Does water still swirl round the plughole in the same direction? he wonders. Does the law of gravity still apply? Do compass needles still point north? Does one plus one still equal two? Does the moon still orbit the earth, and the earth, the sun?
Do the laws of physics still hold? he wonders. If he walked in front of a bus, would it crush him? If he stabbed himself in the heart, would his heart stop beating? If he cut through his carotid artery, would he bleed to death? If he jumped from St Mary’s, would his body splatter on the ground? If he drank a glass of cyanide, would he die of its toxicity?
He has a fear of time, Wittgenstein says. Of open time. Of empty moments. Empty hours. A fear of intervals. Of time that is not dedicated to a particular task. Time of which he is not the master. A fear of the thoughts that run through his head. Of the thoughts about thought that run through his head …
Life is too long, not too short, he says. Life is eternal.
He has experienced every kind of mental illness, he says. Not one mode of madness is closed to him. He’s heard hostile voices. He’s felt that his mind is being read. He’s felt persecuted. Tormented, by alien forces. He’s experienced great highs, manias. He’s felt grandiosity. He’s felt chosen. He’s felt that only he could save the world.
And he’s experienced terrible despairs, he says. Abysmal depression. He’s had to keep away from sharp knives. From exposed pipework. From bottles of bleach. From high places …
He’s hallucinated, he says. He’s seen the skull of Cantor, full of worms. He’s seen the brain of Gödel, invaded by maggots.
He’s pulled out his hair. He’s picked at his skin. He’s counted his footsteps in intervals of two. He’s sat, mute, for weeks on end, staring at the wall.
Has he ever known joy? Wittgenstein wonders. Has he ever known happiness? Has he lived? Has he for one minute known what it means to live?
Has he ever breathed? Has he ever drawn a single breath? To breathe, to really breathe, must hurt—he’s sure of it. To really breathe must give you pain in your lungs — at the bottom of your lungs.
Has he ever looked? Has he ever even opened his eyes? Has he ever spoken? Has he ever uttered anything true?
No one can speak the truth if he has not mastered himself, he says.
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is at home in the truth.
Everything must come from the heart, he says.
He wants to say only what he has to say. He wants to drop everything but the essential.
But what is it: the essential? What is it that he has to say?
Driving home through the Fens.
Flooded pasture. Meadows full of standing water. Saltwater wetlands. Tidal creeks and meres. Rivers braiding, fanning out.
You get a sense of what the Fens used to be like, before they were drained, Wittgenstein says. Settlers building on banks of silt, on low hills, on fen edges. Towns like islands in the marshland.
We imagine the first scholars, expelled from Oxford, founding the new university in Cambridge. We imagine the first colleges growing out of boardinghouses. The first classes, teaching priests to glorify God, and to preach against heresy. The first benefactors, donating money for building projects. The first courtyard design, at Queens College, the chapel at its heart. The first libraries, built above the ground floor to avoid the floods. The lands, drained along the river, and planted with weeping willows and avenues of lime trees. The Backs, cleared, landscaped lawns replacing garden plots and marshland. Cambridge, raising itself above the water. Cambridge, lifting itself into the heavens of thought …
The rabbis thought that the old earth, Adam’s earth, was as flat as the Fens, Wittgenstein says. That it enjoyed a perfect climate, a perfect summer. No extremes of weather — no thunder or ice, no snow or hail. It was the Flood that changed it all, the rabbis thought. It was the Flood that altered the surface of the earth.
Noah’s ark came to rest on Ararat, Wittgenstein says. On the mountains. And Noah’s family, and all their animals, had to go down from the mountains into the new valleys, into the changeable weather of the world.
His brother used to say that thought is always of the heights, Wittgenstein says. Of the mountains. The thinker must soar above everything. Close to the truth. Close to eternal things.
His brother dreamt of a celestial logic, Wittgenstein says. A system of logic that blazed in the sky. A logical system at one with the order of things, that might be divined in the order of things. A logic that God Himself must have studied, before embarking on the Creation.
It is a terrible thing for the thinker to be sent down from the heights, his brother told him — to be forced to return to the world.
But what if thought is low, and not high? Wittgenstein says. What if the thinker’s place is below things, or with things, rather than above it all?
What if to think is to sink, not to rise? Wittgenstein says. What if thinking is falling, failing, defeat? What if thought is the eclipse, not the sun? What if thought is mist, not clarity? What if thought is getting lost, not discovering? What if thought is waylessness, and not the way?
Perhaps the waters of the Flood are baptismal waters, Wittgenstein says. Perhaps there are joyful names for the disaster …
We take our leave at his door.
How much time he has spent on his own! Wittgenstein says.
No friends — not now, he’s always said to himself. Not until my work is done.
But perhaps he has made friends, he says. Perhaps we are his friends.
Walking back to our rooms.
EDE: Did we save him, do you think? Have we done something good?
ME: I think we have. I think we did.
EDE: Why did we bother, I wonder?
ME: Because he was flagging. Because he needed us.
EDE: You’re very tender, Peters. I hope you’ll be around to save me when the time comes. (A pause.) My God, we’ve been sober for two whole days!
Ede’s rooms. Titmuss arrives with a bottle of cognac; Doyle and Mulberry, with a bottle of absinthe.
Ede pours it all into a saucepan on the stove.
EDE: Gentlemen — did you know it’s possible to inhale alcohol? It bypasses the stomach and goes straight to the lungs and brain. No need for the middleman. Digestion’s strictly old school. You’re supposed to use air pumps to vaporise it, and then pour it over dry ice. But I don’t see why you can’t just heat it and sniff.
We crowd round the saucepan, breathing deeply.
Delirium. Both Kirwins have passed out. Their hyper-fitness makes them vulnerable, we agree. A bit like Bruce Lee.
MULBERRY: The room’s spinning.
DOYLE: My head’s about to fall off.
MULBERRY: Ede, why are there two of you?
DOYLE (panicked): Help me! I think I’m going to die.
EDE: There’s no way for the body to get rid of the alcohol. You can’t vomit your way out of this one, Doyle. You’ll just have to sit it out.
Titmuss launches into one of his India stories.
We lie, listening, in liquid-free drunkenness.