Everything in my life came together in the space of three seconds earlier tonight. I found the connection; the universe is telling me something. Now, what that something is, I don't know — but I am nearly 100% certain that the ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein has everything to do with it! If you would, consider the following:
- The book I've most thoroughly digested (and enjoyed) since I moved to Philadelphia: The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace. WITTGENSTEIN.
- I have been on time to one linguistics lecture this semester. (This isn't my fault, mom. My programming class is in a biology building, and the walk takes ten years on a good day.) And who did we discuss in that lecture? Only a "very interesting fellow by the name of... WITTGENSTEIN."
- On a lark (lark, what a! plunge, what a!), I went rooting around for books in West Philly last Thursday. I found four, as mentioned earlier. the first one I read is about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin, I recommend it). Whose ideas hold the book together? Why, those of WITTGENSTEIN.
- My father's primary piece of advice to me has always been "when you have nothing to say, say nothing." This is a corruption of "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," which hails from the TRACTATUS-LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICALUS, which is the only book ever written by WITTGENSTEIN. This is something I mutter under my breath often while in the library, for there is inevitably some blockhead Skyping sans shame in the No-Cell Zone.
This is it, y'all. I am an unwitting Wittgensteinian, devoid of wit but full of gene snit. Updates on the haunting to follow... perhaps.
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