LATE MARCH 2026:
"One must live for the good and the beautiful until life ends of its own accord." And so the tale begins: Wittgenstein, for once, got it right. Really he got it right quite often, but less so in his diaries. There you see a lot of "Worked... worked... the blessing of work!" and the like, with the occasional diatribe into his nonexistent sex life. Really, though, he occasionally, mostly with reference to his perception of his impending death at the hands of the English, touched upon these points that verge on a real discovery of the meaning of life. He never quite gets there––no philosopher does, or they'd be too busy living to write down their impressions of life––but he certainly nears this point of enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the best way to sum up what I read and loved this late winter, although it certainly doesn't seem it from a distance. I've dabbled in a variety of genres, my habits lacking a throughline of, say, genre or period or style, but they've all assisted in this grand project of understanding the world and myself a bit better.
on loss of the self and others
A year ago now, last March, I took a trip to the Midwest to do some school visits. Whenever I visit that region of the country, where my family built its history and still lingers to this day, whose intonations and quirks reside in my culturally scrambled personality, which has been influenced in equal part by every area of this melting-pot nation and by many areas beyond it, I spend much of my time reading as my father drives through corn fields. I'm always on aux, thank goodness, but that doesn't help quite so much as one might think; you can only listen to so much Wilco and The Velvet Underground before you start to lose your mind from Ohioan ennui. In loving and loathing the Heartland, though, I've read some fascinating things. Outside South Bend, Indiana, where I toured Notre Dame in ten minutes and in that time renounced my family's entire history with the Roman Catholic Church, I ran out of physical media to read and opened the New Yorker app on my phone, where I came across an essay by the novelist Yiyun Li. I'd read Li's The Book of Goose two summers before, alone in a dorm at some Harvard summer camp while my roommate ran out into the night with her gregarious posse of teenage girls as I shuddered at the idea of spending high school as lonely and friendless as I had found myself that July. I'd found the book stunning in its simplicity. I cried all over my copy and had to buy a new, unsoiled one at the Coop to bring back to my mother using cash I'd found on the ground in Central Square; she's never heard this story and, unless she's reading my blog, never will. Anyhow, asides, well, aside, I read Li's essay with great fervor and no advance knowledge of the subject matter.
Reader, this essay is sad, if such a word can even describe the sheer misfortune of Li's life. In less than a decade, she has lost not one but two sons to suicide; she expands upon the task of trying to understand these events with tremendous intellectual power. Things in Nature Merely Grow, a book-length expansion of the essay, goes about finding the intellectual framework through which to comprehend and unravel loss, to engage in a practice of radical acceptance rather than a fog of grief, and does so marvelously. I don't recommend it to people who are easily triggered by such things, who have lost someone either too recently to be able to handle Li's words or not recently enough to be able to feel them yourself, but I do recommend it to just about everybody else. In particular, I suggest mining her references: listen to the music she mentions; read the books she does; attempt to figure out the ideas that seemed to plague her sons and that haunt her today. This is the quest I've been on for the last little bit, ever so slowly, and it's seemed to me a really wonderful way of engaging with new literature.
The same bookstore trip as I encountered Li's memoir (I went to the Seaport location of Porter Square Books, which is in Grubstreet, a fascinating literary hub that I recommend to any Bostonian who wants to meaningfully interact with the creative world), I bought Wittgenstein's Private Notebooks: 1914-1916, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff and published for the first time just three years ago. I read it in one Sunday afternoon the day I finished Things in Nature Merely Grow. I do think my reading experience was enhanced by having just learned that Li's son James had spent much of his final year engrossed in Wittgenstein's work. Unlike him, I can't understand much of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at all. Despite this, though, I found these diaries engrossing and full of new ideas to consider. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," Wittgenstein said, although I don't believe this to be true. I called C. when I read this and tried to get her input, and I'm still not sure what bounds the world if not words, but it's got to be something else. Even the great Ludwig himself couldn't express his ideas through language! He had to rely on a warning that the only people who would comprehend him would be those who had already thought as he did. Even then, his ideas are so bare-bones, so mathematical, as to permanently confuse the reader. Philosophy, I believe, is not quite meant to be like this; instead, Wittgenstein poses a reconstruction of logic.
on truth
killers of the flower moon
graeber
king arthur
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