The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Oh, well, on horseback, scoffed Moore, without the faintest idea what that meant. So it’s not too far.

  Over mountains it is far. Wittgenstein nodded. Without stops, nine, ten hours at least.

  Oh, said Moore nonchalantly. But inwardly he said, Good heavens!

  This wasn’t the holiday Moore had planned, not at all. Not that he hadn’t tried to wriggle out of it; the wretched truth was, he was trapped.

  Originally, Moore and Pinsent were to have made the journey together, but then Moore saw he would have to leave earlier than they’d planned, while Pinsent reluctantly decided to leave later as a concession to his mother, who had come down with a serious case of bronchitis. As it turned out, Moore and Pinsent would pass in Bergen, where they planned to meet one night for a changing of the guard, as Moore put it.

  But this was a fortnight away, and Moore first had some business to transact. As a favor to Russell — now at Harvard delivering his new lecture series, Our Knowledge of the External World — Moore had agreed to take down Wittgenstein’s dictated ideas, the culmination of his labors for the past year.

  But can’t he transcribe his own ideas? Moore had asked when Russell first approached him about it. I rather envisioned it as a holiday.

  Smiling, Russell tried to formulate an answer, then gave up.

  No, said Russell with a dry smile. Wittgenstein can’t transcribe his own ideas. That, you see, would be writing.

  But you said he keeps a notebook. Moore was beginning to color. He can’t copy it out?

  Russell’s smile slithered. Well, clearly he can’t. Call it anxiety, if you like — you know what a perfectionist he is. He is not ready to publish, not even near, but fortunately he finds speech acceptable — easier, I suppose, to repudiate. I’ve tried letters, but it’s tortuous. No matter what he says, it changes — the ground is constantly shifting under your feet. But really, emphasized Russell, he’s quite enthusiastic about the idea of dictating. And obviously you are, shall we say, the perfect medium. You’re a trained mind, as opposed to a mere stenographer, and you’re — well, basically neutral on the subject. Certainly less suspect than I am, anyway.

  Then Moore started squirming. Oh, I don’t know, he said, thoughtfully touching the tip of his nose. I’d sooner snatch bait from a trap. After another moment’s loss, Moore recovered enough to say, But I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Why can’t you go yourself?

  Well, I would very much like to, said Russell, hovering himself for a moment. But you see it will be at least January before I can, what with this American excursion. And by then Wittgenstein may not agree. And besides, he said, brightening — and here was the clincher — Pinsent will be there with you, won’t he?

  Moore still could not believe he had been stupid enough to agree to it — especially without Pinsent there as a buffer. Already, Moore felt weary, appearing to believe — to Wittgenstein’s supreme irritation — that he had undergone a terrific ordeal. Finally, after a drab supper that first night, Moore asked Wittgenstein if they might stay a while longer at the Flaam. Three or four days more, perhaps? Curled around his pipe, with a humbled look, he confessed, I would enjoy a little, em, transitional civilization. I’ve got blisters from these new boots. And as for a horse, well, frankly, my piles have been acting up. Moore stuffed his pipe drearily. I suppose you must think I’m a bit of a duffer.

  Straining to be conciliatory, Wittgenstein said, A few more days we can wait if you like.

  Moore brightened. You wouldn’t mind? Actually, I thought you could do your dictating here.

  We could, said Wittgenstein dubiously.

  Several days? Moore pressed, hopeful. You think your dictating may take that long?

  Wittgenstein grew tense. I do not know. I have no idea. I am unhappy with the whole scheme.

  Moore’s spruce chair gave a crack. But Russell said you were quite keen on it.

  Anxious to part with my thoughts? Wittgenstein was stunned. Not anxious, no.

  And not even very willing, it seemed to Moore: tenacious was the word for it. Over two tense days, with Moore acting as midwife, Wittgenstein grudgingly brought forth a year’s worth of thinking.

  Wittgenstein said, for one, that so-called logical properties show the logical properties of language and therefore the universe, but they say nothing. He said that in philosophy there are no deductions; that philosophy is purely descriptive. Distrust of grammar, he said, is the first prerequisite for philosophizing. But the swipes he took at Russell led Moore to ask slyly if the second prerequisite wasn’t distrust of Russell.

  On the contrary, said Wittgenstein acerbically. Distrust of oneself is second. Russell is third. Then comes you, Moore.

  Such moments of levity were few. Wittgenstein’s prickliness wore on Moore. No sooner would Moore read something back, it seemed, than Wittgenstein would correct him. If Moore interrupted to ask a question, he’d be met with impatience; and if Moore raised an objection, or required too much clarification, Wittgenstein would jump up, shouting:

  This is a stupid idea! Idiotic! I hate it, I hate it!

  Don’t rage at me! Shaking the stem of his pipe. This wasn’t my idea.

  Rot! Everything I say is rot!

  Listen, Moore would say sternly. Shall we proceed with this or not?

  Whatever do you mean? A look of shock as Wittgenstein motioned him down with his hand. Now, as I said …

  By the time they finished three days later, they were both sour and exhausted. Moore felt as if somebody had been punching him in the ribs. But still, he was pleased with the results, even if he felt, as he wrote Dorothy, that he had played midwife to a rhinoceros.

  Wittgenstein was not so pleased, however. The dictator was sick. The next day as they loaded the horses, he was gloomy and silent, feeling that he had offered his treasures to a thief.

  With this chore over, Wittgenstein was more anxious than ever to return to the hut he had just built. Manual labor and solitude had been his cure that spring, and it was what he needed now. What he did not need was a guest.

  * * *

  Oddly enough, the blessing Wittgenstein had felt after his father’s death had remained with him longer than he’d expected. But it had crumpled under the supreme test — his obligatory visit home to Vienna at Christmas. Like Pinsent, Wittgenstein found himself having to contend with his widowed mother’s loneliness and endless worries about him, her worsening health and complaints. True to form, there had been yet another young lady for him to meet — another failure. And then from all quarters came the inevitable questions about why he insisted on leading this hermit’s existence away from his family, in the middle of nowhere.

  There was also the matter of money — not the lack of money but the harrowing abundance of it heaping up, and with it hectoring solicitors, trusts and endless papers to sign. There was no avoiding it now. It was not his father’s money, or even his family’s money. No, it was his money, mounting, compounding, stock and dividend money with steel jaws to trap him if he wasn’t careful.

  From all this he had fled, leaving Vienna in mid-January. Once back in Norway, he was better. It was nice to burrow in under the relentless winter — short gasps of daylight followed by endless nights, pulsing with the gaseous whorls of the borealis. Across virgin snows, in applecracking cold, he learned to snowshoe and ski. Several times, he was even seen in church.

  His was not a hermit’s existence. He was staying in the home of the town postmaster, along with his wife and four children. The postmaster was amazed at the quantity of important-looking mail the boarder received, and it quickly became known that the Austrian was a man of means who struck a bargain without haggling as he went about buying tools and supplies for the spring.

  The postmaster’s wife, thickset but supple, with gorgeous graying blond hair, saw all this and more in her boarder. She spoke some German and was in the process of teaching him Norwegian. Sitting across from him in a chair, tutoring him, she was like a mother bird stuffing new phrases
down his hungry gullet, saying Det er virkeligsnilt av Dem … Det-er-virkelig-snilt-av-Dem … Leaning closer then, she would clarify the grammar, show him the proper position of the tongue, clucking and squirming with delight as he struggled to improve his pronunciation.

  Norwegian he acquired with remarkable ease; it was his tutor’s more subtle tongue that was slow to discern. But then one day, hearing her full skirts swish behind him, he looked down to see her plump hand sluice through the fold between his shirt buttons. When he grasped her hand, she mistook it for passion, emitting a low midwinter moan. How fearful he found her, bristling with an aurora of sticky, staticky sex. His Norwegian was not bad; he made himself understood. Shamed and furious, seeing to her disbelief that he had nothing for her, the postmaster’s wife gave him a real Norwegian lesson then — it was a tongue lashing he would be months getting over. What was wrong with him? she asked. He did not go to the socials that made these winters bearable. He did not talk to the young ladies. Why do you withhold yourself? she asked. For whom? For what?

  Sunk in his room later, unable to answer any of her questions, he felt only his own shameful incapacity and contradiction. Much as he wanted to leave, he saw he must stay, since to leave in midwinter would only have invited suspicions. For two tense months he remained there. Looming and unavoidable, smoldering still, the wife made him suffer for having spurned her. At times, he thought he could almost smell her, musty as a sickroom quilt in need of airing.

  Spring had saved him. It was a mighty, thunderous spring, which came first with a dripping, then with a roaring and a crashing of ice as roofs and boughs shook loose their burdens. Then in April, with a squeaking and groaning like a nail being wrenched from a board, the ice-bound lakes broke open, the white-hot ice booming and splitting like the surface of a vast, aboriginal egg.

  Later that month, driving a heavily loaded sledge drawn by a bay plow horse named Oskar, Wittgenstein set off for the land he had bought the previous fall. Waterfalls unfroze and crashed down the mountainsides. Under that concerted sun, hardy wildflowers popped up through the melting snow, and the lakes broke clear, flashing up with a hard, blue radiance. With a smack of leather and tinkle of harness chains, Oskar swung a head the size of a woodstove, his flanks and shoulders quivering to dislodge the first black flies. Wittgenstein cracked the reins and up the hill they climbed, the wet, dark earth ripping and squirting out under the sledge’s runners with the smell of ripe cheese.

  With a neighbor named Nordstrøm and his two sons, Wittgenstein had the foundation dug by the time the first load of lumber arrived on the fjord a few miles below. For two brutal months he drove himself. It took those weeks of hard physical labor just to break his will’s dark hold, his pride still welted with the wife’s words. But the work redeemed him, his fears melting again in the mountain plenum. In fact, he was quite good until Moore arrived — in his mind, it was Moore’s visit that spoiled things. Having surrendered his ideas to Moore, Wittgenstein felt denuded, without an ounce of fat to get him through this next long winter.

  Wittgenstein knew, at heart, that this wasn’t Moore’s fault. But still he resented Moore’s intruding presence, and he was sick of Moore’s complaints. As they rode out to the hut, Moore’s piles throbbed so badly that he hardly knew whether to walk or ride, and so the ten-hour trip stretched into twelve. By the time they arrived, Moore was done in. Spotting the “necessary house,” Moore eased himself down from the saddle and took off with that delicate, bowlegged dance step — the green apple two-step, some call it.

  Why? Moore asked himself as he crouched over that fulsome lime pit, grunting and slapping. Why was he here and not with his young wife? Why not at the Hurley-Burley, where he and Dorothy had passed an idyllic August at the seaside the previous summer?

  It was not long after their wedding that Dorothy had insisted on taking him there for a needed rest. This came after Moore had begun to founder on Prolegomena to Any Future Certainty, a paper he had been months struggling with. Ironically, it was Wittgenstein who had suggested the topic that day in Moore’s office when he refused to say there was not a rhinoceros in the room. Moore’s paper sought to respond to such skepticism, but how? The further Moore progressed, the more stale and unconvincing he found his arguments. For a month Dorothy watched his mounting frustration, until at supper one night Moore threw up his hands and declared:

  I know it thus! Behold my two hands! Ergo I know there are at least two things in the world!

  I see, said Dorothy quietly. I’ll show you a third. You’re exhausted, and I’m exhausted by you. I insist we take a holiday.

  Moore didn’t protest very hard. Indeed, he was thoroughly relieved three days later when they registered at the Hurley-Burley, a tall, white-shingled hotel near Harwich, on a cliff overlooking the North Sea.

  There was a crowd of regulars who convened there every summer, older and middle-aged couples, with many children. Dorothy was among the youngest wives, and when she revealed to Mrs. Noyes that they were only recently married, they were then known as the “young couple” — mascots to remind the older people of when their love was green.

  There’s rather more burley than hurley here, mused old Mr. Colbeck while sitting beside Moore at grogtime, which began promptly at four on the promontory overlooking the sun-greased sea. By the second day, Moore had heard that dictum repeated a dozen times by the various Burleybacks, or Puffins — the return guests for whom the sameness of those placid Augusts was clearly the best that life could hold.

  It was an easy, unmeditated life, a thoroughly common life among ordinary people. Yet Moore had to admit that the life here promised much more good, and certainly a good deal less harm, than many more rigorously applied systems. After supper in the dining room, there were the usual round of skits, impromptu musicales and parlor games. Moore played charades and, with Dorothy at the piano, sang the definitive, three-hankie rendition of Foggy, Foggy Dew. Wearing a mop wig and a seaweed beard, he even posed as Poseidon at the Henleys’ fortieth wedding anniversary party.

  Moore guessed it was partly due to being married and partly due to age that he suddenly found these humble rites so sacred and consoling. Sitting with the men, he could avidly discuss pigeon breeding, garden pests or dog training. There were an endless variety of things to talk about, and once it was learned that Moore was a philosopher, he became the resident authority on virtually every topic. At night, there was always a large gathering out on the promontory. Mr. Glencannon, who only a year ago had lost his lovely wife, Agnes, would play Mother O’ Mine and Comin’ thro’ the Rye on his mournful bagpipes (sounding like a frightful geese gaggle, as old Mrs. Dovecote never failed to remark). Wearing heavy Shetland sweaters and bundled under blankets in the varnished slat chairs, they would sit for three and four hours at a stretch, talking, drinking toddies, playing euchre. The awnings rippled and the waves pounded the black rocks, sending up a mist that kept people wiping their glasses. Puffing his pipe and holding hands with Dorothy, Moore would stare out to sea, hardly saying a word, while the others disagreed over which constellation was which, or gamely debated whether dogs have souls or God a sex — questions, ultimately, that were respectfully remanded to the able Professor Moore for his considered views.

  Mornings, Moore would be up even before the old men to read the paper and savor the sun as it burned off the fog. At the breakfast bell he would be off, heading down the line of steaming chafing dishes, heaping his plate with rashers of bacon and shirred eggs, toast and stewed prunes. God, but he could pack it away there. He could feel the fragrant heat fanning up from the fiery gardens. He could smell the rank sea air that flapped the stiff white linen as he worked away at that holy mountain of food, conscious of the rising pressures of his body stoked with two normal-size breakfasts and four cups of hot coffee.

  Seven days a week this was Moore’s Sunday morning service. And the body — was it not a luxury liner built for pleasure as well as thinking? Dorotheeee? he would wheedle as he crept into the room
. Dorotheeeeee. Oh, he’d catch her in bed. And didn’t he love the whiteness of her breasts below her sunburned neck! Working down the whiteness of her thighs to the red flesh of her ample calves, Bill Moore was in a rut. Sniffing and snorting. Jackstamping in the joy seat of that squeaking iron bed. Long clam-sucking thrusts and a clenching kiss. Then came the whistling, the little rinse in the wash basin before changing into his scratchy black bathing costume. Grinning at her in the mirror.

  Yes, a black pleasure ship he was, built for stateliness, not for speed. Offering his arm to Dorothy, Moore would cross the shaky planks that led down the cliffs to the beach. With his pipe clenched in his teeth and his skimmer slanted against the glare, he would step off onto the fine white sand so agreeably hot underfoot. A few older couples sitting fully dressed in beach chairs holding parasols; and then the younger women in flouncy wading gowns and their husbands in banded black. Children running with their pails. Mrs. Marsdon’s sturdy black Labrador, Hero, bounding into the foam. Greetings came like alms.

  Ah, the young people. Mrs. Moore, do come sit here beside me.

  Good Mr. Moore! And how are you, sir, this lovely morning?

  Oh, very well, thank you!

  Taking leave then of the Burleybacks and bumsitters, parting from his wife, Moore would calmly slog out into the cold, black water. And after him the children would shout, Mr. Moore, your hat! You’re wearing your hat, sir!

  Lazily waving his hand. The hat’s old. It floats. The waves will wash it ashore.

  Doing a slow crawl beyond the waves, Moore would spurt and roll over. A sperm whale, he was. From the shore, his black belly resembled a distant island. Timid swimmers found his presence reassuring; he made the sea look so restful and inviting, the golden straw of his skimmer glowing like a halo over the glassy roll.

  Moore felt distant and serene as he fluttered along, peering over his belly at the hotel on the little bluff and the folk lying on the sand. From here it seemed he could draw these disparate elements of his life into perspective; it was a way of taking a long look back at his life and wife, staring half in disbelief at that fragile green thing waiting for him on the shore. So odd, he would think, this need to see from afar what could best be seen up close. It was a matter of one’s emotional focal length: one was either near- or farsighted, or perhaps not clear at any distance. With his arms waggling at his sides, Moore would daily test the limits of his acuity, drifting out until he felt a kind of pain, like a boy seeing how long he could remain submerged. Sweeping out, he would wait until at last he saw her waving at him, angry that he always ventured out so far, without a care. Then he would bellow back and slog in, feeling secretly grateful that she had called him back. Floating out, he could reforge that bond, venturing forth that he might return, lobbing over the swells to strain the ragged edge of sight.