PicoBlog

When you are lonely, you have time to think; and one thing you may think of is the privacy of the mind, our ineluctable opacity to one another. One mines the pit of isolation for insight, seeking the metaphysical in the mundane—or hidden depths within oneself. “I think, therefore I’m not you.”

You might expect a philosopher like me to celebrate these meditations. But I suspect that they’re a form of sublimation: the animal reality of frustrated social need refigured as tragic epiphany, like referred emotional pain. We’re ashamed to confess that we feel lonely, so we say we’re doing philosophy. But the philosophy is skewed. Why fixate on the privacy of the mind when the body is no less private? “Why can one man not piss for another man?”—a question posed by my mother-in-law with a long-suffering shrug. It is no easier—in fact, it may be harder—than thinking for someone else.

Earlier this year, the private notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein were published in English for the very first time, in a translation by Marjorie Perloff. Wittgenstein wrote them on the front lines of the First World War, hiding his private thoughts in a simple cipher in a notebook whose facing pages grappled with the problems of philosophy that would shape the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s impenetrable masterpiece.

The private notebooks record Wittgenstein’s alienation from his fellow soldiers, his shame about sex, his lonely confrontation with fate. The Tractatus defends a form of solipsism, the view that no-one else exists: “what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.”

In reviewing the notebooks, I found Wittgenstein’s life reflected in his work—not just in the Tractatus, but in his later recoil from solipsism. The most famous argument of Wittgenstein’s late masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, is that there can be no “private language”: thought and talk are always already social; impregnable solitude is impossible.

The experimental novelist David Markson read Wittgenstein the same way. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is the journal of a woman, Kate, living on a beach, who believes she is the only person left on earth. It is written in short paragraphs—often no more than a sentence—that record her lonely travels, a surrealist Robinson Crusoe. There are funny moments, as when Kate installs her amateur paintings in the galleries of the Met. But on the whole, it’s a study in paranoia. “Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking,” Kate asks herself, “or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?”

David Foster Wallace loved the book. He found in its atomistic paragraphs a manifestation of the arid, pointillist world of the Tractatus—a book that’s structured as a branching tree of oblique, elusive aphorisms.

I see in it more of the later Wittgenstein. Can thought subsist in perfect solitude? Or does it fall apart? Kate is losing it: “of course,” she writes, “I was quite out of my mind for a certain period, too.” (An intentional pun?) She corrects and re-corrects herself unreliably; names skip away from their referents like skimming stones. Her son is “Simon” then “Lucien” (though his cat is always “Cat”). Kate writes messages in the sand in Greek—”Well, or in what looked like Greek, although I was actually only inventing that.” (A private language?) She loses track of time, and at times of what her own words mean. “The world is everything that is the case,” she writes. “I have no idea what I mean by the sentence I have just typed.” It is the first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, a book that Kate has never read.

Admiring the novel’s abstractions, Wallace was unhappy that it turns out, in the end, to be a study of grief and betrayal. As we gradually learn, Kate’s son has died, she feels responsible for his death, and she had extra-marital affairs. Like Wallace, I have qualms about the sexual politics of the book, but his response is symptomatic: a refusal to acknowledge that the anguish of everyday life is more urgent than metaphysical fantasy. The emotional power of the novel turns on the possibility that Kate’s solitude is not everything it seems.

What if she is not the last woman on earth—though she feels as though she is? What if she flouts the limits of language not philosophically but from the ordinary pain of isolation? Why is it so difficult to admit that one is lonely? Why is it a source of shame?

“What we cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ends, “we must pass over in silence.” True. Or we could learn to speak about it.

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