Civil Readings

A final roar

On hearing someone quote Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known observation (in Philosophical Investigations) that ‘if a lion could speak, we would not understand him’, the eccentric gambler and zoo-owner John Aspinall responded: ‘He hasn’t spent long enough with lions’.


The oral type

I once suggested, for polemical reasons, that Friedrich Nietzsche wasn’t entirely the good European he thought he was because he knew little about European languages and cultures other than the classical ones (which he knew very well indeed) and the France of his epoch. He once declined to translate Giacomo Leopardi, claiming that his knowledge of Italian wasn’t up to it and adding, with a charming false modesty, that in any case German posed him enough problems. It may be the case however that the undeniable rhythm and poise of his German prose style came from a deliberate restriction of his interests.

He was also an intensive rather than extensive reader, preferring (against the newspaper-fuelled trend of his time) to concentrate on a few master texts and, even then, to hear them read out loud, in the old-fashioned way. The German, he complained, ‘does not read aloud; he does not read for the ear, but only with his eyes’. Reading and listening were quite different activities; and he complained that inappropriate standards were applied to Greek history ‘from which alas only the words for readers have come down to us’.

Owing to his poor eyesight, Nietzsche was naturally drawn to the memorable: to short, pithy, rhythmic ...