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Grape Picking in Burgundy

I am now at that point of my life where I and my friends have mostly all finished university and are now settling into whichever stream will carry us to our retirement. Unsurprisingly, most people are working in The City, whether as lawyers or bankers or some other nebulous financial profession. A few braver and probably more admirable souls are pursuing careers in academia. And others are merely flailing about, looking for something solid to hold on to. It is true to say that we have not graduated at a particularly good time.

Of all my friends, however, it is Sophie for whom I have the most respect. She decided to work on a vineyard in Burgundy rather than engage in any kind of rat-race. Hard, physical labour, an outdoor environment – she knew, as Wittgenstein did, that these are often the surest paths towards a happy, long, and restful sleep. She went against pressures, social and otherwise, in pursuing this, and in doing so rather showed the rest of us up by demonstrating that whatever one’s educational background, however well-bred one is, still the ultimate barrier to us working in a similar field is only our own cowardice.

I was visiting Sophie last week, just before the year’s grape picking began. That was the plan, at any rate. But the start of the harvest is unpredictable, and in the week before I arrived, I learned, rather concerningly, that instead of spending three days relaxing with an old friend, I would have to be on the fields with her, toiling away. Well, I thought, at least it will be an experience. And indeed it was.

Prejudices

Though I grew up on a farm, I never really participated in its operations, and though I live in the countryside now, I still look on those who live from the land with uncomprehending admiration. Like most people without experience of actual farm labour, I had a somewhat idealised view of things. Rather than rely on what little I remembered from our hard life in Scotland, my main inspiration was Tolstoy’s Levin, out on the fields in Anna Karenina. I believed that work outside is tough but rewarding, an opportunity to fall into a community where everyone looks out for everyone else, and that on the fields God lurks underneath each unturned stone. At the same time, however, I retained a certain cynicism. I thought that farmers were boring and bigoted, and that I was probably wrong to like the idea of the work. In short, I believed while constantly doubting what I believed.

What was surprising was that my suspicions, or rather my hopes, about the work, were far closer to reality than my cynicism was.

People

The farm we were working on was only about ten hectares, or twenty-five acres, and it was family run. Unlike other vineyards, or indeed most fruit picking jobs (as I understand it), the work here was rather light. Many of the pickers were regulars, people who came year after year. So long as the work was done, the pace was not overly important. We had a long lunch break each day, and a good number of rests during the day too. Although we were bussed about in vans, there was little else to connect us with the horror stories one reads of about migrant fruit pickers.

There were about twenty-five of us to begin with, and that number grew slightly once the weekend came around. I was the only Englishman; there were about seven or eight Poles; the rest were all French, though not necessarily from Burgundy. Except for the Poles, who spoke English, everyone else spoke French. For me, someone who hasn’t studied French in about seven years, and who has never really spoken the language, having to speak French was something I really should have anticipated. What I could not have predicted, however, was how easily I found myself speaking it.

Everyone knows the stereotype of the English or American abroad who refuses even to attempt to speak the local language. The French with me certainly knew it. It was partly because of that that I found it so easy to speak – I knew that even trying would stand me in good stead. And then, I think, and just as important, there was the matter of perfectionism. Precisely because I was out of practice, precisely because I had not studied French at university, I did not give a damn how I sounded – I just wanted to speak. And so my words were wrong, my speech a bizarre blend of French and English and occasionally any other available language too, and to top it all off, I apparently spoke with a Russian accent. But I was speaking, and as the days went by, I was speaking more and more, complex sentences even. The words were coming back to me, dug up from whatever deep recesses of my mind that they had hidden themselves. I even managed to learn a few new words too.

I would not have had so much success with the French if the people there were not so friendly. Almost without exception everyone was willing to talk to me, in one or multiple languages. And I met a random, but loveable, bunch of people. One man, in his fifties, with a sailor’s faded tattoos, a squashed nose, and a cigarette permanently poking out of his mouth, seemed unable to pick without removing his shirt, revealing a gigantic belly that rolled over the top of his disarmingly short shorts. A young guy in his late teens, who had previously been an apprentice at the vineyard, wore a different pair of football tracksuits each day, could not speak any English whatsoever, but got incredibly excited every time I said the word “whisky” for him. He would come up to me, ramble away in French for a minute, enjoying the look of dismay on my face, and then start to laugh. His good nature was infectious. I felt rather better when one of the other Frenchmen told me that this fellow spoke with the local dialect and that none of them understood most of what he said either.

Each lunch we were served by an enormous woman who had turned herself into such a wobbler that she could only walk with the aid of a stick – she was aided in her cooking by an equally large husband. The food they produced, however, was always filling, and delivered in generous helpings. I met a Bhutanese-Frenchman who had trained as a monk and seemed to spend all day drinking, and lots of pleasant young Poles, picking just because it was a bit of fun. The only person who ever bothered me was a mister T, the tractor driver, who was about my age. On my first day I looked up to see the Frenchman storming down my row towards me, shouting and gesticulating wildly in his finest French. I thought perhaps I had left something down by the tractor, but it turned out – after everyone else had stopped picking and several volunteer translators had jumped to my aid – that I had been picking particularly awfully, and that mister T (whose role had nothing to do with this) was very displeased. When he had finished berating me, he noticed that the rest of the field was glaring at him, and he backed down somewhat. Unsurprisingly, after that he did not bother me further. And for my part I tried to pick a little better.

Property

Perhaps the people who I liked best were the owners of the vineyard. The boss, P-, was only twenty-nine, and he still shared some responsibilities with his father. The vineyard is run very much as a family affair. Without teamwork, the whole thing would fall apart. This is because of French inheritance law, which is among the strictest I have come across. Nobody can be disinherited, and property must be equally divided among the children. In practice, this means that France has a high rate of inheritance-related murders. It also means that major wine-producers, including major champagne brands like Taittinger, have suffered due to the enforced division of their lands. This vineyard has already been divided by a generation or two, and that means that some of the land belongs to people who don’t work there or have any real connection to the place – instead they simply rent it back to their family, as generously or stingily as they wish.

P, his father, his uncle, his sister, and his girlfriend – these were the family. Responsibilities are divided and so far, order and financial stability has been preserved. How many more generations it can last, however, is hard to say.

P himself was an interesting character, though I did not speak to him much. He is well-educated, tall, bespectacled, and was always trudging around in shorts and big brown wellington boots. There is something of a low-budget Harry Potter cosplay about him. But what is most striking is how out of place he is here, with his reading and his interests. He is quiet, bashful even, and slow to express an opinion. Whether he is a good leader is not my place to say, but certainly he is an atypical vineyard boss. I would like to write a story about him, one of those classical tales of one being forced, not entirely against one’s will, into fulfilling a duty that nevertheless takes one away from the place where one would really be able to flourish. P’s girlfriend was also lovely, an extraordinarily friendly woman who was an artist and seemed to carry the sun around in her chest. While we were picking she would always be suggesting silly games to play, like naming every writer beginning with each letter of the alphabet, and such like. Whenever P was with her, suddenly his reservations disappeared, and he too seemed to shine with a kind of light. He smiled, he played, he ran about with their dogs. There is a story there.

Picking

Each morning I woke up at sixish, and we started work on the fields at seven thirty. Grape picking can be automated, but currently the robots aren’t quite so good as the people. We are able to better identify things like rot and unripe grapes while we are picking, but it’s hard to say how long we’ll hold onto our advantage. It almost doesn’t matter, anyway, because fewer and fewer young people are getting involved with their local vineyards, and this means that automation will become a necessity in a few years, whatever happens with the technology.

The process of grape picking is simple. You are given some secateurs and told to gather your grapes in a bucket. People with large backpack-buckets go up and down collecting the contents of your bucket, once it’s filled, and take the grapes to the tractor, where they will be sorted a second time, and taken back to base. You can cut your grapes in different ways. If you have good core strength you can squat at each vine, or else you can kneel – the Poles all came with knee protection, as if they were actually going roller-skating. Finally, if you are lazy like me, you can sit on the ground, and slide crablike down your row. This is very slow, but less painful. And given work only ends at five-thirty, it’s best to avoid what pain you can.

We were cutting red grapes, at least while I was there. These grapes are easier to spot than white grapes, but they can still pose a challenge. You sometimes have to tear down masses of leaves to get to the grapes, giving the whole thing a rather adventurous feel, as though you are actually travelling through the Amazon jungle, but it means that it’s easy to miss a bunch or two. Sometimes the vines are diseased or have something else wrong with them and their leaves turn red, which makes it much harder to find the grapes underneath.

The grapes themselves can have issues too. Ideally, they are slightly glassy, translucent, like marbles. But when only half-ripe they can be almost matte, and a deep bluey-red. This year was not a good year for the harvest. We had to pick many bunches that were not wholly ready. And those that we picked also had major issues with rot, so that after picking each bunch we often had to stand there scraping the puffs of white dust out from the centre of the grapes. This took as much time as the picking, sometimes more. But if too much rot gets into the vats, the resultant wine can have its taste completely spoilt.

I was a slow worker. Except for one of the Polish girls, for whom it was also the first time, I was the slowest. But I did my best to make up for it by being diligent. It was a strange experience, working in a family business like this. I knew exactly who I was working for, and this made me redouble my efforts even when my strength was flagging. I wanted these people to succeed. I remember the despair in P’s uncle’s eyes as he sat there, sorting the rotten grapes. They could all see that everything was going wrong, and I didn’t want to make it any worse for them.

On the final day, it was raining. Heavily. We went out onto the fields late and returned after only an hour. It was hellish in the rain. I do not think that a comparison to the battlefields of the First World War is entirely out of the question, to the fields of mud of the Somme. My boots were caked in a toecap of mud. My clothes were wet and sticky with the stuff. In the darkness and the rain the grapes were almost impossible to make out. They seemed to live a kind of ghostly, phantom existence, forever hiding just out of reach behind another clump of leaves. My basket accumulated bunches incredibly slowly. A general hopelessness ruled the day. And though I was wearing a raincoat, it felt as if the rain was seeping through it into my bones. We all worked slowly then. And I was very glad when it was over.

Pride

Grape picking is generally not done in the rain because it is inefficient and ineffective. The other two days I worked the sun had shone and everything was golden. And it is those days that I will remember best, for those days are the days that I worked properly. However much he was an idiot for idolising peasants, I do not think that Tolstoy was wrong for valuing physical labour like this. For a couple of days I went to bed exhausted and slept well. My body ached, but in a good way – as though it were thanking me for using it the way it was supposed to be used after so long spent sitting in chairs and walking around cities. I felt part of a collective, I felt welcomed, I spoke French. These are all extraordinary things. I am sure that if I had stayed longer my body would have collapsed and I would have ended up sitting in the middle of a row, my bucket on my head, in tears. But I would not blame the work for that. I would only blame myself for not starting to work sooner.

Labouring alongside others draws us closer to them. Language proved no barrier, nor did education, nor class, nor anything else. I came across a common humanity, one that we always suspect the existence of, but don’t always see. I came across real work too – work in which one feels a relinquishing of the self, and even some of that magic force which takes hold of Levin while he’s out on the fields. While I was working I thought a lot about a particular quote of Whitman’s, one that to me reflects the reality of work as I experienced it:

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.

From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,

The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,

Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself section 12

Each man hits his place. I was dreadfully slow with my picking. But I was there; I took part; I felt a part of something greater than myself, and something valuable too. The pain I felt on falling asleep and on waking, the aches and sores – these I will forget. But the pride of working will go with me forever. I certainly do not think that we need to work on the fields every day of our lives. Life is not so simple as that. But spending a week or two of each year out there, working, sweating, burning – after having a taste of it, I cannot find anything to say against it. This is real life.

And next year, if my silly office job allows me to take the time off, I will experience it again.

Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

A desert.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”

John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.

Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

What is attractive about Ludwig Wittgenstein is that he was a real genius. I did not gallop through Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius because I wanted to know about Wittgenstein’s philosophy – I did it because I wanted to know about the man. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language are worth knowing about, sure, but certainly not near the top of the pile of philosophies I want to have a grasp of. Though Monk’s biography gave me some sense of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, the focus here was more on his life. This approach works because, for me at least, the parts of Wittgenstein’s thought that are most interesting are precisely those that came from his life – such as the way the mystical sections of the Tractatus came from Wittgenstein’s experience in the First World War.

Rather than summarise a summary of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, I thought I’d note here the parts of his life that struck me as particularly entertaining, saddening, or interesting. Being such a unique personality, Wittgenstein provides plenty of all three.

The Briefest of Biographical Summaries

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna to one of the richest of all Austrian families and had an extremely privileged upbringing. But the Vienna he was born into, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s life, was not a happy place producing happy people. I counted at least five suicides in the first chapter of Monk’s book alone – three of them Wittgenstein’s brothers. Our hero moves to England for his studies, meets a number of philosophers including Bertrand Russell who all eventually come to consider him a genius. He spends time in Norway and as a soldier, works as a teacher and gardener, goes back to Cambridge to teach, helps out in the Second World War behind the scenes, and finally dies. Given that the lives of most philosophers are little more interesting than that of Immanuel Kant, who never left his province, Wittgenstein’s life of action is rather exciting.

Genius and its Duty

One thing making Wittgenstein interesting is that he was not a scientist and did not see philosophy as scientific. Instead, he approached philosophy creatively. At one point he shocked the boring old gits of the Vienna Circle of philosophers by recommending they read Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He also lectured primarily using the power of inspiration, standing in the lecture hall or else pacing until a thought came to him, and then announcing it to enraptured onlookers. Most importantly, Wittgenstein’s whole character was artistic. Monk quotes Russell here:

“His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair.”

At another point Russell had Wittgenstein pace up and down his room for three hours in silence before Russell finally asked: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” “Both,” Wittgenstein replies, and continues his pacing. 

The language of sins is surprising to people who like me think of Wittgenstein as a boring logician. In reality, Wittgenstein was of a decidedly religious sensibility. His major influences appear to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – Hadji Murat and The Brothers Karamazov are just two of several books by the authors that Wittgenstein adored and passed out among his friends. Acquaintances compared him to Levin from Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin from The Idiot. Though he was raised a Catholic, Wittgenstein did not believe in the Church’s dogmas, even as he believed in a kind of God and definitely believed in his own sinfulness.

Sin, for Wittgenstein (as it was for Tolstoy), was determined by his own conscience: “The God who in my bosom dwells”. What Wittgenstein feared most of all was judgement – “God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”” He was never happy with himself. He expected nothing less than perfection from himself, that beautiful but impossible congruence between one’s thoughts and one’s actions. At one point he made a confession to all of his friends in an attempt to rid himself of his pride. Instead, he just annoyed them. Few were interested in listening to all of his minor failings.

But Wittgenstein believed that he had a duty to be perfect – the duty of genius that Monk uses as his biography’s title. By perfect I do not mean in conduct so much as in the sense of squeezing out of himself as much philosophy as possible, by any means possible. At one point Wittgenstein was struggling from overwork, but rather than take a break as his friends suggested, he decided to try hypnotherapy to help him concentrate even more successfully. At another point he decides to abandon the world to live in a hut in Norway and write philosophy.

Russell, ever sensible, warns him against it:

“I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”

Wittgenstein does not listen. He does not listen to anybody at all. In many ways he reminded me of Tolstoy, who like him was sceptical of doctors and medicine, and had an all-consuming desire to be perfect: “How can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

And Wittgenstein is miserable as a result: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.”

As he gets older Wittgenstein mellows in some ways, thanks in part to his loves, male and female. The sheer obstinacy of his youth is less visible, and there is less of the humorous, if sad, determination to ignore everyone else’s opinions or suggestions. 

A photo of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rather than reading this piece one should really just stare at this face for five minutes or so. I cannot be alone in thinking that Wittgenstein’s gaze pierces into the soul.

The Dark Side of Genius

Wittgenstein’s perfectionist demands upon himself were ones that affected everyone around him, and rarely positively. He shows a remarkable lack of concern for others’ feelings and emotions, especially those of his partners. Even though when asked how to improve the world he declared that all we could do was improve ourselves, his attempts at self-improvement rarely seem to improve either him or the world. He loses friends at every turn – including Russell himself. His vaguely Tolstoyan ideal of a good life – working with one’s hands while developing spiritually – is not one he himself follows, stuck in Cambridge, but is one he forces on others, including Francis Skinner, one of his partners.

When Wittgenstein actually encounters “the common man”, said man rarely proves the best of us. Wittgenstein dislikes his soldierly comrades in the Austro-Hungarian army, and during his years of teaching in the mountains of rural Austria he ends up being a dreadful teacher for anyone lacking ability. Wittgenstein preferred to use fists to ensure mathematics got into his pupils’ heads, rather than patient and repeated explanations. At one point he even knocks a poor child unconscious, for which he is taken to court.

As for the intelligent people in his life, they are rarely treated by Wittgenstein to any greater kindness or concern. Of one friend he said: “he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.” When another writes to him, wishing him well in his work and social endeavours, Wittgenstein responds especially pleasantly: “It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid. How could you imagine I would ever have “lots of friends”?” And indeed, after reading such a letter, how could we doubt his social abilities?

Wittgenstein’s determination to destroy himself in the name of perfection ruined any chance at happiness, even though he thought that perfection would be what would finally provide him with it. In this Wittgenstein is no different from many other depressed people, your blogger included, who set themselves impossible tasks and achieve nothing but their own misery thereby. I found one moment particularly amusing in connection with this. Wittgenstein finally sees a doctor for some exhaustion and pain he was suffering from and gets given some vitamins. Once he takes them, he immediately recovers and returns to work. Rather than lying in his moral failings, perhaps his inability to work could have just lain in his poor health. However, in his determination to see everything through the lens of his own sinfulness, Wittgenstein obviously never considered the possibility that he might just need to live a little more healthily, eat well and sleep.

Conclusion

Wittgenstein wrote that “the way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear”. It’s a good idea, but Wittgenstein clearly chose the wrong way to live. Clearly? Wittgenstein achieved a great deal, his work revolutionised philosophy, and on his deathbed he was able to request that his friends be told he’d “had a wonderful life”. Alas, his life rather epitomises that dreadful, unbridgeable divide between happiness and achievement. The best happiness demands limited goals, while the greatest goals demand the sacrifice of (at least) part of our happiness. We may read Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and say that Wittgenstein really just needed some good meds and some CBT for his OCD and other problems, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Would he have been able to work so well if he did not have this way of life, this drive? Wittgenstein was a genius – he had a self-appointed duty to destroy himself in the quest for a better way of philosophising. What is important is that Wittgenstein could squeeze more philosophy out of himself. Can we, depressed perfectionists, really hope to achieve that much more by destroying ourselves, or should we just cut our losses and be sensible, care about ourselves and the world, and eventually find that thing that others talk so lovingly about – happiness?

I don’t know.