Wittgenstein's closing remarks in the Tractatus have long puzzled his readers. His propositions, he tells us, are nonsense, and to understand him is to recognize this. Yet how can recognizing his pronouncements as nonsense count as a kind of understanding? Of what value could this understanding be? We can recognize Jabberwocky as nonsense, and in doing so we can perhaps achieve some sort of understanding of Lewis Carroll. However, Jabberwocky does not open with a claim to deal with the problems of philosophy and to bring them to a definitive resolution. Moreover, Jabberwocky wears its nonsensicality on its sleeve; it is obvious nonsense and we recognize it as such from its first sentence. The typical reader of the Tractatus, on the other hand, will begin by supposing herself to be reading a book of philosophy, intended as a straightforward communication of intelligible thought. This thought may appear difficult and its expression highly compressed; the reader may struggle to come to an understanding of the author's point of view; but if the reader persists and makes it to the end of the book, it may surprise her to learn that she is to dismiss as nonsense what she had taken herself to understand. She may infer that she has understood nothing at all, and throw the book away yet not in the way seemingly intended by Wittgenstein's image of the ladder which one throws away after climbing it for this reader will not have been transformed in any interesting way by the experience, except perhaps in acquiring a distaste for certain kinds of philosophy. I recently encountered an example of such a reaction in a" reader's review" of the Tractatus posted by the Internet bookseller Amazon. com. The reviewer'writes, under the heading" A lot of bloated nonsense":