Just as important as Wittgenstein’s ideas was the fact that he was a spellbinding teacher. Crowds of the brightest Cambridge students turned up to watch him pace his bare room, mouthing his epigrams, striving for moral purity, overpowering his students’ queries, and all the while demeaning himself for being so inarticulate. The combination of his brilliance, his striking good looks, his magnetic and unusual sexuality, and his exotic otherworldliness (he renounced a huge family fortune) was seductive, and his students fell in love with the man and with his thought. (It is commonplace for
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