I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another...

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another
scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for
a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and
sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him
what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him –
‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would
do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we
made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed
himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only
hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no
exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people
like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working
terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight
about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully
worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all
hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon
– there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a
long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries
about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is
mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable
time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has
put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other
work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the
science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish
his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is
not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of
thought etc – which of course are of
more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will
die within four years – but today it was two months.

David Pinsent, on Wittgenstein