Wittgenstein's Nephew Read Online Free Page A

Paul’s. Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them
the mainspring of my existence
. For decades Paul
lived
the part of the madman; similarly I
lived
the part of the victim of lung disease. Just as for decades Paul
played
the madman, so I
played
the victim of lung disease; and just as he
exploited
his role for his purposes, so I
exploited
my role for mine. Some people spend all their lives cherishing some great possession or some exceptional art, daring to exploit it by everypossible means and making it, for as long as they live, the sole content of their lives: in the same way Paul spent all his life cherishing and exploiting his madness and using every possible means to make it the content of his life. Similarly I cherished and exploited both my lung disease and my madness, which together may be said to constitute my art. However, just as Paul became increasingly ruthless toward his madness, so I became increasingly ruthless toward my lung disease and my madness, and as our ruthlessness toward our diseases increased, so did our ruthlessness toward the world around us, which naturally became increasingly ruthless toward us. The consequence was that we ended up, at diminishing intervals, in our respective institutions—Paul in mental institutions, I in pulmonary institutions. Yet whereas our respective institutions had always been far apart, in 1967 we suddenly came together on the Wilhelminenberg, and it was there that our friendship
deepened
. Had we not ended up on the Wilhelminenberg in 1967, there might have been no such
deepening
of our friendship. Having abstained from friendship for many years, I suddenly found myself with a real friend, who understood even the maddest escapades of my far from simple and indeed quite complex mind, and was prepared to become involved in them—something that the others around me were never willing to do, because they lacked the capacity. I had only to touch on a subject, as they say, and our thoughts would develop in the right direction, and this was true not only of music, which was his specialism and mine, but of every other subject. I had never known anyone with a sharper talent for observation or a greater capacity for thought. The trouble with Paulwas that he was as profligate with his intellectual fortune as he was with his financial fortune, but his intellect, unlike his finances, was inexhaustible. He never ceased to throw it out of the window, yet it never ceased to grow; the more he threw it out of the window, the more it grew. It is characteristic of people like Paul, who are at first merely crazy and are finally pronounced insane, that their intellectual fortune increases as fast as they throw it out of the window (of the mind). As they throw more and more of it out of the window, it goes on building up in the mind and naturally becomes more and more dangerous. Eventually they cannot keep up the pace, with the result that the mind can no longer endure the buildup and finally explodes. Paul’s mind quite simply exploded because he could not discard his intellectual fortune fast enough. In the same way Nietzsche’s mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead. In the same way Paul’s mind exploded one day and he was dead. We were alike and yet completely different. Paul, for instance, had a concern for the poor and was
also
touched by them: I too had a concern for the poor, but I was not touched by them; my mind works in such a way that I have never been able to be touched as Paul was. On one occasion Paul burst into tears at the sight of a child squatting by the Traunsee. I saw at once that it had actually been stationed there by a scheming mother