From Skjolden to Rosroe: Tracing Wittgenstein’s Solitude

Last Saturday I visited Wittgenstein’s hut, high above a fjord in Norway, near the village of Skjolden. I travelled there with two Scandinavian friends, Åke and Helge. We were pilgrims of sorts, drawn to the erstwhile home of a man who shaped so much of twentieth century thought. 

We parked by the Fortun River and were met by the soft-spoken Oddvin. He devotes much of his life to keeping Wittgenstein’s memory alive in this part of the world. Oddvin walked the path to the hut with us, pointing out the things that mattered, like the hoist Wittgenstein used to draw water from the lake. He explained the lake’s unusual aqua marine colour, caused by particles in the glacier that feeds it. That colour disappears in winter when the lake freezes. This was the lake Wittgenstein crossed to reach his hut, either by boat or on foot when it iced over.

We crossed a wooden bridge, then followed a stony track through farmland and low scrub. The final climb was steep, with metal rods fixed into the rock to help us. At the top, through thinning trees, the hut came into view. Larger than I had imagined, plain and weathered. Four wooden walls and a roof, perched above the lake. It is a place without ornament or distraction, except for the stunning beauty of the Norwegian landscape.

And yet it isn’t quite right to call it seclusion. The hut is hard to get to, but easy to see. It looks out over the fjord and is visible from below. This was not disappearance. Oddvin told us that Wittgenstein often crossed the lake to visit a friend who ran a hotel in the village. He had other friendships in Skjolden, including the local tailor. His solitude wasn’t absolute. He remained connected, though on his own terms.

Solitude can create a kind of inner pressure. A clarity so fierce it becomes almost unbearable. We may long for it, even seek it out, but few remain in it indefinitely. The mind, stretched to its limits, needs something ordinary to lean on. A conversation, a meal, the presence of another person. Even the most ascetic life needs interruption. It’s as if we cannot spend all our time in the presence of the divine and still live. That intensity, whether spiritual or intellectual, has a cost. James Hillman once wrote that we cannot stay on the battlefield forever. It is not just a site of violence. It is a site of the sacred and a place too charged to survive. In a different register, Wittgenstein’s hut was its own kind of battlefield. A place of confrontation, of stripping-away, of standing alone before the real. 

But even he needed to cross the lake.

He paid to have the hut built. Unlike Thoreau, he didn’t construct it himself. However, it carried the same intention. Inside, it was sparsely furnished. His simple wooden single bed still sits there. No embellishments. Just what was needed.

This was a life of deliberate reduction. But it wasn’t cold. Something else shaped his need for privacy, something deeper than temperament or intellectual preference. Something personal. There is a kind of inner vigilance that some people learn early. A way of being watchful, not because they are secretive by nature, but because the world has not earned their openness.

Wittgenstein was one of those people. And this is where a more honest account must begin to name what earlier generations only hinted at: his homosexuality. There is a kind of clarity that queer lives often develop early, a sensitivity to what’s said, and to what has to remain unspoken. For Wittgenstein, solitude was not just philosophical. It was also a shelter. 

In his lifetime, people spoke cautiously about his personal life, saying he “may have loved men.” But it is now clear that he did. The men he was closest to, David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, Ben Richards, were more than friends. He wrote about them with intensity, affection, grief. In the climate of the time, homosexuality was criminalised and dangerous. What he couldn’t say openly, he held in silence. This wasn’t evasion. It was survival. The caution in his writing, his discomfort with systems, his suspicion of declarations, all of it feels connected to a life lived partly in shadow.

Wittgenstein first came to Skjolden in 1913. He was so taken by the place that he designed and commissioned the building of the hut. He lived in it periodically until the 1930s. It allowed him to walk away from Cambridge and the early fame of his work. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a small and severe book, tried to trace the outer edge of meaningful language. It laid out a logical structure for the world. Yet, at its end, it gestures beyond what can be said. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 

The Tractatus, with all its precision, ends in a kind of refusal. Something in him remained unsettled.

His later work, especially the fragments published as Philosophical Investigations, broke away from formalism. Language was no longer seen as a mirror of the world. Meaning, he came to believe, was not fixed but shaped by context and use. It emerged in relation, in ordinary life. I suspect this is why he enjoyed the company of the hotelier and the tailor. It was not condescension for Cambridge’s greatest philosopher to enjoy these people. It was a form of grounding, time with people who didn’t live in language, but in the world.

This was not a rejection of clarity. It was a different kind of clarity, one that didn’t seek to control. His thinking moved away from certainty, toward something more humane. Philosophy became ethical. For him, it was no longer just about thought, but about how to live.

The Enlightenment idea that only what can be described has real weight no longer held. Wittgenstein understood that some of the most important human experiences resist capture. The mystical, for him, wasn’t a leap into fantasy. It was an honest recognition. Not everything can be pinned down in words.

This is where his work intersects with what I’ve described in my book as the meta-rational. This is where the philosophical and the theological meet. The meta-rational is not the abandonment of reason, but an awareness of its limits. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, never gave up on clarity. He realised that not all clarity takes the form of statements. Some truths are shown, not said. Some are lived. Some are held quietly, even protectively.

His queerness sharpens this point. It helps us see that his silences were not abstract. They were personal. They were ethical. They were necessary. He knew what it meant to carry meaning that the world refused to affirm. This was not easy to hold and Wittgenstein’s life was far from easy. He suffered from depression and from what looks like scruples arising from his own fierce sense of right and wrong. He could be tender and exacting, generous and dismissive. Friends found him both unforgettable and exhausting.

He expected more of himself than was bearable. And though he often failed, he kept returning to the same task: to live honestly, to speak truthfully. When neither was possible, he held the silence without pretence.

George Steiner once wrote that Wittgenstein’s charisma came from having renounced all worldly persuasion. He didn’t try to impress. He simply lived as if truth mattered. People remembered that.

He wasn’t always right. He misjudged politics. He underestimated the threat of nazism. His brilliance in one area often left him exposed in others. But still, something in him kept turning toward what mattered.

Standing on the balcony of his Norwegian hut, I thought of the time he spent in Ireland near the end of his life. He had visited before, but in the late 1940s he returned. He stayed in a remote cottage at Rosroe, beneath Mweelrea, the highest mountain in Connemara. Even now, Rosroe feels like the edge of the world. In his day, even more so.

It sits at the head of Killary Harbour, Ireland’s only fjord. The landscape there has something in common with Skjolden, steep-sided, quiet, a long stretch of deep water held between mountains. Fjords are shaped by absence. Carved by glaciers long vanished, they carry the trace of something vast that passed through. That history gives them their stillness. They are places of depth and exposure at once, open to the sea, but held close by land. It’s hard not to think this was part of what drew Wittgenstein to both places. There is something in a fjord that reflects the shape of a life like his. Silence that remains visible. Depth that does not demand noise. Privacy that does not seek to disappear.

He went to Rosroe to work on Philosophical Investigations, and to live quietly. He saw a few people. Wrote a few letters. He walked, thought, complained about noise, and ate mostly porridge and eggs. Some saw this as eccentric. But there was something in it that was closer to monastic. A kind of listening. Not a retreat from philosophy, but its ground.

Wittgenstein died in 1951. Philosophical Investigations was left unfinished and published in fragments. There is no final theory, no closing statement. Just a voice returning again and again to the question of what it means to speak truly, and when it is better not to speak at all.

What remains is not a system, but a belief that the most important things can’t be mastered. Humility is part of knowing. Silence, when rightly held, is not absence but presence. And yet much of the commentary since has tried to smooth him out, to make him manageable. The mystical is treated as a lapse. The silences are read as pathology. His queerness is downplayed or erased, as if acknowledging it would make him less philosophical.

We are still trying to domesticate Wittgenstein. To make him easier to teach. Easier to quote. Easier to admire. But he was not easy. Not in his life, not in his work. Bertrand Russell, who once mentored him, could never accept the mystical turn at the end of the Tractatus. He saw it as a flaw. As if logic, taken to its limits, should not arrive at silence.

But Wittgenstein knew otherwise. He sensed what Levinas would later make explicit, that the ethical begins in the silence when knowledge breaks down. That we are most responsible not when we understand, but when we are interrupted. Wittgenstein’s refusal to go further holds something profound. His decision to fall silent is not a failure. It is a form of responsibility. A kind of respect for what cannot be reduced. To stand in Skjolden or Rosroe is to feel a duty to cultivate reverence for what resists capture.

Today, cruise ships travel up the Norwegian fjords, and some tour companies want to offer passengers a Wittgenstein experience. But the steep climb to the hut holds them back. The foundation responsible for the site has made it clear they don’t wish it to become a tourist stop cruise ship passengers. They will not install cable cars or concrete steps.

There’s a kind of metaphor in that. We are often found trying to turn mystery into itinerary and the difficult into the consumable. But some places are not meant to be visited like that. Some lives are not meant to be made accessible. Not all silences are waiting to be filled.

The hut stands quietly, undisturbed, refusing to cheapen the hard-earned depth of Wittgenstein’s life and work. Perched above the fjord, it holds open a space for the important things that cannot be packaged, and the strange things that should not be explained away. As we say in the west of Ireland, fair play to them. Fair play to the foundation for minding this place with such care and good judgement. We need sites like this. Not monuments, but reminders of the people who have attended to the serious things.

And fair play, also, to Oddvin, who walks the path with others, but never claims it. He tends the memory of Wittgenstein not by interpretation, but by attention. Quietly, without performance, he lets the place do the work. A truly remarkable man. 

Part of me would love to find a way to bring Rosroe and Skjolden into conversation. There’s an echo between them I can’t ignore. Two shelters on the edges of Europe, two fjords carved by disappearance. Places where a strange, serious man went to live simply and think carefully. I don’t yet know how to bring those places together, only that the impulse is real and calling. Some questions don’t ask for definitive or quick answers. You just keep walking the path toward them.

If this speaks to you, get in touch.

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