Again I find myself transporting meaningful stuff over the English Channel: two framed drawings of horses and men – from a Cuban and a Greek artist, respectively – and a few selected books, the ones I deemed essential for the start: Japanese Learning and Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”, a bilingual edition. I open the latter right before take-off and carefully read the first few pages, those I know almost by heart, though this time I use the German original instead of the English translation and it goes surprisingly well. “Weird infatuation”, I think to myself, and go on reflecting on the nature of my relationship to this book. Looking back for some precedent, I realise that I’ve gone through this before: Mann’s “Doktor Faustus” and Weinberg’s “The Quantum Theory of Fields”. Why is that, I wonder. Maybe it’s because I imagined they had the power to change the world around me – as weird as it sounds – by providing an understanding – an aesthetic – that I could literally inhabit. Definitely not sure why. As it is commonplace, it wasn’t until I overcame the feeling, broke the spell and forgot all about them, that I actually grew. Wisdom, which I plainly equate with the sense of growing old, has the flavour of shattered knowledge, not exactly disproven but digested and excreted. Transcended, one might say, but I dislike the word. Beyond, al di là, παραπέρα… I might never finish this book: it could only bring forth a fourth one.