BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [1 JUNE 1913]
BRACERS 17929. ALS. Morrell papers #793, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

Sunday evening.1^, 2

My Darling Love

Having reached page 300 this morning and finished my chapter on Truth and Falsehood, I am doing no more work today, so I will try to write a better letter than I have usually written lately.

It is sad that you have to stay so long in Lausanne, but you are quite right to stay. I suppose I couldn’t meet you in Paris, if J. comes home before you? I am sorry to hear Combe is ill. Billy3 must be dreadfully trying — you must find her very difficult to endure. Limited people always feel so sure of themselves — one longs to knock a little uncertainty into them, but it can’t be done.

You ask if I am tired. I don’t feel so, particularly, but I think I must be, because I have grown terribly nervous and irritable, and the feeling of work that must be done has grown oppressive. A sort of inner voice keeps on, as persistently as the rumble of a train, saying “Get on with your work — get on with your work”, leaving me no peace when I am doing anything else. And then people who come and talk seem annoying, and I want to be rude to them and make them go. The feeling of writing that must be done is like being in the middle of a mountain and having to tunnel one’s way through before one can reach light and air. And of course I have only superficially and by an act of will got over Wittgenstein’s attack — it has made the work a task rather than a joy. It is all tangled up with the difficulty of not stealing his ideas — there is really more merit in raising a good problem than in solving it.

Wittgenstein affects me just as I affect you — I get to know every turn and twist of the ways in which I irritate and depress you from watching how he irritates and depresses me; and at the same time I love and admire him. Also I affect him just as you affect me when you are cold. The parallelism is curiously close altogether. He differs from me just as I differ from you. He is clearer, more creative, more passionate; I am broader, more sympathetic, more sane. I have overstated the parallel for the sake of symmetry, but there is something in it.

It is astonishing how many problems there are in theory of knowledge which no one has ever dealt with. I look up other books occasionally, but I find always a complete blindness to all the most obvious distinctions. Sometimes I can use James’s Psychology for a statement of the data — but neither he nor anyone else is any use for the analysis of them. In spite of Wittgenstein, and even if every particular statement in it is false, I am sure the book I am writing is a good book, because it gives an example of scientific method where previous writing has been unscientific. That will certainly be the main thing I shall have achieved — making certain parts of philosophy scientific, and giving grounds for thinking that other parts are absurd, like astrology. It is what Galileo did in physics — its value is independent of the truth or falsehood of the particular results one arrives at. It satisfies me as a way of spending one’s life. But it is rather a lonely business, and demands a terrible expenditure of energy.

America won’t interfere much. Having to lecture there is a stimulus to me, and helps me to write. And it will bring me into sympathetic contact with people, which is encouraging.

I hope to write the constructive part of this book in September, after walking with Sanger. “The place of good and evil” I want to do when you come home. I shall do it all the better for being a little tired. In the October term I must write a text-book of logic, which I can use for my logic lectures in America. That will not require fresh thinking — I shall explicitly avoid the doubtful fundamental questions, and give only what seems to me definitely known. It does me good having a lot of work to do — it simplifies life and keeps me from brooding and worrying.

Tonight I dine with the Mirrlees’s. Tomorrow I go to the Whiteheads and return Tuesday night.

Darling I long for your love — the world I have been living in is very cold. I don’t remember which letter of mine yours this morning is an answer to, but something in it seems to have worried you. Dearest I do need your love. I hope I have not done anything to hurt you.

Your
B

• 1

  [document] Document 000793. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

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  [envelope] A circled “793”. The Lady Ottoline Morrell | chez Madame Chartier | 3 Avenue Agassiz | Lausanne | Switzerland. Pmk: CAMBRIDGE | 10.15 PM | 1 JUNE 13

• 3

  Billy Mildred (“Billy”) Townshend, Julian’s new nanny in 1913.