The World as I Found It Read Online Free PDF Page A

Wittgenstein to think that he and Russell should be doomed to bear this antagonism through the rest of their days. Still, it could have ended only this way. Their natures were too disparate. Besides, their reputations had both grown too large, and there was now much else at stake — fundamental values and beliefs, not to mention the added goad of vanity.
    Difficult to say how this emnity had come about. Attribute it to time, time and the misunderstandings of time, ingrown. Russell had long felt that Wittgenstein disapproved of his life, of his couplings and anti-Christian beliefs, of his politics and popular writings, his easy socializing and celebrity. Russell was not entirely wrong in his suspicions. Wittgenstein did disapprove, but not as sternly as Russell thought. On Wittgenstein’s end it was the same. In the twenties, when he was off in that Austrian backwater teaching school, Wittgenstein fancied that Russell felt him to be more misguided and confused than in fact he did. Besides, Russell had a family by then. He had more on his mind than Wittgenstein.
    Time was the breach, then. Friendship, it seemed, wasn’t long or durable enough for time. Slowly, almost inevitably, they lost sight of one another. And they changed — they changed more than they knew, accepting all too readily those ways in which they felt they had changed for the better and spurning what they had lost or discarded as the price of becoming something else. It was a very human amnesia, this spewing of the past while hungrily swallowing the future. Like colliding waves, they broke and fell away.
    But to think: Russell had once called the twenty-three-year-old Wittgenstein his philosophical heir, the most brilliant man he had ever met. Now Russell called him tragic, a brilliant failure. Russell said many cutting things, especially as Wittgenstein’s influence in certain circles began to eclipse his own. This was what was beginning to happen by 1946. Russell’s philosophical work was then undergoing one of those periodic declines of reputation. Indeed, his reputation was suffering the aftershocks of his own hegemony and grandeur as a thinker. He was too gargantuan; his successors had to throw him off, had to debunk and devalue him so their own work could proceed, unintimidated. But beyond that, Russell was a victim of his own fame and success, qualities that to those who were unknown or, worse, only marginally successful meant he must now be a smug old fraud who was happily coasting — and cashing in — on his name. Russell simply did too many things well, wore too many hats — educator, journalist, sexual revolutionary, libertarian, gadfly, pundit, peace advocate and moral leader. And these were by no means all his hats. To his now venerable head, others would have sooner fastened goat’s horns and plastered his forehead with scarlet letters proclaiming “Atheist,” “Philanderer,” “Pervert,” “Public Pest.”
    This was the same Russell who corresponded with Einstein, Gandhi and Niels Bohr, who hectored and advised kings, premiers and presidents and who had long shown an intransigent willingness — if not an appetite — to be jailed if necessary in the cause of peace and the free exchange of civil beliefs. Russell didn’t just have detractors, he had sworn enemies. The press loved and hated him, but early on Russell had been shrewd enough to see that, in the long run, the periodic black eyes they gave him made no difference and sometimes even worked in his favor. All that really mattered, he realized, was that he be provocative and quotable. He was the story; the papers were only the mouthpiece, and he plied them like a master ventriloquist so that no matter how they distorted or vilified him, they spoke with one voice, blabbing the universal praise of publicity.
    Russell was a master of the bon mot and the slogan, of the seemingly good-natured slight, fraught with