Plastic polytunnels. A wartime bunker with galvanised tin walls.
Sometimes, he wants only to let it all go, he says. To rest. To sleep. To let the world go its way. He dreams of a world that is liberated from him. Of a time when he is unremembered.
He dreams of his disappearance. Of the world without him. Of the world after his thought. After all thought. He dreams of having no need to think. He dreams of the light and grace of the world after philosophy …
He tells us a story.
Once upon a time, the devil made a mirror that mocked the things it reflected — that laughed at all beauty and goodness and grandeur. In his daring, the devil carried the mirror heavenward, so that he might use it to ridicule the angels, even to scorn the Saviour Himself. But, dazzled by heaven’s light, the devil lost his grip as he flew upward. The mirror fell and shattered, and splinters of its mocking surface fell into the eyes and hearts of all human beings. And thereafter, all human eyes laughed at the Creation, and all human hearts laughed at love. And thereafter, there was no such thing as human innocence, nor human silence. And thereafter, there was no such thing as an innocent thought.
WITTGENSTEIN: That’s how philosophy was born. Philosophy is a way of laughing at beauty and goodness and grandeur. A way of laughing at life!
EDE (gently): Then why do we bother with philosophy at all?
WITTGENSTEIN: Because philosophy stands between us and salvation.
Brightly coloured horse-jumps. A rider, circling the field, bobbing in the saddle.
Sometimes he wonders if we students aren’t already on the other side of philosophy, he says. That philosophy, that all thought, is a matter for him, but not for us.
Are we the clue? he asks. Are we the gateway out of philosophy? Perhaps the clue is in our faces. Perhaps it is there, right there. Perhaps the clue is in our laughter. If he could only get to our laughter …
A solitary horse in its field, standing by the fence. Wittgenstein leans forwards and breathes softly into its nostrils.
When he sees a horse, he feels that life itself is before him, he says. In truth, horses were never expelled from paradise. The horse, in particular, is close to the divine.
There was no better horseman than his father, Wittgenstein says. No better man!
He has no bad memories of his father — not one, he says.
WITTGENSTEIN: My father was a man of absolutes. Of certainties. (A pause.) A man of certainties can act. (A pause). My trouble is that I have no certainties, and therefore cannot act.
His mother was from a thinking family, Wittgenstein says. From a line of thinkers, from old Vienna. He had a thinking grandfather, he says. And a thinking grandmother. It goes back for generations.
They were Viennese Jews, his mother’s family, he says. Then they were Viennese Catholics. Then, with the Anschluss, they were Viennese Jews again. They haunt our steps, that we cannot go in our streets. His great-grandfather paid off the Nazis, and the family fled the country, he says.
His mother was a musical thinker, he says. A concert pianist. She thought as she played. Reviewers wrote of her fine equilibrium of intellect and emotion. Of her purity of style. They wrote of her polyphony. Of her unruffled perfection. They wrote of the morality of her pianism. And of her heart.
It is possible to be too good, he says. My mother was too good.
Through the woods. Low beech branches close to the ground. Saplings in protective frames. Big, iron-coloured oaks.
You have to want to live, if you are to live, he says. That’s what his brother lacked, he says: the desire to live.
We stop to make way for a Land Rover.
His brother showed Lebenskraft, he says — the ability to live. But his brother lacked Lebenswille—the will to live.
Sometimes, he, too, lacks Lebenswille, Wittgenstein says. But we are full of Lebenswille, he says, looking at us with affection. That is why he likes to keep us close.
A small brick outhouse. Then a barn, its doors open, giving into a greeny-black gloom.
The act of suicide means that anything is possible: that is its horror, he says. Anything: even striking against the grounds of life, the life of life.
Suicide mocks the possible, he says. It laughs at life. Death ought to come as grace, he says. As the gift of God. As even the greatest gift of God.
The end is not about the will, he says. We must not want the end. The end must come to us. The end must come, like a horse nuzzling our pockets for a treat.
What is divine is the fact that there is an end to our suffering, he says. That our end is coming.
The end is innocent, he says. It has God’s innocence.
A canal lock. The black-and-white arms of the sluices. The lockkeeper’s house, flying the flag of St George.
Thought was once a matter of character, Wittgenstein says. Of living in a certain way. You were judged as a thinker by the way you lived before others. You showed what you thought by the evidence of your life.
But thought, now, is a kind of beetling, he says. The thinker is a nocturnal insect. The thinker goes about in darkness. The thinker lives and dies unnoticed. His body is swept away with all the others, like a dried-up fly in a dusty corner.
Thinking is no longer an honest pursuit, he says. No longer a decent pursuit. There is something covert about thinking now. Something dirty.
The Fens. Open land, flat to infinity.
He doesn’t like open spaces, Wittgenstein says. Before the sky, you can have no secrets. The light goes right through you. It leaves you no hiding place.
The sky is burrowing into him, he says. Why should he fear it? — the sky is blind; it sees nothing. But he feels that its blindness is itself an eye. An eye that sees. A blind eye — an eye that belongs to no one, that sees.
And it’s not only the sky, he says. The earth watches us, blindly. The toad that crawls through the clods of earth watches us, blindly. The circling rooks …
Nothing is watching, he says. Nothingness itself is watching. He smiles. Imagine what his colleagues in Cambridge would think were he to speak to them of nothingness itself!
Life cannot go on as it is, he says. He has to die. He must die.
His mental suffering must be matched by a commensurate physical suffering, he says. He must be dying. He must be mortally ill.
How much time is left to him? A couple of months, he thinks. A couple of weeks.
Anything could happen, this close to the end, he says. The old laws do not apply anymore. At any moment, a slow tsunami could break over the Fens …