the love of wisdom?
Perhaps we are simply too young for philosophy, he says. Too blithe. We haven’t yet run up against life’s difficulties, he says. Against the tragedy of life. You can see that in our faces, he says. We know nothing of life’s calamities—of madness, suicide, all that.