grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

Any of his books made into films? I am sure there must be, but any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

It's not a bad movie, but not a very good one, either. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is short enough that anyone should be able to read it over a weekend without problem. I frankly could never get through his longer stuff. Oh, and yeah, the guy definitely was a religious authoritarian, a fact that came as no small embarrassment to many Western liberals and conservatives alike who rushed to embrace him as an anti-Soviet hero. Was he all that courageous? The problem with True Believers of any sort typically isn't that they lack the courage of their convictions but that they lack any sense of perspective or proportion. Still, faced with the massive enormity of the USSR, it was probably hard to go overboard in criticism.

AR, if I try to give you a merely discursive answer it would be on a par with giving answers to koans. Of course, in the sense of magic as believed by the superstitious, I don't believe in any such mysticism at all and whatever my theological views about a transcendental reality and / or its inhabitants and / or their relationship, if any, to this world has nothing to do with what I think Wittgenstein was getting at, either.

It's his line, of course, from toward the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , the same book that ends with "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." W- is one of the most difficult philosophers to understand and I'm hardly up to giving a "100 words or less" explanation of his thought here. However, what W- set out to do in the Tractatus was to describe precisely the way language relates to the world and, in the process, limn the boundary between what can be said and what can't. The problem, of course, is that talking about that which cannot be said is in a sense violating the very principle, which is why W- also says toward the end that people who understand him will also understand that he is talking nonsense. (But important nonsense!)

Anyway, I think W- struggled to find some sense in which notions of good and bad and, I also think, of God were, although strictly speaking nonsensical and neither of nor in the world, nonetheless real and important, and I think he felt that the mere existence of the universe is in some profound sense the most amazing thing possible.

In any case, whether he did or not, I do and that's why I've been using the quote.

None of this probably makes any sense. It is, however, at least an approach to an answer to your question, albeit a not terribly clear and certainly not a sufficient answer.