Wittgenstein's Mistress

According to Crusher, it says a lot about America's stupid fucking culture that Mitch Albom is even allowed near any public library, much less allowed to publish "books," while David Markson's remarkable work has received no popular recognition over the last four decades. (Yes, Crusher is aware that this is an old song; all that changes are names. Fine, fine. Crusher will move on.)

There are a lot of reasons to read this novel. It's written in a fascinating, formally inventive way. The narrator is a woman named Kate, and her musings to herself are replete with historical, cultural, and artistic references. But right now what Crusher wants to emphasize is that Wittgenstein's Mistress, Crusher thinks, is about what happens when a person is, well, crushed by loneliness. Kate has come to believe she is the last person in the world. In fact, the last conscious entity in the world. She refers over and over to skies emptied of seagulls. In fact, she sets fire to pages from a book, throwing them one by one into the air at the edge of a beach in an attempt to recreate the gulls' flight. Maybe she's insane and maybe she isn't. What's important, more important than that question, is her realization at the end of the story. She is musing on the prospects of writing a novel about a woman who believes she is the last person in the world. And she says this about that character:

Although one curious thing that might sooner or later cross the woman's mind would be that she had paradoxically been practically as alone before all this happened as she was now, incidentally.

Well, this being an autobiographical novel I can categorically verify that such a thing would sooner or later cross her mind, in fact.

One manner of being alone simply being different from another manner of being alone, being all that she would finally decide that this came down to, as well.

Whether she's insane, the ending is so powerful because she realizes that the loneliness she feels now, as the last person alive, is very much like the loneliness she felt in her life before, a life in which her child died, her marriage ended, and she drifted from lover to lover, from place to place. Kate's life, that is, is simply a span of time in which connections with others are one by one dissolved.

One in which love fails.

And Crusher has to think that this is a fate we are all exposed to. Crusher's sense of things is that in any emotionally significant relationship--any relationship in which we experience longing, need, vulnerability, intimacy, tenderness, misunderstanding, loss, anger, and on and on and on (much like this sentence, Crusher knows)--is one in which people struggle, a lot of the time anyway, to create, to maintain, to recover a sense that we aren't alone.

And we're so bad at that.

Hell, most of the time, Crusher says, most of us don't even really know what the truth is about our lives or how to stay close to someone else. We're not so good at figuring that out and then there's the fact that we're also quite good at ignoring, denying, repressing, under-rug-sweeping, and just plain lying when it comes to what's really going on in our lives, what we want, what we (really, really--as S. Girls plead for us to disclose) need. Then there's communicating whatever it is we think we have a handle on to someone else and then there's their getting it, given everything they're struggling with inside, all their confusion and muddying history and longings and needs and all that.

And what's so sad, what's so fucking sad, about the human heart is this incessant wish for connection anyway.

Crusher is teaching Plato's Symposium this fall. And this dialogue just blows Crusher away every time. Not because of what Socrates says love is. Socrates . . . who the hell knows what he means by the time we're done. It's Aristophanes' speech about love. He says that human beings originally comprised "two" persons--we had two faces, four arms and four legs, etc. But Zeus was displeased with us because of our pridefulness, so he split us all in half and set us wandering for that lost part of ourselves. The pleasures of sex were given us to distract us from our deep, deep and unending loneliness. What we want most from love, according to Aristophanes, is to be "united" with our lost self, which we seek in someone else. If the gods offered to reunite us with our lost half, we would experience the greatest happiness possible:

Surely you can see that no one who received such an offer would turn it down; no one would find anything else that he wanted. Instead, everyone would think he'd found out at least what he always wanted: to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two. Why should this be so? It's because, as I said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now "Love" is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

But Aristophanes underlines that this offer is hypothetical only and that there's no guarantee we will ever find that wholeness:

But for the future, Love promises the greatest hope of all: If we treat the gods with due reverence, he will restore us to our original nature, and by healing us, he will make us blessed and happy.

So, we're right now in need of healing. The human condition is one of division, loneliness, longing, according to Aristophanes. And we can only hope that somehow and at some time, the gods will take pity on us and restore us.

Well, how often have you seen the gods come through on our behalf? About as often as Crusher has, probably. And Crusher doesn't know how much, through the course of a life, we really get better at connecting to someone else. Kate is fifty, she thinks, in this story, and everyone and everything has disappeared from her life. Which, Crusher guesses, is why this Philip Larkin poem also gets to him. Crusher might have Crusher's students read it when we cover Aristophanes' speech:

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds across the sky,

And dark towns heap up on horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

And yet.

Those moments when we feel, yeah, melted together with someone else. Can't give up wanting that, can we? At the end of the novel, Kate is lighting fires at the water's edge, recalling to herself the watchfires the Greeks lit on the beaches at Troy.