WITTGENSTEIN: There is no Logik! There’s nothing, nothing. I am nothing. (Another long pause.) I heard laughter outside my room. Your laughter. I came out to hear you. I thought to myself, There’s a clue in their laughter. There’s something I must find.
His stare is very intense. Desperately intense, we agree afterwards.
Town. A concrete piazza, scattered with steel bollards. Surveillance cameras on high masts. New buildings, grotesquely aping the old ones, with decorative brickwork and painted gables. Office complexes with scholarly names (Academy House; Scholars’ Grove, and so on).
WITTGENSTEIN: Cambridge has died, in its heart. It happened quickly. The rest of it will die much more slowly. (A pause.) A kind of rigor mortis has set in. A stiffness of the limbs. (A pause.) Cambridge is becoming brittle. Cracking, like ice in a puddle. Splintering. There are sharp edges in Cambridge. Careful! There are spikes and shards.
Near the station. Luxury apartments (‘price on application’) with stuck-on balconies. Investors’ megaflats, with staring windows and slanted roofs on stilts.
He walks. We walk.
Thought is howling: can we hear it? he says. Logic is howling. The wind is tearing the world to shreds. Now it begins: the great desolation. Now it will come: the storm of the cosmos.
The sky is cracking: can we hear it? The sky is about to shatter. The stars are stigmata drilling into the night. The earth is groaning. It sings, it groans.
• • •
Thought is exploding inside him, he says. Logic is exploding inside him.
Philosophy is loose inside him, he says. Philosophy is devouring him from within.
And when it has finished with him? When it has done devouring? But it will never finish with him, he says. There will always be more of him to destroy.
Belvedere Tower, domineering. The Leisure Park opposite — faceless, looming.
His brain is going out, he says. His brain is exploding.
He is being kept alive, he says. But for what purpose?
What does God want with him, by letting him live?
He has the sense of being martyred, but for no cause in particular.
He has the sense of being bereft, but without having lost anything in particular.
Homertown Street. Clone-town shops. Concrete and metal. Absolute blandness.
Thought, and the derangement of thought, he says. How to distinguish between them?
A breakdown, a breakthrough: how to distinguish between them?
There is a cost to thought, he says. He’ll pay with himself. He’ll sacrifice himself.
• • •
Death, he says. He is drunk with death.
He can hear it: death is sharpening its knife. He can hear it: death is running its blade along the whetstone.
Death is coming, he says. Death will whistle around him like an Arctic storm.
Tea, among the tourists in the Copper Kettle.
Last night, he thought he saw the dons, looking up at his window and pointing, Wittgenstein says. He thought he heard the dons, shuffling up and down the stairs outside his room. He thought he sensed them, pacing back and forth on his landing. But when he looked out through his spyhole, there was no one there.
The dons are really pacing in his head, Wittgenstein says. The dons have set up court inside him. The dons are pronouncing judgement on him from the inside. A crowd of dons, jeering at him inside. Sneering and jeering: that’s all he can hear inside his head, he says. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dons, jostling inside him. A whole crowd of dons sneering inside him.
What do the dons want from him? What do they expect? What did they think he could bring to the university? What did they think he could contribute? Couldn’t they see the kind of person he was? Wasn’t it clear? He’s never tried to hide what he is, Wittgenstein says. He’s never pretended to be what he’s not. His face — couldn’t they read his face? Wasn’t everything written there, on his face?
What did the dons think they’d found in him? Wittgenstein asks. Who did they think they had brought to Cambridge? He was a curio, at first. A real find. Did they think he’d entertain them during the long winter nights? Because the dons need amusement, he says. The dons need diversion as the nights draw in.
But he has become too much for the dons, Wittgenstein says. He’s become a problem, which the dons don’t know how to solve. He is the equivalent of a blocked drain, he says. A blocked lavatory. What an unsavoury job to fix it! How will he be disposed of! It’s not my job, each don says to himself. But then whose job is it?
It’s his job, Wittgenstein says. He should dispose of himself. He should strangle himself, and get rid of the body. He should throw himself into the Cam, he says. He should throw himself off the Mathematical Bridge, or Magdalene Bridge, or Cutter Ferry Bridge, and let his body wash down to the sea.
It should be as though he had never been here, he says. As though he had never been invited to Cambridge, never brought here. The dons shouldn’t be troubled by even the memory of his existence, he says. The dons shouldn’t remember a thing — not a thing! The wound in their memory should be closed up …
The dons should be left undisturbed, Wittgenstein says. The dons should be left to stride about on their English lawn. To walk with their hands behind their backs on the English lawn. To go in for English tea. To tuck into scones and jam in the English tea-room. The dons should be allowed to forget all about him. To never have heard his name. To have known nothing about him, about his very existence.
That his shadow has fallen on Cambridge: too much! That the shadow of Cambridge has fallen on him: too much! That his silhouette has been spied in the Cambridge evening: too much! That his feet have impressed the Cambridge turf … That his breath has clouded the Cambridge morning … That his eyes have rested upon Cambridge sights … That his ears have been thronged with Cambridge noises … Too much! too much! too much! too much!
Ah, but the dons know how it will end, he says. The dons can see the future. He will blow out his brains on the English lawn, they know that. And the lawnkeepers will rake out pieces of his skull from the English lawn.
We drive out to the country.
A clearing, ready for building. Stumps of trees. Diggers. Crates. Long metal pipes in piles. All for a new housing estate, beyond the suburbs of Cambridge.
A line of just-built houses without feature, blank-faced, simple. No shadows. No lines. A sheer wall of bricks and glass and plastic doors.
Red and blue For Sale signs. A show home on the corner. A flag by the show home, the developer’s name flapping in the wind.
It may seem that Cambridge is expanding outwards, Wittgenstein says. That these are the new suburbs of Cambridge. But really it is the other way round. The suburbs are expanding into Cambridge. Cambridge is being engulfed by the suburbs. Drowned by them …
What if he and his brother had lived ordinary lives? Wittgenstein says. What if they had never embarked upon their life of the mind?
Why can he not accept the world as it is? he says. Why is he unsatisfied with ordinary life? Why can he not let things be things, and the world be the world?