Books on Wittgenstein

 The debate with myself: Whether to buy yet another book on Wittgenstein.

The argument against: The limits of my own interests. I’m intensely interested in Wittgenstein, yet my interest is narrow. I am interested in (1) Wittgenstein’s thought and (2) how his thought shaped his life.

Wittgenstein’s thought is clearest in his own writings. If you are looking for a place to start, I like On Certainty.

The best biography is Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. It’s a wonderful book, but I am interested in the narrower question of how Wittgenstein’s thought shaped his life. The best account on that point is Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.

Monk’s biography is 704 pages. Malcolm’s memoir is 100.

I am glad there are scholars in the world. I love Monk’s book. But I am not a scholar, and I am interested only in parts of what almost has become an academic discipline. I was interested in Malcolm’s 100 pages. I was interested in about the same number of pages in Monk’s book. I also was interested in about the same number of pages in Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees. The star of that collection is M. O’C. Drury, one of Wittgenstein’s students.

• Source: Nikhil Krishnan, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy is Daunting. This Biography Makes Him Human”; The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2025. It’s a review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2025.

Listening to the bells

 Harper’s has a piece about the controversy in England over the new rules for bell ringing.

When I was a young man, I once sat outside with my brother and listened to the bells of a church in the Cotswolds.

If there are five bells in the tower, and you start in order — 1,2,3,4,5 — how many different possibilities are there? How many sequences could the ringers go through without repeating themselves? How long would that take?

As I sat, listening, I slowly became aware of the subtle changes in the sequences. I sensed a pattern. I started to anticipate the next note and was pleased when I heard the expected note. Is that what music is?

Bells are an ingredient of place in England. Villages, parishes in cities and university towns are places in peculiar ways. Bells are a part of those peculiar ways. I left England with a lifelong interest in bells.

In earlier times, the bells celebrated coronations and national victories. They also delivered the news. Here’s a bell ringer, speaking in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield:

 

The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, “Hullo, a death?” Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if they went on speaking, “seventy-one, seventy-two …” people would say, “Well, they had a good innings!” But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty, a hush would come over the fields.

 

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 87.

Veronique Greenwood, “A Change of Tune: a revolution in English bell ringing”; Harper’s, October 2025. It’s here:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/10/a-change-of-tune-veronique-greenwood-bell-ringing/

The way the news is told

 Suppose one of the richest men in your town got into a dispute with city hall.

This fellow claimed he’s owed a ton of money. He runs for mayor. When he wins, he installs his friends and former employers in key posts. After they express gratitude for the cushy new jobs, he tells them he wants them to give him the money he claims he’s owed. He doesn’t want to hear criticism about the claims being on the dubious-to-bogus end of the scale.

Suppose you were reading this story in the local paper. How long would it take you to realize that the taxes you pay on your house are going to pay off the mayor?

If you’re thinking about the Current Occupant of the White House and his demand that the Justice Department pay him $230 million, we are of like minds.

I wish the newspapers I read had told this story in a different way. When I read accounts of the news, I read about unprecedented ethical conflicts and about how this development has no parallel in American history.

The instincts of the journalists I was reading was to find the abstractions. I think they’d have written better stories if they’d found the ordinary, the everyday.

If this had happened in the town we all live in, we would see it for what it is: not an unprecedented ethical conflict but a heist.

'The partial truths we humans mostly live by'

Julian Barnes said that William Trevor “is the subtlest purveyor of the partial truths we humans mostly live by.”

I like that line. I think most of us have some general principles that guide our lives, but our day-to-day behavior isn’t governed by some grand ethical theory. We limp along with partial truths — our grandfather’s maxims, our professor’s proverbs, our drill sergeant’s standing order. Trevor gets his finger on these partial truths. His stories often show how our reliance on them can go wrong.

More than one writer has noticed that Trevor is a master at giving readers information without letting them know. If you’re a reader of Trevor’s stories, you find that you know things about the characters without having been explicitly told.

That, to me, is writing.

• Source and notes: Julian Barnes, “Julian Barnes on William Trevor’s final stories — a master of the short form”; The Guardian, 19 May 2018. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/19/last-stories-william-trevor-review-julian-barnes

Trevor: ‘The Crippled Man’

 The crippled man in William Trevor’s story lives on a pension. He lives on a farm with his “cousin” Martina, an interesting character who wants the house painted. 

But the story is about two stateless brothers who come to paint the house and are sidelined by days of rain. Because they have no legal protections and can’t complain if they are mistreated or cheated, they watch every move their employer makes. They look for meaning in every gesture and review every conversation as if they had a transcript. They read between the lines.

 

Survival was their immediate purposes, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

 

I have known people like that in this country. I think Trevor captured them in one sentence. 

• Source: William Trevor, Selected Stories; New York: Viking, 2010. “The Crippled Man” is on pp. 10-33. The quotation is on p. 17.

Arabia Mountain, October

 The leaves are turning and falling. I can’t imagine how you’d give an account that was measurable. Are a-third of the leaves gone? A-quarter?

You can see further through the forest. We were tramping around Arabia Mountain and could see outcrops that had been hidden two weeks ago.

I also don’t see how anyone can give an account of the changing colors by species. We paused under a  sweetgum that had all the colors. Some leaves were green, but others were yellow and a few were red. But there were other tones, all the soft shades of pink you see on peaches, on the same tree.

It’s hard to account for autumn.

People call this an oak-history-pine forest after the dominant species. In fall, I tend to notice the other players in the orchestra: the elms, common persimmon and red mulberry. The reddest red we saw was a black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica.

Public wilderness

 Thoreau thought each place should have a public wilderness: 

I think that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

 

He asked why we would fund public education and destroy the best school.

• Source: Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, edited by Bradley P. Dean; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000, p. 238.