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Published: 2005
Category: Children
The last book Ludwig Wittgenstein read --- the book he read as he lay dying --- was 'Black Beauty.'
I have always wondered why.
Wittgenstein was arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. Although he wrote "Everything that can be said can be said clearly," his linguistic analysis is brainsplittingly difficult. By all accounts, doing philosophy was torment for him. Why, of all the books he knew, would he turn in his final days to a book we think of as a novel for children?
I want to know the answer, so I re-read 'Black Beauty' every decade or so. And this time, as I reach my dotage, I think I see what the lure was for Wittgenstein --- 'Black Beauty' is not a book about a horse for kids, it's a parable for us all.
Before I urge you to buy this book not only for your kids, but for yourself, let met tell you about Anna Sewell. As a child in the l800s, Seward injured her leg and was an invalid for life. Because she lived with her mother in London, she had more reasons than most to use horse-drawn carriages. There were as many as l0,000 hansom cabs in London at that time; many of the horses were badly treated.
'Black Beauty' was Sewell's only book. She wrote it in the last few years of her life, when she was so weak she had to dictate it to her mother. But she was as clear a thinker as she was a storyteller. Her aim in writing ''Black Beauty,' she said, was to "induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding of the treatment of horses.