David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

The things one tardily becomes aware of.

Even if the whole notion actually saddens me now that I do know about it, to tell the truth.

Grass being simply supposed to be grass, is all.

Well, or quite possibly the book itself is a sad book, and for this identical reason, which would have been a point that I missed until now completely, of course.

In fact quite possibly even those people Campy or Stan Usual may have been sad too, if somebody once told them they would have to stop playing their game on real grass.

Although surely even people who played baseball must have had more important things than that to worry about, or one would certainly wish to imagine that they did.

Certainly the one they named the disease after must have had more important things to worry about.

The instrument that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to play was a clarinet, by the way.

Which for some curious reason he carried in an old sock, rather than in a case.

So that anybody seeing him walk down the street with it might have thought, there goes that person carrying an old sock.

Having no idea whatsoever that Mozart could come out of it.

Doubtless A. E. Housman thought he was just somebody carrying an old sock, in fact, on the afternoon when Wittgenstein found himself with diarrhea and asked if he could use the toilet, and A. E. Housman said no.

On my honor, Wittgenstein once needed a toilet in a considerable hurry, near some rooms at Cambridge that were Housman's, and Housman would not let him in.

Actually the composer who most often came out of the sock would have probably been Franz Schubert, having been Wittgenstein's favorite.

Even if I have no idea why this reminds me that Brahms's friends were frequently embarrassed because prostitutes would call hello to him when they passed.

Or, for heaven's sake, that Gauguin was once arrested for urinating in public.

Or that Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman often used to nod to each other while walking the streets in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.

Presumably this last will at least make it seem less improbable that people like El Greco and Spinoza did exactly the same thing, at any rate.

If hardly in Washington, D.C.

Clara Schumann actually visited the Wittgenstein home in Vienna with Brahms on occasion also, incidentally, if I have not made that clear.

And which was perhaps an additional reason for Brahms wishing that children would go away.

Whereas Schubert was one more person who had syphilis, unfortunately. This being an explanation for why he never finished the Unfinished Symphony, as a matter of fact, having died at thirty-one.

And Handel can be put on the list of people who went blind, I think.

But who was somebody named Karen Silkwood, whom I suddenly also feel I would like to tell that you can now kneel and drink at the Danube, or the Potomac, or the Allegheny?

And why do I only at this instant realize that Leningrad was still called St. Petersburg when Shostakovich was born there?

I have just wrapped my head into a towel.

Having gone out for some greens, for a wet salad, this would be because of.

And in the meantime the more I have thought about it, the more sorry I have gotten about what I said.

I mean about Michelangelo, not about Herodotus.

Certainly I would have found it more than agreeable to shake Michelangelo's hand, no matter how the pope or Louis Pasteur might have felt about this.

In fact I would have been excited just to see the hand that had taken away superfluous material in the way that Michelangelo had taken it away.

Actually, I would have been pleased to tell Michelangelo how fond I am of his sentence that I once underlined, too.

Perhaps I have not mentioned having once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.

I once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.

This was a sentence that Michelangelo once wrote in a letter, when he had lived almost seventy-five years.

You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.

On my honor, Michelangelo once wrote that.

As a matter of fact I am next to positive I would have liked Michelangelo.

I am still feeling the typewriter, naturally. And hearing the keys.

Hm. I would seem to have left something out, just then.

Oh. All I had meant to write was that I had just closed my eyes, obviously.

There is an explanation for my having decided to do that.

The explanation being that I would appear to be more upset about that carton of grass that is not real than I had realized.

By which I imagine what I mean is that if the grass that is not real is real, as it undoubtedly is, what would be the difference between the way grass that is not real is real and the way real grass is real, then?

For that matter what city was Dmitri Shostakovitch born in?

A certain amount of this sort of thing can actually sometimes almost begin to worry me, to tell the truth.

Even if there would appear to be no record as to what name Wittgenstein ever did pick out for that seagull, on the other hand.

Well, my reason for bringing this up again being because it was a seagull that brought me to this very beach, as it happens.

High, high, against the clouds, little more than a speck, but then swooping in the direction of the sea.

Except that the seagull was in no way a real seagull either, of course, being only ash.

Have I mentioned looking in Savona, New York, ever? Or in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

And that in Florence I did not let myself into the Uffizi immediately, but lived for a period in a hotel they had named after Fra Filippo Lippi, instead?

What I write with my stick are not necessarily always messages, by the way.

Once I wrote Helen of Troy, in Greek.

Well, or in what looked like Greek, although I was actually only inventing that.

Even if Helen of Troy would have been only an invented name in real Greek too, come to think about it, since it is assuredly doubtful that anybody would have been calling her that at the time.

I have decided to hide among some women so that I do not have to go and fight over Helen of Troy. That hardly being the manner in which one imagines that Achilles would have thought about such things, for instance.

Or, I have decided to make believe I am mad and sow salt into my fields so that I do not have to go and fight over Helen of Troy. That hardly being the manner in which one imagines that Odysseus would have thought about them, either.

Moreover everybody would have doubtless been too accustomed to calling her of Sparta to have troubled with changing in any event.

Even after they had sailed to Troy in the one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six ships.

Which is how many ships it says in Homer that the Greeks sailed to Troy in, incidentally.

Even if one is personally next to positive that there would have been no way in the world that the Greeks could have sailed in one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six ships.

Doubtless the Greeks had twenty or thirty ships.

Well, as I believe I have mentioned, the whole of Troy being like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.

No matter how extraordinary one may find it that young men died there in a war that long ago and then died in the same place three thousand years after that.

Although what one doubts even more sincerely is that Helen would have been the cause of that war to begin with, of course.

After all, a single Spartan girl, as Walt Whitman once called her.

Even if in The Trojan Women Euripides does let everybody be furious at Helen.

In the Odyssey, where she has a splendid radiant dignity, nothing of that sort is hinted at at all.