The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. And in the second place because is how the Nabokov story starts, and I hate the artifice, but it is a star turn. I mean, what a star turn, what a triple coup to begin a story thus, with “And,” when nothing at all has gone before, with “in the second place,” when there has been no first place, with “because,” when there has been no why and there will be no indication what, what thing, what happening, what act, what state of mind, will follow on account of that because. The world is everything that is the case, of course, begins the work of Wittgenstein, and more. So dry and flat, in its self-contained, almost impacted quality there is nonetheless a kind of rolling thunder. True, self-evident, beyond any doubt, it creates a terrible sense of what it is possible, what it might be worthwhile, to say at all. Language, thought, advancing like bulldozers, like cement. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Who could argue that the world includes things that are not the case, that some things that are not the case at all are hidden somewhere in the world? Only a specious poet or a trendy French philosopher, toying with metaphor, unworthy of the statement’s august truth. And yet, after the first flash of awe and admiration, the loss is inescapable. I mean, who wants to write specious half-truths. On the other hand, who wants to write cement.