Lars Iyer - Wittgenstein Jr

After philosophy , we will know what it means to live.

Christmas Eve

Morning.

He is pale. Worn.

So he is still sane, he says. Still alive.

We should pray together, he says. We should thank God on our knees. A pause. And then: no, it is not for me to pray.

My youth is already a prayer, for him. My beauty: prayer in the flesh.

Am I his friend? he asks me. I nod. And he says: yes, I am his friend. God has given him a friend.

Tears spring to his eyes.

WITTGENSTEIN: Do you see? I nearly wept …

I tell him he must stay. That he can’t think of going anywhere, in his condition.

He says he won’t stay. That this can’t be where it all ends. Not here. Not in Cambridge.

The last moments, as we wait for his taxi.

Last night, he dreamt he came back to Cambridge, he says. That he came back to rescue me, and to be rescued in turn.

I didn’t recognise him when he returned, he says. He’d come back in a new guise. He was himself — but he wasn’t himself.

And he didn’t know me , not immediately.

In his dream, it took time for us to find our way back to one another. To court one another all over again, and in a new way.

In his dream, everything that has happened happened again, as if for the first time. Everything — his class, our walks on the Backs, our romance, even last night, even the night of sadness before his departure …

In his dream, I found him again, he says. I saw him in someone else’s face. He came towards me with every face but his own. He came laughing , he says. He came weeping . He came in innocence , as pure as a spring breeze.

The taxi draws up. The driver packs Wittgenstein’s cases into the boot.

He will come back to Cambridge as a judge , he says. A sword will go out of his mouth to smite his enemies. And I will sit at his right-hand side, and Ede at his left.

The dons will bow their heads in repentance. The porters in their lodges will look up expectantly. The cleaners will pause with their vacuum cleaners and wait for a sign.

He will come back to Cambridge as a lover , he says. He will hold me in his arms. My hair will be thick against his mouth. My legs will be entwined with his. My fingers, wrapped round his fingers.

And he will sleep beside me, he says. I will sleep beside him. We will be gathered up in the hand of night. Held together.

He will come back to Cambridge as the sanest man in the world , he says. As a man who has passed through madness and survived. As a man remade in the crucible.

He will come as the last thinker , he says. As the last philosopher . He will wield germinal forces. Cosmic forces. He will burn with the great fire of God.

And the first morning of the world will dawn again, he says. The eternal New Year. And he will step with us all into the new world. The coming world.

And there will only be forces and densities, not forms and matters, he says. And there will be but currents and countercurrents, peaks and troughs, and nothing enduring.

And there will be nothing but God, he says. Nothing but divinity, angels torn apart. Nothing but the end, perpetually ending. Nothing but the beginning, eternally recurring.

After philosophy , we will have no names, he says.

After philosophy , there will be a name for everything, and not just for every kind of thing.

He embraces me. Presses a notebook into my hand.

It’s all there, he says. His path into the pathless. The way out.

WITTGENSTEIN: Remember me, Peters.

He climbs into the taxi, his mackintosh folded over his arm. He’s gone.