This isn’t the time for an account of my higher education (a tale including a state college, a flagship university, and a Christian college, plus grad school stops at four different institutions, one of them twice), but I do need to zero in on one episode: the impulse, partway through, to change from grad study in literature to grad study in philosophy . . . so I could plunge even more deeply into the life and thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yes, this was in the early 1970s, around the peak of the fascination with the Austrian genius that drew so many wildly different intellectual young people to read Norman Malcolm’s slim memoir of the philosopher and pore over the
Tractatus
and
Philosophical Investigations
. In the end, I wisely decided against such a move (not that I ever abandoned interest in L. W.).