Read Wittgenstein Jr for Free Online Page A

mean
really
in love?
    Ede speaks of his romance with a Master’s daughter. Her summer dress and flip-flops … A lily pond … A raft … Skinny-dipping … A bottle of champagne chilling in the water …
    Great love will be the making of him, he’s sure of it, Ede says. Only romance will teach him what to do with his life.
    The bathroom. Guthrie’s in the tub, reenacting the death of Seneca under Doyle’s direction.
    GUTHRIE/SENECA:
As long as you live, keep learninghow to live; and this is as true for me, today, as it is for any of you. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living; running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity …
    How noble Guthrie seems! How profound!
    GUTHRIE/SENECA:
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage
.
    Guthrie sniffs cocaine from a mirror. Ede rubs some on his gums (it acts more quickly this way, he says). Mulberry, trousers down, applies his cocaine
rectally
(it’s even quicker
this
way, he says).
    The second bedroom (set aside for ketamine, Mulberry tells us). It’s dark inside. The music thumps up from downstairs, bass magnified through the floorboards. Slumped individuals, among them Scroggins … Is it Scroggins? Yes: there he is, lost in a K-hole.
    The third bedroom, Mulberry’s, up a second flight of stairs. Posters. Mapplethorpe’s men fisting. A large drawing of a headless man, with a labyrinth for viscera and a death’s head for genitals, holding a knife in one hand and a bleeding heart in another. A glassed-in roof terrace, full of straggly marijuana plants.
    Mulberry laces a spliff with codeine and passes it round. We have to lie down, it’s so strong.
    The roofs of Cambridge! We’re on top of the world! The sky above us. The sky: an abyss. The night: a great cave. What a night to lose our minds!
    Benwell is letting off fireworks in the garden. Bursts of colour. Cerise. Vermillion. A Catherine wheel spinning. A smouldering fire, spitting out sparks. Ede says he can
feel
the fireworks. Mulberry says he can
taste
the pink ones.
    Three AM. The girls are here. We lie on our bellies,watching them from the terrace. Girls in Barbour jackets, in vintage fur.
    How beautiful the girls are! How beautiful, the fireworks! And we’re beautiful, too. All the young are beautiful.
    Wittgenstein’s brother took his life at
twenty
, we muse. He knew he was all washed up at
twenty
. At our age! And we haven’t even
begun
to live! We haven’t
done
anything. We haven’t
failed
at anything. Our lives lie ahead of us. Wittgenstein says we haven’t been
tested
yet, Mulberry reminds us.
    To kill yourself at twenty! To have finished with life at twenty! To have run out of options at twenty! Twenty: and for your life to have run its course. To be twenty is surely to be stood at the
brink
of life! To be twenty is yet to have
turned the page
!
    Perhaps that’s what it means to be brilliant, really brilliant, we speculate: to have already seen past the limits of life. To have seen all the way to the end.
    Is that what brilliance means: understanding the whole of life, seeing the whole? Is it that we’re not
clever
enough to kill ourselves? We don’t
want
to die—not now, not today: is this a sign of our shallowness?
    The girls are playing with sparklers. The girls are cooing with delight about their sparklers. How beautiful they are, the girls with their sparklers, making loops in the air …
    They can’t help their beauty, we agree. It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with any of us. We are young, so young. But what does our youth
mean
?
    A cry from downstairs. Scroggins!
    Down we go, forcing our way through the crowds on the staircase. A glimpse of a glassy-eyed Chakrabarti, with a beerbackpack and a suction tube. Of Guthrie, snoring on the floor. Both Kirwins in sweaty snogs with Clare College girls.
    Then Scroggins, like Kurtz at the end of
Apocalypse Now
. Muttering obscurely. Running his