THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 79
Piero Sraffa, a Cambridge economist.
Too little is known about Wittgen-
stein’s conversations with either man
to shed much light on his later thought.
Besides, Wittgenstein always devel-
oped his own idiosyncratic take on the
influences he absorbed: if Ramsey’s
views went in, you can be sure that
they would not be Ramsey’s when they
came out.
After Ramsey’s death, Lettice
earned money as a photographer,
which led to audacious adventures in
Cambodia and up the scaffolding of
King’s College Chapel. She once told
a friend that she had been tempted
to have an affair with the impossible
Wittgenstein, which would have been
her biggest jape of all. Lettice and
Wittgenstein stayed on friendly terms
after Ramsey died, until one day she
threw out his old bathmat and, out-
raged, he cut her off. As she remarked,
he made “a moral issue out of abso-
lutely everything.”
Ramsey’s temperament could not
have been more different. Keynes wrote
that Ramsey’s common sense and prac-
ticality reminded him of the eigh-
teenth-century Scottish philosopher
David Hume. And, like Hume, he was
plump, jolly, and fond of cards. One
member of the Bloomsbury set re-
counted a poker night with Ramsey:
“Frank, with the guffaws of a hippo-
potamus and terrible mathematical cal-
culations, got all our money from us.”
It was not just a matter of girth and
gaiety: there were philosophical par-
allels with Hume, too. The Scotsman
wrote that the human mind “has a
great propensity to spread itself on ex-
ternal objects”—that is, to mistake its
own activities for features of reality.
This was a theme of Ramsey’s work.
Hume’s idea is what Ramsey was get-
ting at when he wrote, in his last year,
that there are many kinds of sentences
that we think state facts about the world
but that are really just expressions of
our attitudes.
Nobody will know how far Ram-
sey might have taken this idea, or any
other, if he had survived. Statements
about what would have happened if
things had been different are what
Ramsey called “unfulfilled” condition-
als. They express an attitude, he said,
but do not correspond to any reality.
BRIEFLY NOTED
A Thousand Moons, by Sebastian Barry ( Viking). This spare,
lyrical sequel to “Days Without End” takes place in the
backwoods of Tennessee, a state scarred by the Civil War.
Winona, a young Lakota woman, lives in a community that
is prejudiced against her race and her sex, yet she finds
fulfilling work and a besotted fiancé. However, after she is
brutally attacked, she is forced to reckon with her past trau-
mas, and with the cruelties faced by Native Americans.
Barry’s atmospheric prose captures the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury’s language and hardscrabble spirit. “Be wise,” Winona
tells herself. “Trouble always comes and no use wishing it
didn’t. Thing is, to get through it—and out the other side.”How Much of These Hills Is Gold, by C Pam Zhang (River-
head). In this stylized and complex début novel, two chil-
dren, born near the end of the gold rush, wander through
harsh Western landscapes searching for a place to bury
their father, a failed prospector. (Their mother, shipped
from China to work on the railroads, died years before.)
The story is narrated by the soft, scholastic twelve-year-
old Lucy, as she journeys with her younger sibling, Sam,
who struts in imitation of their father, and of the cowboys
of their time. While the book presents a counter-narrative
to conventional tales of America’s origins, it also interro-
gates the more intimate dimensions of belonging and mem-
ory, asking, over and over, “What makes a home a home?”The Hot Hand, by Ben Cohen (Custom House). In 1985, a group
of cognitive scientists released a study in which they con-
cluded that hot streaks—one of the most avidly contested
phenomena in sports—were a myth. Cohen, a sportswriter,
begins his exploration of the subject with basketball, but
soon broadens his scope to consider Einstein’s annus mi-
rabilis, in 1905 (his output: special relativity, the photoelec-
tric effect, and E=mc^2 ), and Shakespeare’s, which occurred
during the plague year of 1606. Sports statistics offer some
answers as to whether streaks indeed reflect heightened
abilities rather than chance and circumstance, but, as Cohen
notes, the belief in them has its own value, because it im-
plies that people can “transcend their places in the world.”What Is the Grass, by Mark Doty (Norton). The author of
this appreciation of “Leaves of Grass” animates Walt
Whitman’s joyful proclamation that everything is con-
nected. Doty interweaves an account of his own coming
of age as a gay man with passionate close readings of
Whitman that probe the poet’s multitudes, showing him
to be lustful and wise, sure and self-doubting, and to draw
on both Biblical language and the rough yawps of slang
to create a new style. In the eighteen-fifties, before the
Civil War, Whitman evoked a country in which the kind
of affinity Doty practices here might bind us—in which
“democracy might be founded in the body, on the affec-
tion between bodies”—and called out to his compatriots
in that imagined future.