Persons as reasons (on New Year’s Day)

Friends (if, but only if, I may),

A Tractarian Rilke (and reprise)

Many would agree that the concluding few pages of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are among the most difficult bits of that thin treatise to get one’s head around, though they are also pretty mesmerising. Depending on what kind of reader you are, you would further say that these are also the most suggestive, the most nonsensical (if that makes sense), or most philosophically maddening. However that may be, recently, while I was spending some time re-reading these pages, I happened on a Rilke piece, which I had known, but which now struck me as being pretty Tractarian. (It may not at all be: I may just be suffering that syndrome, familiar to some, where one sees the thoughts of one’s favourite philosopher manifest everywhere.)