A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Levin Janna

Author:Levin, Janna [Levin, Janna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2009-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

The morning of his death, Moritz left his house later than usual, skipping backward out the door as he called good-bye to his wife. He was waylaid by a Wittgenstein crisis. Having chosen his words poorly in a heated discussion the previous evening, he almost alienated the man entirely and spent a good part of the middle of the night smoothing over the beginnings of a rift. Despite the loss of sleep, the late start, the missed breakfast, Moritz was grateful to be the one person Wittgenstein continued to address during his months of near total seclusion. Then there were days when he was unreachable, when his fury was hidden, along with his ideas. At those times, Moritz might spend their meetings staring nervously at his back while Wittgenstein faced the wall in one of the grand sitting rooms in his family's ornate mansion to recite poetry (mystical writings, no less, by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore). Moritz, an otherwise clever and confident man, was privately embarrassed by the obvious condition of missing some fundamental point. Wittgenstein once said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby. He doesn't know what kind of storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.”

Moritz was so enamored of Wittgenstein that he found himself traveling insanely across Vienna for any possible meeting with him as the philosopher changed venues at random without concern for the burdensome commute it might demand. Moritz often brought his assistant, a poorly paid scholar who kept his family housed in a two-room flat on Fruchtgasse above a Czech family of five in the crowded Jewish quarter on the wrong side of the Danube Canal, only to watch him be humiliated. Despite Wittgenstein's ascetic tendencies—such as living alone in a shack in Norway, teaching rural children grammar, shedding his family's obscene wealth in a myriad of ways—he still held an astringent contempt for Moritz's assistant and his abject poverty, a disgust he made no attempt to hide or soften. Wittgenstein's Jewish ancestors converted to Catholicism generations before, and twice he scoffed to an uncomfortable Moritz, “Does this Jew actually practice?”

Alone or with the decoy of his assistant, Moritz collected ideas like dew that condensed and dripped from the man's shirt-sleeves, sometimes having the undignified task of mopping the dew off when it was reluctant to fall his way, so he felt, with dis-belief, like a kind of manservant.

While Wittgenstein's frustration with Moritz and indeed the entire world often flared wildly, Moritz endured the rages and the fickle turns with characteristic patience. If any pressure was apparent, it was only in the form of an exaggerated show of this intrinsically great patience so that it was distorted in the direction of sycophancy. Moritz saw that Wittgenstein was not a madman, nor a bully. He was tormented, fragile even, sometimes crumpling like an eggshell. And so Moritz managed not to feel hurt by the increasingly frequent bites.

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