I will replay too the video from the cruise ship of that glacier cracking, and I will wish later that I had told him about it. I will imagine, as I watch, the underwater shifting of ice, huge panes of ice, like windows, splitting off into hundreds of small pieces. Though I will not know what this would sound like in liquid water, I will reason that there still might be a brief moment of calm and then a terrible crash. And then—as I will remember a line from an essay I once read saying—the world is made and unmade. I will wonder if all that ice, all that noise, was simply absorbed or if for a few brief moments when the pieces of it fragmented and fell, if it became thousands of tiny stars, cosmic dust.
No ice breaks off the day I hike the glacier in Norway, though a few years later, in approximately the same spot where I that day stood, a massive piece will cave—or calve, as they call it—swallowing the parents of a young boy.
THE PHILOSOPHER’S CABIN
On my third time biking past it, I finally saw the sign: WITTGENSTEIN CABIN, 45 MIN. That sign—the sign I’d been looking for for nearly an hour—was situated several meters off the road, partway down a dirt tractor trail, and between an overgrown field and a camping park full of black-and-red-shuttered cabins and signs for other things: ice cream, huts for rent, dining. There was a stick figure of a hiker drawn on the sign and some laminated pieces of paper stapled onto the wooden post below it, but the sign itself was penned in faded black marker, in cursive—one letter running into the next, one word running into the next—and tacked beneath another larger sign for a different hike.
I tipped my bicycle into the high grass beside the trail and walked closer. One of the laminated papers was a Norwegian map leading toward, I assumed, the cabin, except that, besides the starting point—where I was currently standing—the map was merely a series of three black lines snaking through a yellow-and-green background with no distinctive landscape markers, map posts, or even labels. There was a laminated paper in English too, but on the English sheet there was no map, only a few vague directions—Go straight then turn left. Follow the o-marked signs—and a faded photo of a large, dead evergreen; a coral lake with mountains just behind it; and a metal pole, rising straight from the rocks over the water.
I walked a little ways back from the sign, looked up, and scanned the tree line. There were evergreens and pencil-gray mountains all around me, bands of snow lining their highest ridges, then just like that, fading into dark, dense swaths of forest, bisected only by the occasional trail or sheep path. There were ledges of rock here and there and a single bird that approached ground then lifted off, but there was no dead tree or metal pole and no cabin, not that I could make out. Even after several minutes of scanning, all I saw were mountains and more mountains, trees and more trees; I couldn’t place the photograph in relation to the landscape.
I was living four or five miles down the road from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein’s cabin that summer, in a white three-story guesthouse in the very center of a tiny Norwegian farming village, Skjolden. Though cruise ships would begin docking in Skjolden’s blown blue harbor one year later and stacks of shoreline condos and vacation homes would follow the ships, that summer—the summer I was twenty-five—Skjolden was still a relative unknown, marked by the sort of comfortable sameness that comes from a long and mostly quiet history.
My friends Darrell and Annette had bought the ten-bedroom guesthouse in Skjolden two years before. They had seen the not-quite-falling-apart house when they were camping at a high farm in the mountains nearby and had decided, perhaps against all reason, to buy it. It was in a perfect location: a hundred meters from the village’s only hotel and shop, bordering a river, and steps from both the mountains and the fjord, with views of the berry farms and vineyards terracing the mountainsides. Just behind those green mountains that flanked the village were higher snowy mountains, still-vast glaciers, and four of Norway’s national parks.
It was Darrell who had directed me which road to take toward Wittgenstein’s cabin, and it was his old bicycle that I had ridden to get to the trailhead. “It’s easy to lose your way up there,” Darrell had warned me as we were standing around the kitchen eating breakfast that morning, watching the glacial-fed river just outside the guesthouse windows break against the rocky bank.
“I could run you up there in the car,” he offered. “I’ve been there before, though it was a long time ago.”
It was my second summer in Norway. The first—one year before—I had been mid-cross-country move from Chicago to Laramie, Wyoming, for graduate school. Darrell and Annette had just bought the guesthouse, and my own apartment lease was up. When he heard of my plans, my grandfather offered to pay for the plane tickets and sent me to the airport with a black-and-white photograph of his father and the name and number of a Norwegian relative, carefully keyed with the rounded letters of his old typewriter.
I did not call the woman whose name my grandfather had typed for me. I didn’t have a phone that year—or for many years—in Norway, and the only time I found a pay phone was when I was waiting for a bus in an otherwise empty bus station several hours from where we lived. When I tried to call my parents, my three-hour calling card ran out after just a few minutes.
What I did that first year in Norway was fix up the guesthouse with Darrell and Annette—that and go on ice climbs, hike alpine mountains and glaciers, and pick wild strawberries right on the edge of the highway. I camped in high forested hills in the rain, and I wrote words on rocks then threw them into the sea. I lived in a small purple bedroom in the guesthouse with another American friend, Annie, a room where I was able to sleep almost instantly, despite the constant light falling through the sheer curtains.
One year later—after the trip and the move and returning to my grandfather’s small studio with photographs of my own—my graduate program director, Beth, called to tell me that she’d rallied some summer travel funds for the department, that they were mine for the asking. I was back in my hometown already for the summer, looking for work. I walked into a blue-striped guest bedroom in my parents’ house while we talked, pacing excitedly between the wooden dresser, the windowsill, and the overstuffed chair in the corner.
A few weeks later I flew from Minneapolis to Reykjavík to Oslo to Bergen and took a boat all the way back up the familiar coast. I stood on the top deck of that boat—a passenger ferry, really—as the white, red, and yellow steeply pointed houses and hilly stone streets and eventually even the Bergen docks went out of focus, replaced by narrow slopes of rock, then wider berths of green mountains and almost-open ink-blue sea. When I got to the guesthouse late that night, the candles were still lit, swaying in glass jars hung from open windows.
“What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” This was the seventh and final proposition on logic in Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his most famous book.
Language, suggests Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, is ordered by logic; it has an underlying logical structure, and this structure determines the furthest limits—the margins—of what can be thought and therefore what can be said. Individual words in a language name objects, combinations of named objects make sentences, and sentences form paragraphs and ideas and treatises. Religion, aesthetics, ethics, the spiritual, the mystical, the metaphysical—all the things we can’t pen in, all the things beyond the bounds of logic—are also, Wittgenstein argued, beyond the bounds of language. When we think about them, the words get caught in our throats; they disappear because they were never there; all that was ever there was, as Wittgenstein put it, “nonsensical.” This inability to name, Wittgenstein wrote to his teacher Bertrand Russell in 1918, was not only the subject of his book but also “the cardinal problem of philosophy.”
I didn’t know this was the cardinal problem of philosophy when I went to look for Wittgenstein’s cabin. I didn’t know that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, or that Wittgens
tein had written it largely before his twenty-sixth birthday, in a remote two-story, wood-sided cabin on a high rock ledge overlooking a lake, the same cabin I was trying to find.
After leaving that first wooden sign, I hid the bike in the grass not far away and then spent the next several minutes looking for any left-hand turns. The directions had said Go straight then turn left, so I decided I’d go straight until I found the first possible left-hand turn and then I would take it. And if that wasn’t the correct turn, I’d go back and take the next left until I found the one.
As I walked along the dusty path, I passed pines—live and budding—and birch, with their pocked trunks and rolls of papery bark; I passed a tall field of yet-to-be-harvested hay and a swamp where the water from the nearby lake had overtaken the land, trees and parts of bushes rising out of the water, reflecting in it. Though it had been overcast in the morning, the light had broken through the cloud cover now, had fallen onto the lake and settled into the gaps between the trees.
I walked over a narrow wooden bridge, past some low underbrush. Only a few minutes later I was almost to the edge of the forest, the first place the road forked left. The path wasn’t very well defined, but it seemed to head in the direction the map had pointed and so I took it anyway. I walked ten or fifteen feet along that fork, on the edge of where the forest began to sharply slope upward, into the higher hills and mountains. After only two or three minutes of walking, though, the path stopped suddenly, walled off by a wide watery field with waist-high brown grasses. There were endless rows of birch and spruce, but there were no other left-hand turns or red o-marked signs in sight. The path had disappeared completely, as if whoever had laid the trail decided to go that far, but not beyond.
Unsure of the best move, I decided to leave the trail behind and to ford any seeming breaks in the grass on foot, hopeful that the trail was present, just grown over. I tried a first inches-wide break in the grass and then another and then stopped and looked up to get my bearings before repeating the process. For nearly half an hour, I alternated between circling various deer and sheep paths and gazing up at the mountain, trying to read its green slope like a grid.
Wittgenstein began work on his cabin in 1914, the same year that his teacher, Bertrand Russell, predicted Wittgenstein wouldn’t outlive. Two of Wittgenstein’s brothers had died, one by cyanide and one by drowning. Soon after, there would be the death of a third, by shotgun. Wittgenstein himself had a “nervous temperament”; wherever he was, he always wanted to leave, despite or maybe because of his brilliance. He had moved constantly, from England to Austria to Norway, looking for a career and a home and someone to publish his book. All these things were a recipe, Russell once told a friend about Wittgenstein, for an early death.
“I said it would be dark,” Russell wrote of a conversation with Wittgenstein about another move, a move to Norway, “and he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad and he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”
Instead of an early death, after traveling to Norway with a friend, Wittgenstein bought some land on the edge of a large glacial-fed lake near Skjolden and began constructing his cabin. It was a beautiful cabin and remote, built into the upper edge of the cliff, the only house on its side of the mountain and set a lake away from the rest of the village, with open views of the valley and the fjord. In the summer Wittgenstein would get to his land by rowboat, lodging in the village while the cabin was being built. In the winters after the cabin was finished, he snowshoed across the lake every week or few weeks for supplies. “I can’t imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here,” Wittgenstein wrote in 1936. “It’s the quiet and perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness.”
Some people in town called the cabin and Wittgenstein himself “the Austrian.” Unlike the simple one-story, boxlike cabins popular throughout much of Norway, Wittgenstein designed his home to look more like a typical Austrian house with a second-floor balcony, a steeply pitched roof, and a wooden frame set atop a partially submerged stone and brick base. He constructed a system of metal poles and pulleys to haul groceries and other goods from the shoreline up to the cabin, many meters above, and then settled in to write his philosophical treatise.
The hike to Wittgenstein’s cabin was the idea of my friends, Stephen and David. A few months earlier, David and I had run into Stephen while waiting for a train, the same train that routed just past my bedroom window on its way from one side of the city to the other, a train which sometimes rattled my pictures straight off the walls. It was a random Saturday night in May, cool and wet and quiet, like many Saturday nights in spring in Chicago, the only noticeable sound water sloshing under tires and draining down the streets into large metal sewers. David and I were going to the opera; as we walked up to the station, there was Stephen, standing out in the rain, leaning against the back of the building: tall, thin, wet blond hair. He was going to a play, catching the same train.
I had been the graduate teaching assistant for a course Stephen was taking a year prior. He was a philosophy major in an undergraduate poetry workshop; he had called me at home, at midnight, a few weeks into class, to ask me a question about an upcoming exam.
I picked up the phone, bracing for an emergency. “Hello?”
“Hi,” he stumbled, “it’s Stephen, you know, from poetry.”
I told him the answer to the question he was asking but also that if he called the regular professor of the course that late, she might think about failing him. He made a joke about poetic time then apologized and offered to buy me lunch. When the semester was over and I was done grading his assignments, we’d become friends or acquaintances or something in between. We’d chat outside some days, walking along the brick sidewalks of our small college on our way to classes. A few times we got lunch, and often Stephen and I—and David, our mutual friend—would cross paths near the hydrangea-lined entrance to the library, where we seemed to find ourselves at all hours, though we rarely left with any books.
I don’t remember how Wittgenstein came up that night on the train, only that both Stephen and David had heard of Skjolden—the village I’d thought so obscure—and suggested we meet there to make a pilgrimage to Wittgenstein’s cabin. It was less than a month until all three of us moved a quarter-turn around the globe; I was going to Norway and both guys were leaving for separate moves to Germany. David was going to study Jewish history and the Holocaust; Stephen was beginning a four-year PhD in philosophy; he needed a change of pace after a hard winter; he wanted to study European philosophers in Europe, in their home countries and hometowns—in the places that they lived—it only makes sense. I’d wanted to get back to Norway—the mountains, the guesthouse, the alpine air—ever since I’d left.
That night, Stephen wrote his new number on the back of a receipt and then slid it into my coat pocket as we found adjoining seats on the dimly lit train. Below his number, the note said, “July? August?”
My first year in Skjolden, I didn’t know about Wittgenstein’s cabin, or even that he had lived in the village. I’d had little time to learn Skjolden’s history; when we weren’t hiking mountains that summer, we were working on the house, which was a mess of unfinished projects. When Darrell and Annette had bought the place, several of the back windows were cracked, the white wood siding was gray with age, and most of the rooms inside the house were filled with junk: broken chairs, odd ski poles, bed frames, torn curtains, lawn equipment, and old kitchen appliances. You could barely make it through the front door.
That first summer, Annie, a few other friends, and I helped Darrell tear out the attic. Termites had eaten out most of the roof beams and all of the attic’s wooden walls by the time Darrell and Annette moved in, so that summer we took crowbars to the walls and ceilings, threw all of the rotting wood and insulation out the third-story window into a metal dumpster, and then nailed new termite-treated wooden braces ont
o all the old existing beams so the house could be fumigated and later lived in without the roof coming down. This year the others had stayed home, but I’d come back and we were moving on to the next job: leveling out the basement floor, lowering it by twenty centimeters to create a drying room, a sauna, and, eventually, an apartment for rent.
Along with the work on the house, my second summer I was determined to find Wittgenstein’s cabin. I’d promised myself that before I ventured out, to the glacier or the high mountains or anywhere else, I’d start with seeing the place where the philosopher had once lived.
Since I’d arrived in Norway that second summer, I had already attempted the hike twice. Both times I had gotten lost; once I missed the path altogether and found myself deep in the woods, covered by biting flies but otherwise alone. The other time, I started toward Wittgenstein’s cabin but somewhere veered off the overgrown path to his place and ended up on another path, which led to a different house. That house was square and gray, with the roof caved in, and it was full of undersized hardback books, half charred. I took some photographs; I touched the crumbling pages; I wondered if these were the same pages Wittgenstein had penned, had traced with his own hands almost one hundred years before, but then I looked up and noticed a 1960s-style plastic electrical wiring box hanging from the ceiling.
From the nearby highway, I could clearly see the metal bucket hoist that Wittgenstein had used as a pulley to retrieve groceries and other supplies from the lake. But when I got onto the ground, in the woods, I always got turned around. When I finally asked someone in the village for a map, what they gave me was a copy of a rough drawing Wittgenstein had penned himself. A simple, pencil-drawn diagram, the north/south/east/west axis was turned ninety degrees. The mountains, lake, river, and fjord were labeled as was a small black dot that said “House of Wittgenstein,” but no trails or paths were added; the map was drawn from too great a height. In the end, I took the copy of the map with me and, some months later, drew my own map over it: Wittgenstein’s Skjolden set against my own.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 4