Wednesday 1st October, 1913: The S.S.Vega reaches Newcastle around 3 am. Pinsent gets up at 7 am (6 am by British clocks), and LW does so soon afterwards. Pinsent finds a customs official on board, who examines none of their luggage but passes it all. Pinsent comments: ‘He was the nicest douanier I have ever met – extremely apologetic and affable’. He and LW go ashore with their luggage around 7:15 and take a taxi to the railway station, there catching an 8 am train for London, travelling First class. Being very hungry, they have a large breakfast on the train. They continue work on LW’s paper for the Working Men’s College, and play dominoes. They lunch on the train around 12:30, and it arrives at Kings Cross around 2 pm. From there they take a taxi to the Grand Hotel, Trafalgar Square, where they secure two single rooms. At the hotel LW receives a letter which, Pinsent reports, ‘finally settled his scheme for exiling himself’. He recalls that LW has been talking a lot about this idea, and thus that it has been gradually crystallizing. Pinsent mentions that although when LW first revealed the idea he found it absurd, he has gradually come to think differently about it, and that LW seems certain that once settled and working well, he will be happy. To the suggestion that at Cambridge he could do equally good work, as well as good work in teaching others, LW responds that ‘he can never do his best except in exile: and it is better to do good research and not teach – than to do indifferent research and also teach’. ‘The great difficulty about his particular kind of work’, Pinsent says, ‘is that – unless he absolutely settles all the foundations of Logic – his work will be of little value to the world’. He reports that while LW has settled many such difficulties, others remain unsolved, and that a merely partial clearing-up of so abstract a subject probably would not carry conviction, would not be clear, and would perish with him. So ‘There is nothing between doing really great work and doing practically nothing’. The news that LW has received in his letter was that his sister Margarete and her husband Jerome Stonborough, neither of whom he can stand, are coming to live in London. So instead of continuing to live in England he will be off, in about 10 days time, to live in Norway in a small village at the bottom of the Molde-fjord (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldefjord ) – about which he had made enquiries in Bergen. There he will stay in a little inn and ‘probably be quite alone’. Pinsent reports that LW intends going to Cambridge tomorrow, to see Russell and others and to put his affairs in order there, but that he will then come to stay for two nights at Lordswood (the Pinsent family home in Birmingham). He comments: ‘It is all very wild and sudden – I can’t imagine how things will work!’. He and LW have tea in the hotel around 4:30, then take a bus to Marble Arch and walk around Hyde Park, returning by bus from Hyde Park Corner. They have supper in the hotel’s grill room at 7:30, then go for a short stroll by the embankment, returning to the hotel and going to bed by 10 pm (Pinsent, pp.84-6).
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 07:47:39 +0000
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