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in my mouth. I do not look, as you suggest, for Absolute Truth. No truth is absolute, not even a star in the sky like our Goethe.
    I see I already regret this letter. Please, can we avoid turning this into one of those feuds one finds waged across editorial pages? If I must, if only for now , follow this path, you might at least humor me so the journey might be easier. Do you believe one’s life is entirely a matter of conscious choice? Is the mule merely stubborn? — or does he instead find his hooves stuck in the mud of unyielding necessity?
    Your respectful son
    After this letter, Wittgenstein returned to his kites, but the sick feeling persisted and with it a certain floating anxiety. And so he buried himself in his work, looking out into the phenomenological world to keep the worsening weather of his boiling inner world contrite and contained.
    These were big, aerodynamically curved kites he was flying, wide wings in need of galloping winds. For such winds, the University of Manchester had established the Upper Atmosphere Kite-Flying Station near Absdell, a cottage standing on a point where the headlands shear off into the Irish Sea.
    For two days Wittgenstein had been there. For two days this feeling had been building. The kite, a ten-foot-tall red dihedral of laminated spruce and doped silk, had taken him four weeks to build, and in the twenty-knot wind it took right up, the stretched silk rattling like a jib sheet as it tore line from a winch wound with four thousand feet of 150-pound piano wire.
    The sky was wreathed with cirrus. The wind was blowing out to sea. Behind him the brass cups of an anemometer whirled. He had a barometer and stopwatch, inclinometer and notebook, science and its methods — all forgotten now as he watched the kite sweep away.
    Air desires. Water encircles and engulfs. The scourging waves recurred and pulled, seamlessly merging like stairs, without human meaning, without ever ending. As he looked down from that bluff, the waves seemed as meaningless and futile as the generations, no sooner surging than they were wiped clean of what they had just brought, falling back into an oceanic blackness, with a slow explosion of all that had passed before. Ocean or air — it was either the engulfment of will or the steady pull of desire that destroyed him. As a boy, and even now, he had suffered periodic bouts of agoraphobia, a fear not of height but of space. This fear came in different guises. At times he felt he would actually dissolve, perishing like an open flask of ether into the world’s greater volume. Then at other times he saw it was not space he feared but the queasy feeling of not knowing what he would do , imagining that, like an unstable substance, he would somehow explode if ever fully exposed to the concupiscent air.
    In the rising wind, spears of sharp sea grass were whirring like scissors. Clouds covered the sea and waves battered the rocks, spurting up in steamy plumes as the last birds beat back to shore. Across the sky, like a cornea filling with blood, came a fearful darkening. The piano wire was humming, and ever so faintly he was trembling, thinking what a thing it was to dread one’s own self — to see the self as enemy or other, not as companion, guide, sanctuary.
    Why is the will so powerless to stop the thing that life has set in motion? he wondered. Did he suppose that if he were to find value, some gloss of value might rub off on him? In all the sea there is a single pearl. In all the world there is a single, mirroring form that binds and reflects all other things. Desire was his crime, he saw. His father was right: surely, it was vain and sinful to want this thing. Surely, for this presumption punishment awaited. The ocean need not be deep for one to drown, nor need the grapes be high to be just past reach and hence all the sweeter. The dream is incomparably stronger than the dreamer.
    His stomach sank with the barometer. Sore from thinking, sore