Wittgenstein 3 and other stories

 Education doesn't stop when one finishes school or university. By now I almost think that's when it starts and one can spend the rest of one's life undoing the damage of what one's been taught. I'm not being all Marxist or independent in thinking that. The Marxists and free-thinkers at my low grade university were as hidebound, restricted and formulaic in their thinking as were the royalists, Tories and traditionalists at my grammar school.

I got to the end of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein last week. A paragon example of the genre with what seems exactly the right amount of detail, of balance between the life and the work and vividly conveying all their difficulties. The portrait on the cover is of a disturbed man, possibly on the brink of madness, whose intellect was apparently so far beyond that of the next best that it made no sense to them.

The book changed my view of Wittgenstein from that of a potential hero whose philosophy had realized that philosophy reduced everything to word games because language is something we are trapped in to someone who thought there must be something beyond all that fiddle and, throughout it all, relied on God and religion.

All the long, transient years of discussion and writing and forever revising that writing, coming from the mathematics of Frege, logic, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, led him only to despair - being already from a family of suicides- and while his life is a gripping story and he clearly could be an engaging personality in the right company, he's nothing like a hero to me any more.   

Sartre had his moments but got it wrong. I will always want to think that Derrida's demolition of almost everything we ever thought had possibilities. I'd say Camus was my preferred philosopher except that was about his fourth job and I'd rather have him among my very favourite novelists.

Philosophy is bad for you. Endlessly endless. The glimpses I've had of it make me think the chimera of glamour that can be caused by music, poetry and painting at their best is the best we can do.

I could have proceeded to the biography of Proust I found in Chichester Oxfam but maybe I've learnt from Joe Bugner's example and don't want to go in with top class heavyweights one after the other. So I returned to Rose Tremain and Music & Silence, different again from the others of hers I've read but just as equally a beautiful thing. One can enjoy the writing without knowing where the various threads are going to lead us but one has reason to hope it might be a better place than where Wittgenstein's intensity led him to.

In four of her books now, Rose Tremain has been a pleasure to read, just for the sake of reading. They are four apparently quite different books but similar in the way the get inside 'love' and the way it consumes those who find it in a high-grade iteration. There are also the obstacles to it which are either circumstances or other people and it often needs to be clandestine or something apart from conventionally recognized relationships.

Set in 1619-20, in the reign of Christian IV of Denmark, one needs some idea of how much is true and how much fiction in historical novels. It is a bit unsatisfactory, at least in theory, but when it makes for such good writing that reservation diminishes to almost nothing. There's a whole lot more Tremain to go and I will be back in the market for some of it because it looks as if she belongs in the top echelon of contemporary novelists and, so far so good, she's done nothing but impress so far.