“I have taken to worrying about winter when winter appears. When it is here, it will be here.”

WHY THIS NOVEL

It’s a challenging but rewarding exploration of what it means to simply exist, and subsequently of a number of related questions – loneliness, objectivity, expression, language, etc. Nothing happens in this novel, yet the heftiness and intricacies of these topics are enough to provide “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” with a density that demands full attention & time.

Semantics Gone Wild could probably be an alternate title; a significant chunk of this book is spent on the narrator back and clarifying her previous sentence, which is often clarifying the sentence before that. This may seem redundant and a waste of words to some, but I think it makes sense against the novel’s premise: the narrator is the last human and animal on earth. The only living beings besides her are plants. In that context, this “redundancy” doesn’t seem so ridiculous – if you were the last person in the world and on the edge of losing your mind, it’s pretty plausible you’d also start obsessively checking the line between what is pure fact and what are actually shades of an interpretation, connotation. It’s the classic question of “Is it just me, or…,” except in the narrator’s case, it literally is, and always is, just you.

It’s a slow read, not only for its density, but because time is a trivial detail. There are no chapters, no sequencing besides the vague idea that some degree of time is passing. There is a pay-off to this pace though; the last few pages accelerate and release so many secrets at once, leaving you dizzy at everything the narrator just laid at your feet. As though the narrator has finally reached the end of her ability to maintain the superficial, and unwillingly is left to confront the full weight of her life, pre- and post- her title as the last person on earth.

WHY THIS QUOTE

When you’re the last person on earth, there’s probably a lot to worry about, but this line is so patient in the face of all that. But it’s also a hard earned patience. What else are you going to do when you’re the only person left in the world? 

I think it’s that patience and quiet resolve that drew me to this quote. A personal weakness of mine is overthinking when something doesn’t go how I want, and causing myself more stress than actually needed. This quote is a nice reminder to give myself more room, that there is a time to deal with troubles, and fretting over it any more won’t change or improve the situation.