From Wittgenstein’s Mistress

From David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988). Kate (can she really be called a narrator?) types:

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

Wandering through this endless nothingness. Once in a while, when I was not mad, I would turn poetic instead. I honestly did let myself think about things in such ways.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. For instance I thought about them like that, also.

In a manner of speaking, I thought about them like that.

Actually I underlined that sentence in the book, named the Pensées, when I was in college.

Doubtless I underlined the sentence about wandering through an endless nothingness in somebody else’s book, as well.

And a few pages later:

In spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned, I did well in college, actually.

And later still:

Actually, I did well in college, in spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned.

One is now forced to wonder if underlining sentences in Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger might have shown more foresight, however.

And why does Kate handle these names as she does?

Incidentally, there is an explanation for my generally speaking of Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard, but of Martin Heidegger as Martin Heidegger.

The explanation being that Kierkegaard’s first name was Søren and in typing that I would repeatedly have to go back to put in the stroke.

I am very keen on Wittgenstein’s Mistress, having made it through 153 of its 240 pages in a day. The novel makes me think of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (which I hadn’t thought of in years): Kate, like Winnie, is a voice filling a void. And I think of the organization of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and of a Wittgenstein aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kate is putting the world together, sentence by sentence by sentence. Trying out and correcting or qualifying or abandoning ideas, she resists solipsism even as she’s stuck in it.

The sources of Kate’s underlined sentences: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): “Irren wir nicht wie durch ein unendliches Nichts” [Do we not now wander through an endless Nothingness?], from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The joyful wisdom]. Tyler Malone traces both sentences to Markson’s copy of William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.

I once joked that for many years everyone who went to college owned a copy of Barrett’s book. I did, and still do.

I mean, of course, that I still own a copy of the book, not that I am still going to college.

Markson’s books went to the Strand Book Store after his death in 2010.

By which I mean the books that Markson owned, not the books he wrote, although they or some of them could very well have been among the books that he owned.

A copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress could very well have been among them.

Wittgenstein’s Zippy?

[“Solitary Definement.” Zippy , January 7, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy appears to be channeling David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, but with a diner, an empty one. (Appears to be : as I now know, today’s strip is inspired by the Netflix series Pluribus. Thanks, Bill.)

Wittgenstein’s Mistress earned the Orange Crate Art Seal of Approval in 2013. What I wrote then:

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is unlike any other novel I have read. That alone would not be reason to recommend it. The novel’s strange and baffling premise, its comic timing, its pathos: they clinch the deal.

I’m not sure when Zippy earned the OCA Seal of Approval. But long before I first read Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Two posts with excerpts from Wittgenstein’s Mistress : The Salem Oak Diner (Facebook)

From Wittgenstein’s Mistress

One more passage from David Markson’s 1988 novel, six pages from the end, from a litany of suffering that sounds like something from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy:

Well, and poor all the young men who died in places like the Hellespont, by which I mean the Dardanelles, and then died again three thousand years after that, likewise.

Even if I hardly mean the same young man.

But meaning poor Hector and poor Patroclus, say, and after that poor Rupert Brooke.

Ah, me. If not to add poor Andrea del Santo and poor Cassandra and poor Marina Tsvetayeva and poor Vincent Van Gogh and poor Jeanne Hébuterne and poor Piero di Cosimo and poor Iphigenia and poor Stan Gehrig and poor singing birds sweet and poor Medea’s little boys and poor Spinoza’s spiders and poor Astyanax and poor my aunt Esther as well.

Well, and poor all the youngsters throwing snowballs in Bruegel, who grew up, and did whatever they did, but never threw snowballs again.

So for that matter poor practically the whole world then, more often than not.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is unlike any other novel I have read. That alone would not be reason to recommend it. The novel’s strange and baffling premise, its comic timing, its pathos: they clinch the deal.

[Mixed-up names from baseball are a minor element in the novel: Stan Gehrig, Campy Stengel, Sam Usual, Stan Usual. Spinoza liked to watch spiders fight. I’ll leave the rest to your curiosity.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eleventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read:

From the Penguin Little Black Classics series, nos. 3 through 80:

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate

John Ruskin, Traffic

Pu Songling, Wailing Ghosts

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Three Tang Dynasty Poets

Walt Whitman, On the Beach at Night Alone

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

Baltasar Gracián, How to Use Your Enemies

John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes

Thomas Hardy, Woman Much Missed

Guy de Maupassant, Femme Fatale

Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls

Suetonius, Caligula

Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and Medea

Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Petronius, Trimalchio’s Feast

Johann Peter Hebel, How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light

Hans Christian Andersen, The Tinder Box

Rudyard Kipling, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

Dante, Circles of Hell

Henry Mayhew, Of Street Piemen

Hafez, The nightingales are drunk

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath

Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet

Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Well, they are gone, and here must I remain

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings

Charles Dickens, The Great Winglebury Duel

Herman Melville, The Maldive Shark

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story

Nikolay Leskov, The Steel Flea

Honoré de Balzac, The Atheist’s Mass

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

C.P. Cavafy, Remember, Body...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One

Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart

Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

Samuel Pepys, The Great Fire of London

Edith Wharton, The Reckoning

Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, My Dearest Father

Plato, Socrates’ Defence

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

Sindbad the Sailor

Sophocles, Antigone We substituted Peter Woodruff’s translation for Robert Fagles’s.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man

Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci

Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon

Aesop, The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon

Matsuo Bashō, Lips too chilled

Emily Brontë, The Night is Darkening Round Me

Joseph Conrad, To-morrow

Richard Hakluyt, The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe

Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings

Charles Darwin, It was snowing butterflies

Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom

Catullus, I Hate and I Love

Homer, Circe and the Cyclops

D. H. Lawrence, Il Duro

Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

Ovid, The Fall of Icarus

Sappho, Come Close We substituted Mary Barnard’s and Stanley Lombardo’s translations for Aaron Poochigian's New Formalist translation.

Ivan Turgenev, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

Virgil, O Cruel Alexis

H. G. Wells, A Slip under the Microscope

Herodotus, The Madness of Cambyses

Speaking of Śiva

The Dhammapada

And several non-littles:

Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, This Is Not a Novel

Herman Melville, The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

Thanks to the translators who brought many of these works to us: Katrina C. Attwood, Mary Barnard, George Bull, Nigel Cliff, Archibald Colquhoun, Carol Cosman, Dick Davis, Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Robert Fagles, Richard Freeborn, Robert Graves, John Hibberd and Nicholas Jacobs, Mary M. Innes, Kimberly Johnson, Donald Keene, Guy Lee, Stanley Lombardo, David Luke, Meredith McKinney, Siân Miles, John Minford, Samuel Moore, Tiina Nunnally, Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui, E.V. Rieu, Jeremy Robbins, G.W. Robinson and Arthur Cooper, Jay Rubin, Elisabeth Stopp, J.P. Sullivan, Robert and Olivia Temple, Peter Whigham, Ronald Wilks, and Peter Woodruff.

We are now making our way through Dickens’s Bleak House.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Many books. Really many!

Baseball players

Kate, our narrator, if she can be called a narrator, notes that one often gathers “information about subjects one had less than profound interest in”:

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Kate immediately corrects herself: “And Stan Usual, I perhaps meant.”

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard)

Famous pupils

Kate has observed that many pupils of famous teachers “not only fail to become famous, in fact, but eventually even go into a different line of work altogether.” But of course some do become famous.

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Pupil is such an odd word for a student. So odd that I had to look it up and write a post about it.

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard)

Equidistant

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world” : Where is Penelope weaving? : Strange calligraphy

Strange calligraphy

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world” : Where is Penelope weaving?

Where is Penelope weaving?

David Markson, from Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Here’s Pintoricchio’s painting.

Also from this novel
Pascal and Nietzsche : “Poor practically the whole world”