Wittgenstein wrote much of it in the trenches of World War I, convinced he was solving all the problems of philosophy. Seventy-five pages of numbered propositions, austerely beautiful, building toward the final silence: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. He thought the work showed the limits of language from inside, that the truly important things could only be shown, not said. The Tractatus influenced the Vienna Circle, analytic philosophy, and Wittgenstein's own later repudiation of it. It remains one of the strangest and most perfect philosophical texts ever written.