What a cliché Titmuss is!
Titmuss the India connoisseur. Titmuss moved by poverty and staring peasants. Moved by being moved by poverty and staring peasants. Supposing himself to have learnt a great Indian lesson, and — worst of all! — supposing himself to have a great Indian lesson to teach!
Only three weeks in India, and a new Titmuss was born. A heartfelt Titmuss, unknown to friends and family. A compassionate Titmuss with tears of joy in his eyes, as happy as the saints of God … A great-souled Titmuss, full of gap-year wisdom … A karmic Titmuss, dreaming of the thousand incarnations of the Titmuss-soul before him — of Titmussslugs and Titmuss-bats and Titmuss-ground-sloths. An eternal Titmuss — born an amoeba, born an ant, working his way up to a pasty Cambridge student.
The next day. The Kirwins, running through the snow.
EDE: Do you think the Kirwins have ever known despair?
The Kirwins are too vigorous to have known despair, we agree. Unless they are vigorous because of their despair. Unless the Kirwins nurse some deeply buried horror at life from which they flee in triathlons and Ironman contests …
The Kirwins’ tragedy is that there’s no war for them to die in, we agree. No chance of glory, no heroism. Ede imagines them charging some machine gun nest, without a thought for their safety. He sees Alexander Kirwin hurling back an enemy grenade, and Benedict Kirwin offering his body as a human shield to protect the soldiers behind him.
Of course, they could join up to fight in one of our stupid modern wars, Ede says. He imagines them blown up by roadside IEDs. But then, they’d learn to walk again on plastic legs, and salute visiting royalty with plastic arms, and enter the Paralympics, and head to the North Pole with Prince Harry. The Kirwins are irrepressible, Ede says.
The Kirwins will probably excel on the corporate stage, we agree. They’ll work their way up to the boardroom. But they’ll be haunted by a strange emptiness, we imagine — the same emptiness that makes them come to Wittgenstein’s classes. And one will die in a supposed shooting accident (a gun pressed accidentally to his temple: how was that possible?). The other, shortly afterwards, will fly his light aircraft into an electricity pylon. They’ll kill themselves without really knowing why …
EDE: Have you seen their motivational phrases? (Reading from the Kirwins’ Facebook page:) I can therefore I am. You are never too old to set another goal. If you can dream it, you can do it. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Either you run the day or the day runs you. Winners never quit and quitters never win. The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. To begin, begin.
Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can’t therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don’t live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems.
Wittgenstein’s class. Thursday, three o’clock.
Silence. The hum of the computer. The cranking of an unbled radiator.
A poem on the board:
It is possible that to seem — is to be.
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.
There must be no more fundamental work in logic, Wittgenstein says. Logic must not be put on a proper footing. It is not a question of helping logic to its feet.
Logic must be left to stumble, he says.
Logic must suffer a blow to the head, he says. We must strike off the head of logic. No: we must strike off our own heads, if we are to do logic.
A form of life: that’s what he’s looking for, he says. A context in which his life would make sense.
Simply to stand with your feet upon the earth. Just to open your eyes. Just to be here—here. To be of God. With God. And no longer asking, Why?
A rose has no why. Ordinary life has no why. Isn’t that what he’s in search of: ordinary life, where the things themselves are right in front of us?
Our problem is that we want him to say something complicated, Wittgenstein says. But all he’s concerned with is the obvious, the ordinary. All he’s interested in is showing us what we already know.
DOYLE: But if we already know it, why is it so hard to understand?
WITTGENSTEIN: Because something stands between us and what we know. Because the obvious has become difficult to access. The obvious is not obvious for us, that’s the trouble.
Friendly faces, Wittgenstein says, looking round the room at us. Faces to watch him as he tries to think. As he fails to think.
Once, love was the rule, and each one drew his neighbour upward, he quotes. Our faces, our very presence, draw him upward, he says. And perhaps, in his own way, he will draw us upward. Perhaps our presence will bring him the calm he needs, he says. Our presence, all of us around him, like a host of angels.
We are too young to hear him, he says. Too innocent. But he loves our youth, he says. He needs our innocence.
He must find our level, he says. He must put himself in our place, for his sake, if not for ours.
Pascal said that the true philosopher makes light of philosophy. He must try to learn from our lightness, Wittgenstein says. He must descend into our valleys.
Why is Chiron, the teacher of Achilles, presented as a centaur? Wittgenstein asks — because the student must feel that the teacher is at a distance. A distance created by the presence of thought.
The teacher must be higher than the student, he says. A pause. No, that’s not it. The teacher must bring the student into relationship with what is higher. Another pause. No, that is not it, either. And then: the teacher must suffer from his own lack of height, all the while consoling the student for his lack of height.
• • •
Socrates began thinking at whatever point his interlocutors were starting from. He accompanied them, travelled with them, until they came to their moment of crisis, when they were overwhelmed by discouragement and wanted to break off the discussion. And then — by what miracle? — Socrates would take his interlocutors’ doubt and discouragement upon himself. And then — another miracle! — Socrates would transfigure this doubt, and affirm this confusion, until doubt and confusion became the positive outcome of philosophy.
Aporia, that’s the word, Wittgenstein says, writing it on the blackboard. Literally — no passage, no way forward. There exists a point of arrival, but no path, he says, quoting. But perhaps there is no point of arrival, either.
A walk on the Backs.
We speak of the legendary night-climbs of Cambridge. Of St John’s College Main Gate (easy — Doyle has climbed it on a drunken night out, he says). Of the Wren Library (very pretty, Alexander Kirwin says — he’s climbed it twice). Of New Court Tower (he’s stood on its peak before dawn, Benedict Kirwin says). And we speak of the famous Senate House leap, with its deadly plunge (Mulberry wants to plunge, he says).