“Principia nunquam parva”

[Note: “Principia nunquam parva” is a short story as imagined having been written by Valery Rockford after the events and timeline of the coda of The Fourth Winter. We might imagine it having been published between 2017 and 2019.]

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​“Principia nunquam parva”

Valery Elizabeth Rockford

​

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Prop. 7)

​

By the time Joyce had finished filling the refrigerator, Bertrand R. Collins had concluded that she was allowing anxiety to become organizational. There was enough food for considerably longer than the four days she was to be away. Two cartons of milk stood behind the orange juice, although Bertrand did not drink milk except in coffee and even then preferred cream. Three containers of soup occupied most of the upper shelf. There were eggs, cheese, vegetables, two packets of chicken thighs, several jars of puréed food for the baby, and beneath all of these a casserole Joyce had prepared the previous evening despite Bertrand reminding her twice that he was perfectly capable of cooking for himself.

 

Cooking was, in fact, one of the household tasks he preferred to perform. He had always considered himself the better cook. This was not vanity; there was no virtue in pretending two people possessed identical abilities merely because they were married, and Bertrand had never subscribed to the peculiar modern belief that equality required equivalence. Equality and orthogonality were, in and of themselves, not orthogonal. Joyce possessed strengths of her own. She had an admirable facility for practical organization, for instance, and a tolerance for daily chores that Bertrand had never been able to cultivate in himself. Bertrand cooked. Joyce cleaned afterward. The arrangement was organic, without imposition, and seemed to Bertrand considerably more equitable than the rigid division of labour practiced by their parents’ generation. How Joyce had come to believe that she carried the larger domestic burden remained somewhat obscure to him.

 

She closed the refrigerator. “There’s enough formula until Monday.”

 

“There was already enough before you bought more.”

 

“I realize, but I got more just in case I don’t get back Monday.”

 

“You said four days.”

 

“I said I hoped four days.”

 

Bertrand lowered the book he had been reading. “Your father has pneumonia, Joyce, not cholera.”

 

She looked at him.

 

“That wasn’t intended to diminish his condition.”

 

“I know what you intended.”

 

Outside the kitchen windows a fine rain had begun to move across the island. It had been falling intermittently since dawn, never quite becoming a storm and never completely stopping, silvering the cedar branches beyond the house and gathering along the deck railing before falling heavily into the moss below. Bertrand reckoned that had there not been so little cloud, the rain would have been heavier. Across the channel, when the weather permitted, the mainland appeared as a low dark line beneath the mountains. That morning it had disappeared entirely.

 

Joyce placed the feeding instructions beside the telephone.

​

Bertrand looked at the page. “You needn’t write all of that down.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I’ve fed my own daughter before, you know.”

​

“I know.”

​

“She eats approximately every three hours.”

​

“She eats every three hours.”

​

“That is what approximately means in this context.”

​

Joyce folded her arms. Bertrand had learned during their marriage that there were times when a point, although correct, did not benefit from further defence. He returned his attention to the book open upon his knee.

 

Joyce crossed the kitchen and checked the small canvas bag beside the baby’s carrier. Bottles. Formula. Nappies. Wipes. Several changes of clothes. Digital thermometer. Health card. She picked up the bag and carried it into the sitting room. Bertrand followed.

 

The baby stirred in the portable cot beside the wood stove and made a small sound without waking. Joyce knelt to tuck the blanket farther beneath Evelyn’s feet. “Charlotte said she’ll come by tomorrow afternoon.”

 

“Why?”

 

“To check on you.”

 

“On Evelyn.”

​

“On both of you.”

​

“Joyce, I am fifty-three years old. Some years your senior. You make it sound as though you’re leaving two children,” he finally said.

​

“I know how old you are, Bertrand, but because you don’t drive, if you need anything, she’s just popping by to see if she can be of help in any way.”

​

Joyce stood. For a moment she appeared about to answer. Instead she crossed the room and began gathering the split cedar Bertrand had brought in the previous afternoon after she asked him twice. The stove had gone cold overnight. She opened its iron door, removed the ash with a small shovel, arranged kindling over two crumpled sheets of the prior day’s newspaper, and added three narrow pieces of cedar above them.

 

“You’re putting the larger pieces on too soon,” Bertrand observed.

​

Joyce struck a match.

​

“Not those. The ones above them.”

​

She touched the flame to the newspaper.

​

“It reduces the available airflow,” he explained.

​

The paper caught. Small orange flames moved rapidly along its edges before disappearing beneath the kindling. Joyce closed the door almost completely.

​

“You should leave it open another inch.”

​

She adjusted the draft.

​

“Or increase the air there. One or the other.”

 

Joyce remained crouched before the stove. The kindling caught. A thin tongue of flame climbed the cedar and strengthened until the first proper crackle entered the room.

 

“See?” Bertrand said. “Much better.”

 

Joyce sat back upon her heels and looked at him. “Would you like to do it?”

​

Bertrand smiled. “That’s hardly the principle of the matter.”

​

She laughed once through her nose, stood, and brushed her hands against her jeans. Bertrand took the laugh as agreement.

​

⁂

​​

The ferry was scheduled for quarter past eleven. At ten fifteen Joyce brought her suitcase from the bedroom and placed it beside the door. The baby had awakened and was sitting in Bertrand’s lap, gripping one of his fingers with surprising determination while staring solemnly at the rain beyond the windows.

​​

Bertrand liked these quiet periods with her. Evelyn had entered the age when her face seemed perpetually occupied by the discovery that things continued to exist after she first noticed them. A lamp could hold her attention for several minutes. Rainwater moving down the glass could become an event. Bertrand occasionally wondered what language did to such perception once it arrived—whether naming a thing diminished the pure encounter with it or merely gave the encounter somewhere to remain. He had written three pages on the question several years earlier. They belonged somewhere in Chapter Four. He had not yet written Chapter Three.

​

Joyce came into the room wearing her coat. “Did you remember the insurance?”

​

Bertrand felt a small tightening behind his eyes. “I told you I would.”

​

“That isn’t what I asked.”

​

The distinction seemed unnecessarily prosecutorial. Bertrand shifted Evelyn against his chest. “There really comes a point where reminding somebody ceases to function as a reminder and begins to express an assumption of incompetence.”

​

Joyce stared at him. Bertrand waited for her to answer the actual point. She did not. Instead, she picked up the car keys from the small dish beside the door. “Charlotte’s number is on the refrigerator. The clinic is open until five on weekdays. If Evelyn gets a fever over thirty-eight—”

​

“I know.”

​

“Bertrand, let me finish.”

​​

He gestured with his free hand.

​​

“If she gets a fever, call the clinic. If it’s after hours, call Charlotte. Don’t rely on something you read online.”

​

“I’m entirely capable of distinguishing reliable information from spurious online nonsense.”

​

“I didn’t say you weren’t.”

 

“You implied it.”

 

“No, Bertrand. I asked you to call somebody.”

 

He considered correcting the distinction but decided against it. Joyce bent and kissed Evelyn upon the forehead. The baby grabbed at her hair. “Come here, Mamma’s little lamb!” She took Evelyn from him and held her close for longer than Bertrand thought necessary for a four-day separation. Then she handed her back. Her eyes had become wet. Bertrand softened. “Your father will be all right.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You don’t know, strictly speaking, but pneumonia is quite treatable these days.” He stood and kissed her. “I’ll take care of everything here.”

 

Joyce rested her hand briefly against his cheek. “I know you will.”

Something in the way she said it irritated him, although he could not have explained why. She lifted her suitcase. “I’ll call when I get to Dad’s.”

 

“Drive carefully. And don’t worry about us.”

 

Joyce opened the door. Cold wet air entered the room. For several seconds Bertrand watched her walk toward the Subaru through the rain, unlock it, place the suitcase in the rear, then stand beside the driver’s door looking back at the house. He raised Evelyn’s hand and made it wave. Joyce smiled. The car started and backed slowly along the gravel drive before disappearing between the cedars. Bertrand closed the door.

​

The house became quiet with surprising immediacy. He looked down at his daughter. “Well,” he said, “it would appear we’ve been abandoned.” Evelyn stared at him. “Temporarily.” She smiled. “There. Precisely.”

 

⁂

​

The first day passed more easily than Joyce had apparently expected. As he searched the fridge for ingredients for breakfast, he noticed that what he had assumed to be cartons of milk was, in fact, cream for his coffee, as he preferred; he apparently had not been paying sufficient attention as Joyce had gone over what she had stocked for him. He prepared an omelette, pouring in a bit of the cream before beating the eggs, for lunch while Evelyn slept, using only one pan, which he left soaking in the sink after eating because there seemed little purpose in washing an object he would likely use again before dinner. By late afternoon the rain had stopped. He carried Evelyn onto the covered deck and stood with her looking toward the channel. The clouds had lifted sufficiently to reveal the mainland as a charcoal line beneath a pale winter sky. Somewhere lower on the hill a chainsaw started, laboured for several minutes, then stopped. Wood smoke drifted through the cedars from a neighbouring chimney.

​

Bertrand found island winters philosophically clarifying. The narrowing of the world imposed a useful scale upon thought. Ferries came and went according to schedules indifferent to individual preference.

​

Darkness arrived before dinner. Wood became heat through direct effort. An island made dependencies visible in ways cities did not. He had made a note to that effect in Reconciling Russell and Wittgenstein on the Matter of Invariant Principles. The title had come to him eleven years earlier and had survived every subsequent revision. Bertrand considered that significant.

 

His argument, although still developing, concerned the possibility that certain principles of intelligibility remained invariant across linguistic systems despite Wittgenstein’s later rejection of the logical architecture Russell had once hoped might underwrite language more generally.

​

Bertrand believed most readings exaggerated the rupture between them. Beneath their obvious disagreements remained a question neither man had entirely escaped: whether anything stable must persist for meaning to remain possible at all. The manuscript had reached forty-seven pages. This understated the amount of work involved. There were another one hundred and thirty pages of notes, fragments, quotations, diagrams, bibliographical references and preliminary propositions that had not yet been assigned to chapters. Bertrand disliked the fetish academic culture placed upon completed objects. A book was not made more serious merely by having reached publication. Indeed, publication frequently interrupted thought at precisely the moment it ought to have deepened.

​

Earlier that morning he had received a formulaic email from a former university acquaintance announcing the publication of his third book. Dr. Nate Gallagher. Professor Nate Gallagher now. Bertrand had known him when neither title applied. The book was called Ordinary Rules: Language, Practice and the Limits of Formal Meaning. The subject interested Bertrand less than its proximity to questions Bertrand had been considering for considerably longer.

 

He reopened the announcement after putting Evelyn to bed. The jacket photograph showed Nate standing before several shelves of books with his arms folded and his head tilted slightly toward the camera. The expression attempted informality but failed. Bertrand enlarged the image. Nate had aged badly around the eyes. The publisher’s description called the book “a major reconsideration of the later Wittgenstein.” Major was an abused word. Bertrand clicked through to the table of contents. Chapter Two concerned rule-following. Chapter Four concerned private language. Chapter Six was titled “What Remains Invariant?” Bertrand sat forward.

 

He read the title again. Then he laughed. “Good God.”

​

Evelyn made a small sound through the baby monitor. Bertrand lowered his voice. The coincidence did not surprise him so much as confirm something he had suspected for years: certain questions inevitably presented themselves to serious minds. Nate had simply reached print first. There was no shame in that. Bertrand had never possessed Nate’s willingness to publish provisional thinking. He remembered a seminar nearly thirty years earlier in which Nate had defended a paper Bertrand considered conceptually premature. The professor had liked it. Bertrand had said very little. Even then he had understood that a weak argument did not become stronger because one could successfully defend it for fifty minutes before people who had not thought about it as carefully.

​

He closed the publisher’s page. For a few minutes he sat without moving. Then he opened his own manuscript. The title appeared in fourteen-point Garamond:

 

Reconciling Russell and Wittgenstein on the Matter of Invariant Principles Bertrand R. Collins

​

The name reassured him. He had experimented once with including his full middle name but decided the initial possessed greater scholarly economy. Bertrand Russell Collins looked almost facetious on a title page, as though his parents had intended an argument, but clearly Bertrand R. Collins permitted the work to stand independently of biography. He scrolled to page forty-seven. The final paragraph ended midway through a sentence. He read it several times. The thought remained sound. The sentence needed work.

​

⁂

​

By the second afternoon Evelyn had become warm. Bertrand noticed it when he lifted her from the cot after her nap. Her cheeks were flushed and the small weight of her body seemed unusually heavy against him. He touched the back of his hand to her forehead. Warm certainly. But tactile estimates were notoriously unreliable. He found the thermometer in the canvas bag Joyce had prepared. Thirty-seven point eight. He waited fifteen minutes and tried again. Thirty-seven point nine. Not technically a fever. Evelyn refused most of her bottle, which concerned him more.

​

He carried her through the house while she rested her head against his shoulder. The wood stove ticked gently as it cooled. Outside, the afternoon had darkened beneath another front coming in from the sea, and the first raindrops struck the skylight above the kitchen. Bertrand looked at the telephone. There was no need to panic. Infants developed mild temperatures for any number of reasons. Teething. Minor viruses. Environmental warmth. Variations in normal body temperature. He searched for the provincial health service website and read for several minutes. Nothing he found contradicted his assessment.

 

Evelyn began crying. He walked her slowly through the sitting room. “It’s all right.” She cried harder. Bertrand bounced her lightly. “You’re all right.”

 

The words sounded less persuasive the second time. The thermometer now read thirty-eight point one. Bertrand looked toward the refrigerator. Charlotte’s number remained beneath a small magnet shaped like a raven. He considered calling the clinic first, but Joyce had left the explicit instruction that if Evelyn developed a fever he should call, and there seemed something faintly absurd about involving medical professionals over one tenth of a degree. The baby coughed. Not a serious cough. Nevertheless, Bertrand picked up the telephone, but then put it down. He would check again in fifteen minutes, and call on Charlotte if and only if the thermometer had not stabilized.

 

It was then that he saw headlights moving through the trees outside. A vehicle entered the drive. Charlotte. Bertrand experienced an immediate irritation. Joyce had plainly arranged this. A knock came at the door. When he opened it, she stood beneath the porch light wearing a waterproof coat and knitted cap, rain gathered across her shoulders.

 

“How are the two bachelors?”

 

“One of us is female.”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“I generally prefer people to say what they actually mean.”

 

Charlotte removed her boots without replying. She was nearly sixty, broad through the shoulders, and possessed the practical competence of someone who had spent most of her adult life living in places where waiting for somebody else to solve a problem was rarely a useful strategy. She and Joyce had become friends several years earlier after meeting at the island garden club. Bertrand liked her well enough, although he occasionally found her impatience with clearly stated conceptual distinctions tiresome.

 

She looked at Evelyn. “She’s sick.”

 

“She’s running a very slight temperature.”

 

Charlotte touched the baby’s forehead. “How high?”

 

“Thirty-eight point one.”

 

“Since when?”

 

“It only crossed thirty-eight within the last few minutes. I have been keeping track of it. I was already planning to take it again in fifteen, and then you arrived.”

 

“Is she eating?”

 

“Less than usual.”

 

“Wet diapers?”

 

“Yes. As babies will.”

 

“When?”

 

Bertrand paused. “Recently.” Charlotte looked at him. “I haven’t recorded the precise times on nappy changes.”

 

She held out her arms. “Let me see her.”

 

There was no particular reason not to. Bertrand handed Evelyn across. Charlotte held her for perhaps fifteen seconds. “We’re going to the clinic.”

 

“That seems premature.”

 

“It might very well be.”

​

“Then—”

 

“And if it is, we’ll come home.”

 

Bertrand regarded this as a reasonable argument. “I’ll get her things.”

 

“The blue bag,” Charlotte informed him.

 

“Yes, I am well aware," Bertrand replied. He brought the bag from beside the cot. Charlotte checked inside and withdrew a white envelope.

 

“What is that for?”

 

“It is signed permission for me to authorize care from Joyce, needs be.”

 

“You won’t need that merely to attend the clinic.”

 

“I might.”

 

“I remain her father.”

 

“Well, you’re not coming, so I’m taking it just in case.”

 

Bertrand looked toward the windows. Rain now crossed them in diagonal lines. “I assumed I would be coming.”

 

“How?”

 

The question irritated him principally because it possessed an obvious answer. “With you.”

 

“I have the car seat Joyce left at my place. There isn’t room for another adult once I put it in, what with the boxes in the back. If they want her taken to the hospital, Joyce gave me permission and her health information.”

 

Charlotte held up the envelope. Bertrand disliked the completeness of their prior arrangement. “Joyce appears to have scried a remarkably specific catastrophe.”

 

“Joyce knows you don’t drive.”

 

“The fact that I don’t drive—”

 

“I know that, Bertrand. We all know.” Something in her tone prevented him from completing the sentence. Charlotte tucked the envelope back into the bag. “You stay by the phone. I’ll call as soon as we’ve seen somebody.”

 

It had always surprised him that people treated his decision not to drive as though it represented some deficit in practical adulthood. He had developed his position while at university and had never encountered a persuasive reason to alter it. Private automobile ownership distorted civic planning, encouraged unnecessary consumption, contributed to environmental degradation, and had transformed entire societies around the expectation that individuals ought to operate several thousand pounds of machinery merely to participate in ordinary life. He did not object to automobiles as such. He objected to their unexamined necessity. Joyce owned a Subaru. Bertrand was not doctrinaire about it. There were occasions when an automobile was undeniably useful, and Joyce, who had driven since she was sixteen, generally preferred driving to arranging transportation by other means. This meant she was the sole driver as the consequence of their respective choices, not an inequity. No one compelled her to have a driver’s licence, and there seemed no need to abandon his principles on the issue.

 

Bertrand looked at Evelyn. Her eyes had begun to close against Charlotte’s shoulder. He felt suddenly uncertain. “Do you think it’s serious?” he asked.

 

“I don’t know.” That answer, more than reassurance would have, unsettled him. Charlotte softened slightly. “She’s alert. She’s breathing fine. She’s probably got a little bug. I’m taking her because she’s a baby and there’s no prize for guessing right.”

 

Bertrand nodded. “Yes. Quite.”

 

Charlotte turned toward the door.

 

“You’d better take her, then.”

 

She looked back at him. “Joyce already arranged it.”

 

The sentence was harmless. Nevertheless Bertrand disliked the word already. He watched from the porch while Charlotte secured the baby into the waiting car. Evelyn cried briefly when Charlotte tightened the straps, then quieted. The headlights turned across the cedar trunks as the vehicle backed down the drive and disappeared toward the road.

 

Bertrand remained outside after they had gone. The rain had become colder. Beyond the dark trees came the low rush of wind moving through the island. For the first time since Joyce left, Bertrand felt the distance to the mainland not as geography but as fact. He went inside.

 

⁂

​

Evelyn’s absence had removed more sound than Bertrand realized she made. No breathing through the monitor. No small coughs. No sudden cry from another room. Only the refrigerator cycling in the kitchen and the rain brushing the windows. Bertrand sat and tried to read. After three pages he realized he had absorbed none of them. He looked at the telephone. Nothing. He considered calling Charlotte but decided doing so would only distract her while she was driving.

 

The stove had gone nearly out. Joyce ordinarily attended to it sometime before dinner. Bertrand had noticed this ritual hundreds of times without quite noticing when she performed it. The room had cooled enough that he could feel the difference along his hands. He opened the iron door. Grey ash lay beneath two blackened remnants of cedar. Simple enough. He removed the old wood, rearranged the embers, and brought several pieces from the basket Joyce had filled before leaving. She had always made the process unnecessarily elaborate. Too much kindling. Too much waiting. Too much opening and closing of the draft. Fire required fuel, oxygen and sufficient heat to sustain combustion. The principles were not mysterious.

 

Bertrand crumpled several pages of a now-dry mildewed book — from the middle story of a copy of Dubliners that had still been in the moving box when the basement flooded years before — and placed them beneath three pieces of cedar. He added two larger pieces above them. The arrangement looked considerably more efficient than Joyce’s. He struck a match. The paper ignited rapidly. For several seconds the fire seemed uncertain, then caught the cedar with a satisfying rush. Bertrand left the stove door partially open to establish a stronger draft and returned to his chair.

 

His laptop chimed. A notification had appeared from the philosophy forum. He almost ignored it. Then he saw the thread title. Wittgenstein and invariance—category mistake? Bertrand clicked. The discussion had begun beneath an article someone posted about Nate Gallagher’s new book. Of course. Bertrand read through the first several comments with increasing disappointment. Most displayed the familiar confusion between invariance as a formal property and invariance as a claim concerning fixed semantic content.

 

Then a contributor using the name Tractatus_7 wrote: Any attempt to reconcile Russellian invariants with later Wittgenstein fails before it begins. The PI account makes the very demand for invariant logical structure incoherent.

 

Bertrand read the sentence twice. He placed his fingers upon the keyboard and wrote: Only if one assumes that invariant structure and invariant semantic content are the same claim. They aren’t. He signed the post: Bertrand R. Collins. He disliked pseudonyms in serious discussion.

 

A reply appeared four minutes later: That’s not the distinction I’m making.

 

Bertrand smiled. It quite plainly was. He began typing.

 

⁂

​

The telephone rang at seven eighteen. Bertrand had almost forgotten it might. He grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

​

“It’s Charlotte.”

 

“How is she?”

 

“Fine.”

 

The word struck him with enough force that he had to sit down. “What was it?”

 

“Probably viral. Her fever came down after they gave her aceteminophen. Doctor wants somebody keeping an eye on her tonight.”

 

“I see.”

 

“I’m taking her home with me.”

 

Bertrand paused. “There seems no reason—”

 

“Bertrand.” He stopped. “Joyce and I talked.” Of course they had. “She wants Evelyn with me tonight. She’s driving back tomorrow morning if her father stays stable.”

 

“That seems unnecessary.”

 

“Probably.”

 

Charlotte had learned the effectiveness of this word. Bertrand looked toward the empty cot. “I could care for her here.”

 

“Yes, you could.”

​

The answer was worse than disagreement. He looked at the dark window. “All right.”

 

“I’ll bring her home tomorrow.”

 

“Tell Joyce there’s no reason to make the trip early.”

 

“You tell her. She’s calling you.”

 

The line went dead. Bertrand remained beside the telephone for several moments. He experienced relief first. Then annoyance at the arrangement. Then guilt for having felt annoyed. Evelyn was safe. That was the relevant fact. Everything had proceeded exactly as a sensible system should proceed. A minor medical issue had arisen; transportation had been available; professional advice had been obtained; the child was now in the company of a competent adult with access to a vehicle should further care become necessary. There had been, in retrospect, no emergency at all. Bertrand returned to his chair. The forum page now contained nine new replies.

 

⁂

​

Tractatus_7 had become irritating. Not because the contributor was unintelligent. Quite the opposite. Intelligence made error more consequential. Their exchange migrated from invariance to rule-following, then from rule-following to the private-language argument. Two additional participants joined. One withdrew after Bertrand demonstrated that his objection depended upon a proposition no one in the thread had actually advanced. Tractatus_7 remained.

​

You’re still trying to rescue a public criterion from something that only functions because practice precedes the demand for one.

 

Bertrand leaned closer to the screen. This was almost good. He began replying. Behind him the stove gave a small metallic sound. He stopped typing and looked over his shoulder. Nothing appeared wrong. The fire was burning strongly behind the glass. He returned to the thread.

 

Practice does not eliminate invariance. It relocates the level at which invariance must be sought.

 

He considered the sentence. Good. Very good, actually. He copied it into a note beside the manuscript. That belonged somewhere in Chapter Three. Perhaps it was Chapter Three. For the first time in months—possibly years—Bertrand felt the shape of the argument moving beyond him faster than he could consciously arrange it. The experience was exhilarating. One proposition opened onto another. Connections he had suspected but never articulated began resolving themselves under the pressure of opposition. He thought briefly of Nate Gallagher’s book. Published. Finished. Already bounded by its final page. Bertrand felt almost sorry for him.

 

The laptop chimed again: Relocates it where, exactly? If the criterion only exists within use, you’ve abandoned the Russellian half of your reconciliation.

​

Bertrand laughed aloud. “No.”

 

He typed: Only if Russell is reduced to the version of Russell that Wittgenstein needed to reject.

 

He stopped. The room smelled faintly of smoke. Bertrand looked toward the stove. A thin grey haze hovered near the ceiling. He stood and crossed the room. The fire had grown larger than intended. He closed the stove door fully and adjusted the draft. Smoke continued drifting from somewhere behind the stove, or perhaps from the chimney joint above it. He opened the nearby window several inches. Cold air entered immediately. That would clear it. His laptop chimed. He returned to the chair.

 

Tractatus_7 had replied almost instantly: Then you’re not reconciling Russell and Wittgenstein. You’re inventing a third position (a strawman?) and naming half of it Russell.

 

Bertrand stared. The arrogance of the sentence was extraordinary. Strawman? Was he being accused of rhetorical bad faith? He began typing. The smoke alarm sounded. The sudden electronic shriek broke his concentration badly enough that he struck the wrong key. “Christ.”

​

He stood upon the small green ottoman beneath the alarm — at five foot seven in his stocking feet, he had long practice with such elevations — and pressed the silence button. The noise stopped. He waited. The room was undoubtedly smoky — he did not need a screaming alarm to alert him to that — although opening the window had begun clearing the air nearest the floor. This sometimes happened with wood stoves. He had smoked the room on at least two occasions, and Joyce had no less likely done the same. He stepped down. His eyes stung slightly. He should probably inspect the chimney from outside. But Tractatus_7 had already replied again.

 

I’m serious. What invariant remains once you reject the logical atomism that gave Russell’s version content?

 

Bertrand sat. There. At last. The actual question. For eleven years he had been approaching precisely this point, often indirectly, sometimes abandoning it for months because the available language seemed incapable of carrying the distinction he required. Now, unexpectedly, somebody with an absurd pseudonym had placed it before him. What invariant remains? Bertrand rested his fingers upon the keys. Smoke moved across the room above him in slow horizontal layers, thinning as it reached the open window. He began to type.

 

⁂

​

Joyce called twice. The first call went unanswered. During the second, Bertrand heard the telephone ringing but was midway through revising a key paragraph and decided he would return the call once he had completed the thought cogently enough that Tractatus_7 and everyone else would fully understand his position. The forum had become nearly synchronous. Every time Bertrand posted, Tractatus_7 answered. Other contributors had stopped participating.

​

Someone wrote: This is getting interesting.

​

Bertrand felt a curious wave of warmth at the observation. Not pride precisely. Recognition. There was a difference. He had spent years thinking privately, carefully, without the institutional apparatus that permitted lesser minds to exchange unfinished thoughts under the protection of seminars, conferences and peer-reviewed journals. Independent scholarship required a discipline professional academics seldom understood. There were no deadlines except those imposed by the work itself. No department chairs. No promotion committees. No obligation to turn incomplete thought into publication merely to satisfy the bureaucratic appetite for output. The page in front of him offered something different. Resistance. A mind worth pushing against. His own thinking became sharper beneath it.

 

He coughed. The room was becoming uncomfortably warm. He glanced toward the stove. Orange light moved strangely behind it. Not within the firebox. Behind. Bertrand stood. For several seconds he tried to understand what he was seeing. A thin flame had appeared along the wooden wall where the stovepipe entered the chimney enclosure. That was not right. He crossed the room. Heat struck his face. The flame disappeared, then appeared again several inches higher. Bertrand looked around for the extinguisher. Kitchen. Under the sink, perhaps. Or beside the pantry. Joyce had shown him. He remembered the conversation and not the location.

 

His laptop chimed. He ignored it. In the kitchen he opened the cabinet beneath the sink. Cleaning products. Garbage bags. Dishwasher tablets. No extinguisher. He opened the pantry. Nothing. Smoke had begun moving more heavily through the sitting room. The alarm sounded again. Bertrand returned. The flame behind the stove had become several flames. He should call someone. The telephone. Charlotte. Fire department. He lifted the receiver. No dial tone. He looked at the cable. The power went out. Everything became suddenly dark except for the fire.

 

Bertrand stood motionless. The laptop continued glowing upon the table, operating on its battery. A new reply appeared—the UPS he had plugged the WiFi cable router into had been an excellent decision—too many important discussions had been cut off mid-thought from the island’s notorious winter outages. He could read it from several feet away: But you still haven’t answered the private-language problem. Where does the invariant exist?

 

Bertrand stared at the screen. The question, even now, irritated him. Exist. That was precisely the mistake. It did not exist somewhere. An invariant need not be an object. The entire disagreement had been corrupted by a category error introduced almost casually several messages earlier. He stepped toward the laptop. Behind him something cracked sharply inside the wall. Bertrand stopped. The alarm continued its piercing rhythm. He picked up the computer. For one moment he intended merely to carry it toward the door. Then he saw the empty reply field. His fingers moved.

 

You are still treating “where” as though—He coughed hard. Smoke entered his throat. The sentence remained incomplete. He tried again. The invariant is not an object within the language-game any more than a rule—

​

Tractatus_7 sent a final flash before another crack sounded overhead and Bertrand looked up and stopped typing his reply: Aristotle might have said it best: “The agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion.” Would love to keep debating, but I have errands I must attend to.

 

The ceiling above the stove had begun to darken. For the first time that evening, the question upon the screen ceased to matter. He closed the laptop. The front door stood perhaps twelve feet away. Smoke had lowered almost to eye level. He took two steps toward it before something burning fell from the ceiling between him and the door. Bertrand recoiled. Heat filled the room. He turned toward the kitchen. The back door. Of course. He knew the house. He had lived there for eight years. He moved toward the hallway, one hand across his mouth. The smoke was thicker there. He could no longer see the kitchen.

​

For a strange moment, standing in the darkened passage while the alarm shrieked somewhere behind him, Bertrand thought of Joyce kneeling before the stove that morning, arranging the kindling with unnecessary care. Too much kindling, he had said. Or perhaps too little? Ought he have used newspaper rather than the mildewed pages of Dubliners—would that have made a difference in the rate of combustion? And who had left the laundry sink running in the first place for mildewed pages even to be a matter to consider all these years later? He could not remember. The distinction no longer seemed as important as the principle of the matter.

 

⁂

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Charlotte saw the glow above the trees before she reached the turn toward her own house. Evelyn had fallen asleep in the car seat behind her. At first Charlotte thought the light belonged to the neighbour’s workshop farther up the hill. Then the orange strengthened and began moving against the low clouds. She knew. She pulled onto the shoulder, took out her telephone, and called emergency services. Then she called Joyce.

​

⁂

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The ferry did not run during the night. Joyce sat in her father’s kitchen on the mainland until dawn. Her father had finally fallen asleep shortly before midnight, his breathing easier than it had been the previous evening. A half-empty cup of tea stood beside her. She had made it four hours earlier and forgotten to drink it. Charlotte had called three times. The first time to say the house was burning. The second to tell her the volunteer fire department had arrived. The third to say they had found Bertrand. After that there was nothing left to report. Evelyn was asleep at Charlotte’s house. The doctor had been right. Her temperature had continued falling.

​

Joyce sat with both hands around the cold tea. Through the kitchen window the first pale winter light had begun to reveal the mainland mountains. Snow lay along the upper ridges. Somewhere beyond them, hidden by darkness and distance and the intervening water, the island remained exactly where it had always been. Her father’s bedroom door opened.

 

He appeared in the hallway wearing his robe. “What are you doing awake?”

 

Joyce looked at him. He stopped. For a moment neither spoke. Then her father crossed the kitchen and sat beside her. She told him. Not all at once. There seemed no order in which the facts naturally belonged. Evelyn was safe. The house was gone. Bertrand was dead.

 

Her father took her hand. “Oh, sweetheart.” Outside, a gull passed across the whitening sky. Her father squeezed her hand. They remained together until it was time for the first ferry.

 

⁂

​

The house was still smoking when Joyce returned to the island. Only part of the chimney remained standing. The stone foundation preserved the approximate geometry of rooms that no longer existed. Here had been the kitchen. There the sitting room. Beyond it the bedroom where Evelyn’s cot had stood beside their bed during her first months. Joyce remained near the drive. Charlotte came down from her house carrying the baby. For the first time since the previous morning Joyce ran. She took Evelyn and held her so tightly that the child protested, squirming between them until Joyce loosened her arms and began laughing through her tears.

​

“She’s fine,” Charlotte said. “The fever’s almost gone.”

 

“Thank you so much, Charlotte!”

 

“I’ve got all her things.”

 

“Thank you again. You are a lifesaver.”

 

Charlotte shook her head. “You don’t have to thank me.”

 

“Yes,” Joyce said. “I do.”

 

Behind them one of the firefighters moved through the remains of the house with a shovel. The sound of metal against wet ash carried through the trees.

 

⁂

​

The insurance company confirmed it two days later. The homeowner’s policy had lapsed. The renewal notice had been issued months before and a final reminder followed alerting to a fixed grace period. The grace period expired at midnight on the day of the fire, and no payment or even request for extension had been received. Joyce listened to the representative explain this from Charlotte’s kitchen while Evelyn slept in a borrowed cot beside the window. She did not argue. There was nothing to argue about. Afterward she sat with the telephone still in her hand.

​

Upon the table lay several documents Charlotte had collected from Joyce’s lockbox, which had survived because it was kept in the detached shed with their passports and other records. Birth certificates. Mortgage documents. Bank statements. Insurance policies. Joyce began sorting them because sorting was something she could do. She opened the mortgage file. Eight years of payments on a thirty-year term. The house was gone to the foundation. The debt was not. She was still responsible for the remaining balance on a property that no longer existed except in photographs on her cellphone. Near the bottom she found the life policy.

 

BERTRAND RUSSELL COLLINS

 

The insured amount occupied the line beneath his name. Beneath that, in smaller type, a double-indemnity rider for death by accidental means. Joyce stared at the figure. Her parents had insisted upon the policy upon being told of the pregnancy and she and Bertrand had discussed it in bed late at night. He did not see the need for the policy, but when it was put forward that it was not an option for a father-to-be to ignore the prudence of proper insurance, he had capitulated and calculated what he called the long-term economic consequences of his death and decided that conventional formulas dramatically underestimated the value of intellectual and domestic contribution. Joyce laughed. Bertrand did not.

 

“You’re worth that much?” she had asked.

 

“That isn’t the principle of the matter. Since you and your family insist I must have coverage, it only holds that it must be worth the monthly premium.”

 

She could hear him saying it now. Not as clearly as she expected. Memory had already begun the quiet work of reducing his voice to something she could summon only approximately. The insurer had already written: the death, arising as it did from the insured’s own management of the household fire, as evidenced by the timestamps on his online activity from within the house at the time of the fire, could not be classified as accidental within the meaning of the rider. The base sum of one million would be paid. The double would not. The money would not restore what had burned. It could, however, clear the remaining mortgage and leave enough to rebuild.

 

Evelyn stirred. Joyce folded the policy and placed it back upon the table. Beside it lay Bertrand’s wallet. Charlotte had received it from the coroner that morning. His cards had been placed inside a transparent plastic bag. Driver’s licence space empty, naturally. Library card. Bank card. Ferry pass. A business card he had ordered several years earlier and rarely had occasion to distribute. Joyce removed it. The card was cream, heavy, almost unnecessarily good paper. At its centre, in restrained black type, appeared:

 

Bertrand R. Collins, MPhil (Cantab)
Independent Scholar

 

Nothing else. Joyce held the card between two fingers. For a moment she expected anger. None came. Only a great weariness and, beneath it, something softer that she did not yet possess language sufficient to name. Outside Charlotte’s kitchen window, rain moved quietly across the island. Evelyn woke and began to cry. Joyce placed the card beside the insurance policy and lifted her daughter from the cot. She held her against her chest until the sobbing stopped, growing less and less.

​

Then she went to light Charlotte’s stove, and once it was lit, stood near its light.

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Read James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” from Dubliners.

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