After about two hours of reading or discussion, we would go for a walk and then have tea at Lyons, or in the restaurant above the Regal cinema. Sometimes he came to my house in Searle street for supper. Once after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common. We talked about the movements of the bodies of the solar system. It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another. My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her at a trot. Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife. Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran. He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion.
– Norman Malcolm
Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Memoir
(p. 51f.)
Housman in his old age was a remote figure, one of the great men of Cambridge, and the subject of occasional speculation. Stories circulated about him and continue to circulate. Here is one, with a better pedigree than most as it comes from an ex-pupil of Housman’s friend, Andrew Gow:
The philosopher Wittgenstein, who had rooms above Housman, had no private lavatory; Housman had. Wittgenstein had to go downstairs and cross Whewell’s Court to find one. Once, when Wittgenstein had an attack of diarrhoea, he asked through his bedmaker if he might make use of Housman’s lavatory. But the answer came back that Housman was a philosophical hedonist, and therefore refused Wittgenstein’s request.
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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