Wittgenstein at War – his early ethics and two extracts from his diary

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an enigma: a radical philosopher with an overriding impulse to understand how the world worked, whether that be the mechanics of aeroplane engines or the logic of language itself. He had a mind of ice, pure and clean. In 1913 he went to Norway to be alone in the mountains and focus entirely on his philosophy. He gave away all his inheritance (billions in today’s money), wore the same clothes, and ate more or less the same food, whenever he could. It seems plausible that he had autism.

Yet for all his coolness, in 1914 he enlisted voluntarily in the Austro-Hungarian army and faced combat on the Eastern front against the Russian army, where he was awarded for bravery. This same steely logician also had the habit of coming to Bertrand Russell’s rooms in Cambridge and pacing for hours into the early morning, declaring he would end his life as soon as he left, and then thinking and thinking before the exhausted Russell until he found a solution or scrap of progress that meant he returned to his rooms only to sleep.

These two Wittgensteins seem in conflict with one another, and I previously wrote about them while reviewing the excellent Wittgenstein’s Vienna, which paints a far more hot and fiery cultural and intellectual milieu for Ludwig to grow up in than his philosophy reflects at first glance. Really, though, Wittgenstein seems to me a thinker who was utterly obsessed, tormented, and battered relentlessly, by questions of meaning and action. What must we do, and why. Suddenly, every word he wrote seems to reflect the attempt to build a logical scaffolding from which better to consider and resolve these problems of action and meaning.

A Man at War

It is the Wittgenstein at war who is the topic of the piece. What happened between 1914 and the completion of the Tractatus in a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy in 1918 is fascinating. For while much of the logic of the book had been written previously, in Norway, it is here, with death a regular companion, that the sixth section of the Tractatus took shape. The “mystical”, the “higher”, all those things that so alarmed Russell when the two met after the war was over, yet which seem to have been utterly vital in the most literal sense of that word, were added during this time.

In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Meaning of Life, edited by Joaquin Jareno-Alarcon and published earlier this year (the piece was written in late 2023), we have an incredible treasure trove of material to work with. The book aims to gather together all of Wittgenstein’s comments on ethics and religion, whether in diaries or letters, notebooks or second-hand through the memoirs of others. It gives us an incredible insight into the man, the sort that would only be available otherwise to a specialist. I keep coming back to things in it, over and over. It is here, in Wittgenstein’s most private moments, that he seems willing to fill in the gaps of the Tractatus.

The Diary

There is a curious feature to Wittgenstein’s diary of this period. On the left-hand side, we have the mundane, and on the right, he wrote his philosophy. At first, there was no link. The extracts Jareno-Alarcon selects describe Wittgenstein’s army work and his feelings. To give an example: “In post from 1-3. Slept very little.” What merits their inclusion in the collection is Wittgenstein’s inevitable referral to God and the Devil, who emerge as very real forces within Wittgenstein’s life: “It is enormously difficult to resist the Devil all the time. It is difficult to serve the Spirit on an empty stomach and when suffering from lack of sleep!” The philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe said that Wittgenstein told her he lost his faith when still a child. So how then do we explain such utterances, which are extremely regular and indeed run right through to his death?

It seems a cop-out to say merely that God is the world, i.e. the totality of facts, as it is defined in the Tractatus. Certainly it is. But these extracts show a man who is having a very real, very challenging relationship with two forces – I won’t say beings. They seem constantly on his mind. Many readers would be bored to death by the strangeness of the text if that was all there was to it. On the other side of the page, from 1914 to 1916, logic plods along and the Tractatus takes further shape. The two halves of Wittgenstein’s life, the clean precision of logic and the messiness of human reality, are separated by an impermeable barrier.

And then, on the 11th of June 1916, as the Russians conduct a major offensive on the battlefield, they not only punch through Austrian defences – they also punch through this barrier in Wittgenstein’s own world. Here is the diary entry for that day, in the philosophy column:

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?

I know that this world exists.

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

That life is the world.

That my will penetrates the world.

That my will is good or evil.

Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.

I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.

This is, as far as I am concerned, real philosophy. This is a person with a phenomenal mind trying, very hard and for themselves, to think about big questions. When I read this for the first time I felt elated, giddy. This is the kind of thing that is exciting. It was like someone was for the first time pointing at a stain that only I seemed able to see and saying “there, there it is!” And he was standing beside me. In a way, it’s probably the most serious, most personal thing I have ever read.

Another entry soon after it runs:

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in a God means to see that life has a meaning.

The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there.

(As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.)

That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will.

However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God.

In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will.

I can make myself independent of fate.

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.

I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.

A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in face of death.

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

For life in the present there is no death.

Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world.

If by eternity is understood not as infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present.

In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means.

I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: “I am doing the will of God.”

Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life.

When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world?

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

For example: it makes me unhappy to think that I have offended such and such a man. Is that my conscience?

Can one say: “Act according to your conscience whatever it may be”?

Live happy!

In the Tractatus, we have only a little to go on. Wittgenstein does not attempt to talk about that “about which we should be silent”, as he does here. But still, there are moments that are tantalising, which these two extracts and the others in the book explore in greater detail. Like the moment when he says, in 6.43, that “the world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy”, or, in 6.521, that “the solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.”

The ethics that we discover Wittgenstein as having during the First World War are actually not at all complex. They are, in fact, undoubtedly influenced by Tolstoy, whose Gospel in Brief Wittgenstein carried with him all through the war. Tolstoy, like Wittgenstein, came to value the conscience highly. Both men struggled, throughout their lives, with an overpowering sense of guilt, which partly explains it.

Thinking about life as a stage

Yet what does Wittgenstein actually say? What is his vision of the world here? With the help of an influential essay by Eddy Zemach on “Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the mystical” and an extended metaphor, we can perhaps summarise. The facts of the world are as they are. We arrive upon a stage which has been set out already, ready for us to play out our role. God is not a person – God is the stage, we can say. God is the world, is the arrangement of all things that we have to make use of while we perform – “we are dependent on what we can call God.” If there were no world, there would be nothing at all to stand on.

It is mysterious that there is a world at all. How things are, that’s not a problem. (6.52, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions were answered, the problems of life would remain completely untouched”). Science can explain the world just fine – its composition, its creation even back at the Big Bang. The world, the entire universe and all the things in it, are again this stage, or perhaps an entire theatre. But we cannot see beyond the stage. No matter what discoveries we make, we are limited in this. Yet we may have a sense that there is something more, something that cannot be explained – why there is a stage at all. Indeed, on stages people perform. Yet what are we to perform and why?

“There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.” We come into the world and like it, or have a problem with it. If we have a problem, we are not happy. Our unhappiness can be reconsidered as a feeling that if we were to die, we would be upset as death approached. “Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life.” This fear is the result of a bad conscience, and bad conscience is finding that we are not living in a way that is harmonious with things. We go around the stage, frustrated at the chairs and tables placed on it. We constantly stub our toes on the world as it merely is.

The way to be happy is to accept the world. To use the chairs as chairs, to sit at the table, to play a role that the stage allows. Wittgenstein’s idea in this period is that we must follow our conscience, while also accepting the world as it comes to us. It is obvious that such a view comes easily from the experience of war, where we come face to face with evil and death and pointless suffering with a monotonous regularity. If we accept this state of things, then that’s part of the way to happiness cleared up – the world does not upset us.

The next stage is to follow our conscience. Once we accept things, we need to know how to act. Also, just as we can get the world to stop upsetting us by accepting it, we can get ourselves to stop upsetting us, by aligning ourselves with our conscience. Asking our conscience what to do will let us act in a way that is right to us, so that if we were to face death we could not say to ourselves that we had done something wrong. There can be no guilt to expiate if we were true to our own obligations, as we felt them.

In entries both before and after the war, Wittgenstein struggles with the voice of his own conscience, because it places great demands on him. For example, he feels he must write a confession of his sins and give it to all his friends. He does not do this, and so he makes himself miserable. But unlike with one’s attitude to the world, our conscience seems harder to change. And so, we are better off following it.

“I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences.” What we have here are just ideas that Wittgenstein toyed with as he faced the Russians’, and then the Italians’ bullets and bombs. We can see stoicism, but more than that we will recognise the influence of Schopenhauer, whose ethics consists simply of extinguishing one’s own desires while trying to reduce the suffering of others. Wittgenstein’s ethics shares the idea that one should not desire for things to be other than they are, while emphasising the importance of one’s conscience in inevitably leading us to help others, presuming our souls retain the ability to see and mourn their sufferings.

We can and should ask whether these ideas survive the battlefield. By the time the war ends, it seems that Wittgenstein has indeed stopped thinking philosophically about God and wills. “Let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw”, he writes to a friend, Paul Engelmann, in 1918. And there must be a reason why the Tractatus itself is so quiet on these things. (Because we are not supposed to talk about them, perhaps). Yet as we read beyond the bounds of this post’s timeframe, we find that Wittgenstein the individual does not move on. He is still coming back to overwhelming feelings of guilt, to the falsity and baseness of his desires, and he is still talking about “God” and the “Devil” in ways that seem to go beyond just considering these two synonyms for words like “fate”.

Now, as a way of living, we might find plenty of problems with this worldview. It may not seem true to our experience. We may note that war, in fact, can easily warp and ruin the conscience, in a way that seems unacceptable to those who haven’t experienced it, but which does not matter to those who have. (Someone with a ruined conscience cannot really understand what they’ve lost). Yet enough of these ideas appeal to me that I keep coming back to them. Though he does seem to have had a life of torment and personal struggle, given his conscience and sense of guilt I doubt Wittgenstein could have survived existence any other way. Perhaps we should take him at his word when, dying, he said “tell my friends I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Conclusion

I spend a lot of time myself in conflict with my own conscience. Most of my wasted and hence ultimately saddest moments come from ineffectual attempts to avoid my conscience, numbing it in various ways. If I were to face death now, I am not sure I would manage it well. Not primarily because I would be upset for those I leave behind – for like Wittgenstein, your blogger is on a certain spectrum – but because I know that there are falsities in my life that require remedy. I would regret, and regret much.

A friend of the family is a doctor in Switzerland, the sort whose patients are extremely wealthy and mostly on their way out. According to them, most of their patients scream on their deathbed, a little like Ivan Ilyich. I tend to see this as an indication that the kind of life that leads to you dying wealthy in Switzerland is often incompatible with the Last Judgement (another phrase Wittgenstein used wholly seriously, funnily enough) you make of yourself and your life. It is certainly something to consider as we make decisions about careers, families, and related matters.

There are other explanations, of course. If we truly love life, we will be loathe to part with it. We may be upset for our loved ones, losing us. But in any case, considering whether we have a bad conscience, or whether we would scream and scream if death came suddenly to us in the near future, is probably a good rule-of-thumb when assessing our own lives. Given it’s almost the New Year as I finish this post, it’s the perfect time to audit ourselves.

On the Edge of an Abyss – Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire

This is a novella that seems to sit on the edge of an abyss. I have read nothing like it. As a description of madness, its brilliance is in showing madness as a thing within the mind that goes beyond merely mistaking what lies before us, or acting in a way that makes little sense to others. Yet what Aliss at the Fire shows may well not be madness at all and instead another, deeper consciousness. It is a supremely mystical, magical work.

Set by a fjord in Norway, Signe, an elderly widow reflects on her husband Asle’s disappearance over twenty years before. But this reflection is more like the spinning of a cobweb. Told primarily using only commas and line breaks, the text itself is a constant stream. So it is that Signe imagines her past self, and the text enters the perception of this past Signe, as she says goodbye to her husband. He walks to the shore, and there he encounters a vision of himself as a child, walking with his grandmother. Other figures are seen by Asle or Signe as the novella progresses, including Asle’s great-grandmother, Aliss.

Perspective

This shifting of perspective, or time and place, comes so smoothly, the way that we can follow one thread of the web to a junction and turn immediately to any of many others without pause, precisely because of the relative lack of punctuation. Amongst the flow, we notice a “he thinks” or a “she sees” and that is all we have to tell us of a shift from one Signe to another, or from one Asle to another.

Signe is our only character in the present. As with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, we have a very isolated existence on which to build our drama. There is a reference to a boat builder, who built the boat that Asle heads out on to meet his fate, and also to two boys who burned the boat later as part of a Midsommer celebration.

But Signe is alone, friendless, and adrift in herself.

Alone, that is, except for all these memories. There is something almost cinematic about Fosse’s style in Aliss at the Fire, which builds up in echoes and reverberations until it becomes deafening. Asle drowns on a boat. His grandfather, also called Asle, drowns on a toy boat he receives for his seventh birthday. The original Asle’s father, Kristoffer, nearly drowns when out with Aliss. Aliss makes a fire to roast a sheep’s head, and both the second Asle and Signe see strange fires, out on the fjord or down at the shore.

The Signe of the present witnesses this past, as it passes through her house – for it is Asle’s family home – without understanding who these people are. She also witnesses her own self, watching for her Asle. Though alone, the doors are constantly opening as people rush in and out. The air is filled with the sounds of past life.

We must ask ourselves: is it madness or a great comfort to have the past be so real?

Trauma

Seen from the present, we know everything that is to come. We know, because Asle tells us, that his grandfather’s brother Asle died as a boy, long before we see the seven-year-old head out from the shore for the last time, bearing a cargo of shells for Bergen. We know also that Asle himself, whatever his doubts, will go out on his own boat during a storm, and will not return. What these moments lose in immediate shock, they gain in emotional weight.

If we read Aliss at the Fire as a novella about trauma, we can possibly see it is being about coming to terms with that trauma by seeing its many interlinkages and coming to accept it and the past it inhabits as a totality. At the back of my copy, I wrote down Asle’s family tree, not necessarily because it is complicated, but because I wanted to see the whole thing together. Signe goes from watching in bewilderment as the world passes through her house, to acceptance as she strokes Kristoffer’s wife Brita’s hair as she hurries inside with the drowned small Asle in her arms.

As a character, Signe thinks back to that final day with Asle because she wants to understand how he could have died – a moment that remains unrevealed to us. She goes in circles with her questions: “…what was it he said before he went out that day when he disappeared? what did he say before he left, did he say something? something about going out onto the fjord for a little while maybe?…”

Perhaps one way we can read what she experiences is as a demonstration of the answer to them – a showing of the answer, rather than its direct telling. Although, as we do not see Asle’s death, we must use the other memories – as must Signe – as a way of understanding her loss.

Without an insight into Asle’s death, we must speculate based on what little we have. Inevitably, one thinks of suicide. I am aware that Scandinavian intimacies may be more subtle than those of warmer climates, but it is difficult to find much fire in Asle’s heart. And she seems to have many more doubts than would be sensible. There are hints of friction in their past, such as when she thinks about how he does not like long words after she writes him a flowery love letter.

Furthermore, we must ask why Asle goes out on the fjord every day when he himself does not seem to like it or know why he goes. Perhaps we can answer the question by saying that Asle is in the grip of forces he does not know or control, just as Signe finds herself in the grip of memories she cannot control either.

God

The main thing one notices in Aliss at the Fire, more than minor questions of what and why, is the pervading mystical feeling. We know at once that we are not dealing with the physical rules that we are used to seeing governing our lives. Here the dead come back not as ghosts but as images, as if something is projecting the past back onto the present. Here we see mysterious fires, and we inhabit a universe that is essentially devoid of other human life.

It is only Signe, only Asle, only a few family members, and the world of the fjord and the elements. Often I thought of the prints of Edvard Munch, for here too we often see our characters only from their backs as they face the landscape and try to make sense of it. Here too, we see but do not truly know them.

What do we make of these porous boundaries? Is Signe losing her mind, or drifting between worlds? We might find something primeval and pagan in the mysterious fires seen above the water, or the sheep’s head Aliss burns on the shore. At the same time, however, as an old grandmother, Aliss provides comfort to her son and daughter-in-law after her grandson Asle drowns on his toy boat in a distinctly Christian way. For though Christianity is present indirectly in the novella, for example in Kristoffer’s name (Christ-bearer), it is only about two-thirds of the way through that God himself is invoked by Aliss:

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, she says

He is happy, Asle’s happy now with God in Heaven, so don’t be said, she says

God is good, He is, she says”

This marks the beginning of God’s direct involvement in the novella, which culminates in the story’s final and very ambiguous moment, when the whole of reality seems to collapse, and Signe herself joins the memories in their ghostly realm. If I found Fosse’s A Shining a little silly, Aliss at the Fire is much easier to enjoy as a kind of religious work. Perhaps this is because the work as a whole is far more intense.

It is hard to convey, in my own neat sentences, the sheer force of Fosse’s writing in Aliss. The near absence of full stops, coupled with the constant shifting of perspective, really drags one into the world in the way that the mildly annoying personality of the narrator in A Shining kept me out. I felt like I had a mystery before me, whereas A Shining had something that seemed altogether too obvious.

This does not make Aliss’s words religiously convincing, but it makes them weighty. In a story where trauma seems destined to repeat, with drowning after drowning, we must believe in the earnestness of the characters’ attempts to deal with it.

Aliss is serious in her confrontation with death in a way that the bumbling narrator of A Shining is not. It is this seriousness that allows us to overlook the essential absurdities that might otherwise get on our nerves or seem entirely unrealistic. Things like the way that nobody has any friends, the way Asle has no job and literally spends his entire life going out on the fjord on his boat each day, and so on.

Instead, we see the beauty, and just like Signe, we find ourselves adrift in this strange and mysterious world.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the work, as I reflect on it, is the way that Fosse’s stylistic approach aids and supports his thematic goals. Literarily, this is pretty elementary stuff. But the particular use of streaming narrative and flowing consciousnesses for the particular goal of turning our thoughts to realms beyond our reality is really rather effective. It makes me wonder whether we can actually write anything serious about religion or spiritual matters, now, in normal language, or whether we have to do something strange, like Fosse’s flowing language, or McCarthy’s cathedrals of prose. This seems to me, as someone who is interested in these things and can imagine myself writing about them, to be quite important to think about.

Jon Fosse – A Shining

If a story is going to create a mystery without a single answer, it should at least aim at the creation of the potential for the reader to find an answer. The alternative is simply frustration. For instance, Kafka’s brilliance lies in the way that we can find a solution to his works’ problems, just never a conclusive one. We all know why Gregor Samsa becomes a bug – only our views inevitably conflict with one another. The text, nevertheless, provides clues for all of us. It prompts endless exploration. Whereas I am not sure Jon Fosse’s A Shining does.

I had high hopes for A Shining. After all, Jon Fosse has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I spent weeks going around bookshops, trying to find Septology. Perhaps this effort meant that I demanded more (when I finally found a book of Fosse’s in stock) than the writing could give me. A Shining is about fifty pages long. It’s so thin that it bends the wrong way if I carry it in a breast pocket. But plenty of stories have managed much in fewer pages.

The plot is very simple. A man drives into a forest. He has been driving aimlessly, out of boredom. In the forest his car gets stuck. He gets out of the car and tries to find help. It starts snowing and he gets cold. He sees a mysterious “shining” that approaches and talks to him. Then the shining goes inside him. He then sees an old couple that he recognises, not immediately, as his parents. Then he sees a man in a suit. Then they all float away, the narrator included.

The narrator asks :

“What’s happening here in the middle of the forest, in the black darkness of the trees, where there’s white snow on the branches and on the ground between the trees[?]”

What, indeed.

I propose to start with the narrator, whose consciousness we inhabit. Often narrators are the way into a story like this.

He shows signs of depression: “Boredom had taken hold of me—usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do.” He hasn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and he experiences a kind of emptiness and anxiety that worsens as the story progresses. He is lonely. What else? As so often in these kinds of stream-of-consciousness books, he has a lack of self-knowledge that can easily grate: “And what was I doing on this forest road?”

Does he want to end his life? Perhaps – “And maybe that is exactly why I walked into the forest, because I wanted to freeze to death.” Perhaps not – he then immediately decides this is not the case. We don’t know his job, his life before the story, except for hints that are insufficient to form a view – “You might almost consider me a thinker.” In other words, our man is a blank slate, albeit likely a prideful one. Even when his “parents” arrive upon the scene, the dialogue between the three is very limited and focused on his trying to find a way out of the forest. There is insufficient evidence there for even the most ardent Freudian to make an essay from. 

Let’s go back to Kafka. Gregor Samsa was a travelling salesman. This made him a bug in the eyes of others. He had a family whose interactions with him give plenty to think over. Like the narrator of A Shining, he seems oblivious to certain things – in Gregor’s case, for example, that being a bug might make it hard for him to do his job. But unlike the narrator of Fosse’s story, his outward existence as an individual is sufficient to give us something to keep in our minds as we try to make sense of things. Both have personalities, but only Gregor seems to have had a life.

We might say that A Shining is about meaning, as if this is an excuse. Certainly, one real part of the work is the way that we try to find order and meaning in the world. The narrator’s hope for rescue leads him to ascribe meaning to the ground itself: “and that was probably a path leading into the forest, and it has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it, and there must be people there.” He finds a stone that just seems to have been shaped for sitting on. There is a human desperation for everything to make sense that he clings to.

Philosophically, this comes across in questions of determinism. On the very first page, the narrator notes: “All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or another, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else.” (We might note here that our narrator, who thinks he is a “thinker”, refuses to state outright the simple name for this idea). If everything is determined by something else, then that suggests an ordering of the universe. That is a comforting thought.

Against that thought, there is reality and the random. The snow of the forest that obliterates any path that might be there,  that the car gets stuck to begin with. The narrator walking in circles as he tries to get out. The way that his parents, rather than helping him escape, argue with one another sadly and admit that they do not know the way out either.

We might look to parts of the story as symbols to guide us, to things as echoes of others. Dante’s Divine Comedy begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

This is our narrator’s problem, through and through. After the uncertainty of the forest, Dante meets his guide. Our narrator in A Shining also meets guides – the shining, the parents, and so on. He also remembers seeing a cabin beyond the forest – a symbol, clearly, of the order and meaning he can achieve if he can work through the muddle of snow and trees. Back on the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse, showing that the world he left behind cannot be returned to. This all sounds good to me, reasonable interpretations of things. But it does make things look quite simple.

The Shining

Now it’s really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and clearer. Yes, a white outline there in the dark, right in front of me. Is it far away or is it nearby. I can’t say for sure. It’s impossible, yes, impossible to say whether it’s close or far away. But it’s there. A white outline. Shining. And I think it’s walking toward me. Or coming toward me.

With the shining itself, it’s perhaps not necessary to demonstrate the parallels, except that I am increasingly aware that the extent to which I was exposed to Christianity as a child through my schooling is completely unrepresentative of the general distance many now have from the common stories of the Bible, regardless of belief. It could be an “angel”. Certainly, it brings comfort to the narrator, warming him up. At one point he thinks of it as a voice of “love.” The shining form enters the narrator and occasionally talks to him –

I say: who are you. The presence says: I am who I am—and I think that I’ve heard that answer before, but I can’t remember where I heard it, or maybe I read it somewhere or another.

So at least the book is aware that people’s connection to God is not what it used to be, and makes it obvious. Although the narrator suggests it might be some dark angel, it is fairly conclusive from the context that it is a positive spirit, trying to help him. “I’ll leave that for other people to decide,” he thinks, about whether it is the voice of God. But the book does not leave much room for an alternative.

Next, we have the parents, once the shining has gone quiet and entered the narrator. Their portrayal is touching, because of its vulnerability. We expect his parents to help, but they seem just as lost in the forest as the narrator:

She says: you don’t know the way—and he says no and she says she was sure he knew where the way was, he always knew the way, she couldn’t remember a single time when he hadn’t known the way, she was sure he knew the way, she would never have imagined anything else, she says and she’s stopped, and she’s let go of my father’s arm and now she’s looking up at him, and she says, and her voice sounds scared: you don’t know the way, you can’t find the way back home—and my father shakes his head. She says: so why did we walk so far into the forest—and my father doesn’t answer, he just stands there stiffly. She says: answer me. He says: but we came here together. She says: no, it was you who dragged me into the forest. He says: but you wanted to find him.

But at this point, we can say that the parents are sent by some higher power, clearly not to help the narrator escape, but to help him understand something about the world. “Wasn’t he always his own person,” his mother says to his father. Perhaps the lesson has something to do with selfishness and pride.

The final person is a man in a black suit. He has no face and perhaps is God, or the man the narrator could become. It’s impossible to say.

No, I don’t understand this. It’s not something that can be understood either, it’s something else, maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening? Everything you experience, yes, is real in a way, yes, and you probably understand it too, in a way. But it doesn’t matter either way.

He does not talk, but he and the narrator and all the others float off into the distance and the story ends, essentially bathed in light.

Conclusion

Now, either the narrator dies, or he is saved. It’s fairly immaterial. We can go for an atheistic interpretation that the whole thing was the delusion brought on by freezing to death, his parents, and the rest of it all just one of those near-death-experience oddities. Or we can say that in the forest he found some higher truth that is incommunicable, except as a strange second-hand experience for us readers. But it’s hard to see any other interpretation. It’s essentially a mystery that is not mysterious because there isn’t an answer here. We just need to accept the truth of it, which works with religion but seems fairly annoying with fiction.

A Shining isn’t actually bad as a religious tale. Its air of mystery is effectively created and it feels like a modern-day allegory. But it then suffers from not knowing what it is by trying half-heartedly to add ambiguity. Either it’s a story about a sad man who finds God/Meaning/Truth, in which case it should take itself still more seriously, or it’s an ironic tale that might just be a man freezing to death after taking a drive – at which point it could give us more to work with as we try to reach our own satisfactory interpretation of things. Either more ambiguity or more Truth, in other words.

Still, the funny thing is that I can see myself reading A Shining again. It’s not often that you have something that’s really trying to convey a mystical feeling – and partly succeeding. But on the other hand, I can’t see myself turning to the seven hundred or so pages of Septology too soon.