The World as I Found It Read Online Free

dreamed of greeting him, much less of bothering him with questions or small talk. He wanted no tourists or gapers, and none dared come late. Perched on the folding gunmetal chairs on which he expected them to remain for two or three hours without squeaking , they were not to talk, smoke, raise their hands or, in short, do anything that might distract him. The session would “begin” promptly at four, but another ten or fifteen minutes might pass before, without warning, he erupted into words. Grimacing, grasping the metal seat of his own chair, cast in the forcing house of their expectant gaze, he might talk brilliantly for the entire session, without a single note. These were the good days. But there were also the slow, halting or bad sessions, when he would sit there mentally whipping himself for his torpidity, snorting, Come — on! Oh, this is intolerable . As you can see, I’m perfectly stupid today …
    People would watch him and wonder. Was he happy? Sad? A troubled man beneath? But what could the outer world know of the inner? Morning and evening, when the light was most intense, the most transitional, they would see him barging through the Cambridge Backs, a wild expanse of cattails and lilystems, impossibly green, through which the River Cam glides under ductile willows. Even then, late in his life, Wittgenstein looked a good ten years younger than fifty-eight. He was a trim man of average height, with a sharp nose, flat, literal lips, and curly brown hair graying at the temples. His eyes were dark and piercing, and he often carried a bamboo cane, not as a crutch, but as a foil and pointer. About him there was a vaguely martial air, a certain cleanness and sobriety, like that of a priest on an off Sunday. His dress was functional, meticulous and, above all, consistent : an old tweed coat or a worn leather jacket, a shirt open at the collar. The dark flannel trousers were worn but carefully pressed, and the cracked leather of his old oxfords was buffed to the burnished hue of an old pipe bowl.
    Often one of his young friends would accompany him on these walks. These were, as a rule, self-effacing, innocent young men from middle- or lower-middle-class families, the type who took the early school prizes and were duly brought under the wing of some lonely master who made it his cause to get the lad into Oxford or Cambridge. But besides being innocent and brainy, Wittgenstein’s young men were slender and good-looking. More beguiling still, for Wittgenstein, they were often as not quite unaware of their looks and indeed of sex in general. Oblivious to the pull of mirrors, they were themselves mirrors — deep, drowsing pools of innocence in which Wittgenstein could lose himself while feeling, in certain fundamental respects, more innocent himself.
    He craved their companionship. Like a possessive mother, he fussed over them and read their fate like tea leaves: to marry late, if ever, and be forever tied to him. A few years before, in fact, Wittgenstein had even taken one of these young men with him to Russia — for Wittgenstein the spiritual land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — with the idea of their emigrating there to study medicine in preparation for a life spent treating the poor. They went quietly, secretively, but of course stories got out that Wittgenstein was a Red or a Marxist, while others snottily said that the former aeronautical engineer had taken his young shadow to Russia so they might get their wings — their angel’s wings.
    But Russia was not what Wittgenstein wanted. Whatever its merits, philosophy wasn’t what he wanted either, not when life offered so many other useful pursuits. Certainly he did not advise his students to become philosophers; that was the last thing he would have suggested. No, he warned them to avoid at all cost the trap of academic life — at least if they planned to do any honest or original thinking of their own.
    On the surface, this