Spurious

Interview with Anna Aslanyan for Radio Free Europe. Translated into Russian.

I am appearing with Kjersti Skomsvold at a 'fiction discussion' at the Town Hall Theatre Galway as part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature this coming Wednesday (25 April at 6.30-8.00pm). Tickets priced €8 and €6 (available at the venue and at www.tht.ie.)

So it is the sick whom one can count on, and who have not yet lost their sense of what is unjust and monstrous.

Ingeborg Bachmann, from the Todesarten cycle

Declan Rooney, of the Galway Independent interviews me alongside Kjersti Skomsvold, in anticipation of our appearance at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, held next week.

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (not online) has a very interesting review of Dogma by Toby Lichtig.

I have at all times thought with my whole body and my whole life. I do not know what purely intellectual problems are … You know these things by way of thinking, yet your thought is not your experience by the reverberation of the experience of others; as your room trembles when a carriage passes. I am sitting in that carriage, and often am the carriage itself.

Nietzsche

A Chinese sage of the distant past was once asked by his disciplines what he would do first if he were given power to set right the affairs of the country. He answered: ‘I should certainly see to it that language is used correctly’. The disciplines looked perplexed. ‘Surely’, they said, ‘this is a trivial matter. Why should you deem it so important?’ And the Master replied: ‘If language is not used correctly, then what is said is not meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will be corrupted; if morals and art are corrupted, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion’.

Erich Heller

Anyone who wishes to understand me fully must know Norway. The spectacular but severe landscape which people have around them in the north, and the lonely shut-off life – the houses often lie miles from each other – force them not to bother about other people, but only their own concerns, so that they become reflective and serious, they brood and doubt and often despair. In Norway every second man is a philosopher. And those dark winters, with the thick mists outside – ah they long for the sun.

Ibsen, in a letter

I now wish that lived together with someone. To see a human face in the morning. – On the other hand, I have now become so soft, that it would perhaps be good for me to have to live alone. Am now extraordinarily contemptible. I have the feeling that I am now perhaps not entirely without ideas, but that the solitude will make me depressed, making it impossible to work. I am afraid that all my thoughts would die in my house.

Wittgenstein, in his notebooks during a stay in Norway.

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him – ‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon – there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of thought etc – which of course are of more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will die within four years – but today it was two months.

Excerpts from the diary of David Pinsent, Wittgenstein's close friend, with whom he travelled to Norway in 1913. Pinsent, with whom Wittgenstein was in love, died during World War One.