Correction

They said that Roithamer had willed me his papers. Everything seemed to me intent upon my destruction. I escaped to my father’s shack in the mountains.

There I suddenly fell sick. Pure chance, I thought, still staring down into the Aurach from my window, that they found me up there. Most likely, I thought, suddenly conscious again that I was here in Hoeller’s garret, most likely I shall go back to England. Then I paced back and forth in Hoeller’s garret.

Suddenly the mere idea of going back to England alone and without Roithamer felt horrible. I sat down at first on the chair beside the door, then got up and sat down at the desk. I took the yellow paper rose out of the top drawer and held it up to the light that had ceased to be a light, the twilight had already darkened everything, soon it will be pitch-dark, I thought, and laid the yellow paper rose back in the drawer. Was I right in going from the hospital, not to my parents’ house, but to Hoeller’s garret, I thought, and I kept going over it in my mind how deeply my parents’ feelings would be hurt when they found that I left the hospital and went directly to the Aurach and into Hoeller’s house. Even though they like Hoeller, I thought, they probably still won’t understand my going to Hoeller instead of to them. My father visits the Hoellers often, as a child I used to go along when he visited the Hoellers in their old house, the one on the lower Aurach which Hoeller suddenly sold in order to build the new house with the proceeds, plus a hefty bank loan. He had sold the old house on condition that, though the new owners had moved in long since, he and his family could stay in it another two years, or only as long as he needed to build the new house he had designed. The whole thing had been Roithamer’s inspiration for his Cone, Roithamer had quite unconsciously, as I now know, modeled his own plans and their execution for his Cone on Hoeller’s plans for Hoeller’s house and the building and finishing of Hoeller’s house. Hoeller, given his circumstances, had needed four years to plan and build and finish his house, while Roithamer had needed six years to plan and build and finish the Cone for his sister. If Hoeller had not built his house, the idea of building would probably never have entered Roithamer’s head and so today there would be no Cone, that unique instance in Europe of a cone built as a habitation, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. But Hoeller’s procedure had been the same as Roithamer’s, I thought, the one built himself a house ideal for his purposes, the other an ideal cone, as he believed, for his sister. On the one hand I thought: what audacity for Roithamer to build that Cone, on the other hand: what audacity for Hoeller to build his house in the Aurach gorge. After all, I thought, it is right here in Hoeller’s garret that the idea of building the Cone was worked out, so the Cone unquestionably comes from Hoeller’s house, from Hoeller’s garret. I had never yet been more conscious of this fact than at this moment, when I was summoned to come down to supper with the Hoeller family, by three brief knocks on the ceiling, that is, the attic floor, from below, with a hazel stick. I put on my jacket and went down at once. Hoeller and the children were already seated at the table, on which a large stoneware bowl full of dumplings was steaming, I could sit on the window side of the table, where I had a comfortable view of everything in the room which happened to be directly under the garret, conversely I was being most attentively watched by the Hoeller children and by Hoeller and his wife, each and every one had a stoneware plate and a fork in front of him, Hoeller’s wife had served a boiled smoked ham and put a pitcher of cider on the table. She sat down opposite me. She was the daughter of a roadworker from Steinbach on the Atterlake, raised, accordingly, in the humblest circumstances, dressed according to the Aurach valley custom, about thirty-six or thirty-eight years old, no more, and quietly took care of her family along fixed guidelines that had been in effect here for hundreds of years. Who, I’d wondered, will be the first to start eating, and it was Hoeller who started and invited me to start eating, then the children helped themselves and lastly Hoeller’s wife whom I have never yet heard speaking a single word in all this time I have now been in Hoeller’s house, she was the most self-effacing woman, self-effacing like all these women rescued from the worst poverty by the men who married them, always the daughters of roadmenders and woodcutters, sawmill workers or dirt farmers, taciturn women always absorbed in caring for their own families in a daily round of always the same chores, bed-making, cooking, farmyard chores and so on, women who never argued and whose matter-of-course attachment to their husbands and children was such as has already become unimaginable in a major part of our world today, but here along the Aurach we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships and therefore the same circumstances as existed two hundred or four hundred years ago, nature hadn’t changed and so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecundity, we have here a breed of men, I thought, actually the same breed we had at the dawn of history, progress has passed them by, they’re bone ignorant, with only a dim intuitive sense of everything which keeps them bound in trust to nature, a bond that, dangerous and painful as it may be, nevertheless guarantees their survival, and to which they have totally surrendered themselves, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, because they never had an alternative, once born they had to cope with their native situation, circumstances, conditions, which are already unimaginable to the modern mind, and they did cope; if ever they bucked against it, if ever the discrepancy between their world and today’s world flashed on their minds, it was only for the briefest moment, after which they submitted again to the rules that have remained the same às they were half a millennium ago, and whatever they found incomprehensible when they thought about it, the Church made comprehensible to them, as it does wherever it is still influential. This woman had always been reserve personified, never a loud word, never the first to speak, everything in and about her was oriented toward taking care of things around her, she took care of her children, her husband, and her and her husband’s and her children’s house and the garden and the riverbank and everything under her care was always in order and, depending on the season, always kept in yellow or blue or red or white colors by her special love for flowers and plants, probably always her secret and surest refuge. All of Hoeller’s house was kept clean, though not oppressively clean, by this woman who scrubbed the floor boards regularly once a week with cold water, no spiderwebs on the walls, everything white, the few sticks of furniture, part of Hoeller’s inheritance from his parents, not hers, who’d had nothing, the whole house filled with an aroma characteristic of Hoeller’s house from the foods stored here and there, apples and pears atop the wardrobe or under the beds, it was an aroma I’d suddenly find myself breathing in often, sometimes on a street in the middle of London, and identifying as the Hoeller house aroma, all of a sudden there was this aroma, no matter where I happened to be, but at such moments I was always very far away from Hoeller’s house, abroad mostly, and it would start me off thinking about my so-called homeland and the things of home, so-called, seeing the images of home, for a longer or shorter time, depending on my state of mind or emotional state or both together, which these memories made bearable again. Roithamer too once told me that the aroma of Hoeller’s house would suddenly remind him of the Aurach and Hoeller’s house and Hoeller’s family and consequently of Altensam, and that this aroma had very often brought him back to life. Hoeller’s wife looked older than her years, what with taking a major part in building their house while at the same time taking care of the children born not long before they began building, all the worry about whether the house would be any good, as Hoeller once said, plus the worries about financing the house, all these inroads on her health had caused Hoeller’s wife to age rapidly, though in an incredibly attractive way.

Watching this woman I could see how very comfortable Roithamer must have felt here in Hoeller’s rooms and up there in the garret, whenever he arrived from somewhere, anywhere, even from England, here at the Aurach and in Hoeller’s house and in Hoeller’s garret, coming out of the cold into a haven where there was someone who actually had so soothing an effect on a man as Hoeller’s wife did, under such conditions he could soon recover what he had lost, his love of life and, consequently, his love of work. The Hoeller children were well brought up by their parents, they were as unspoiled and open to everything as one might wish, incidentally I had noticed immediately that the girl took more after her father, the son more after his mother, what it was I didn’t know, they just reached up to their parents’ shoulders in height, they were full of curiosity and watching me all the time, they seemed wholly intent upon the new man so suddenly among them, they ate and drank exactly like their parents and were, while they ate, just as silent as their parents. They too would never have said a word to me unless I encouraged them, just like their mother, and for the longest time I found it impossible, for whatever reason, to say anything to the children, or to Hoeller’s wife, I probably wanted the experience of this meal taken in absolute silence to have its effect on me, I should have said something to Hoeller’s wife or to the children right at the start, I thought, but I said nothing and they did not dare to say anything, because Hoeller had not encouraged them to speak, Hoeller had come in from his workshop, had washed his hands and had sat down at the table, as I saw him doing when I walked in, the children were already seated at the table when I came in and was invited by Hoeller, not by his wife, to take the window seat from which I had the best view of the whole room and everything going on in it, this seat was probably Roithamer’s seat too, I thought, knowing Roithamer as I do, this very seat where I have just sat down must have been his seat, how often he had told me about the meals in Hoeller’s family room, suddenly not reported but told, it was the sort of thing that made a story, not a report, he told me how these meals were conducted, always the same way, always in silence, just as it was now in my experience, again I compared Roithamer’s story with my own observations made just now, and again Roithamer’s stories (about mealtime in Hoeller’s family room) and my observations coincided, and I thought that Roithamer always sat like this with his back to the wall in every room, it was characteristic of him, the moment he entered a room he looked for a seat where his back would be to the wall and never sat anywhere but where he could have his back to the wall and keep his eye on the whole room, I also had the same habit, I had not picked it up from Roithamer, this tendency always to sit back-to-the-wall especially in restaurants or coffee shops had been characteristic of me always and long before I noticed it in Roithamer, so I was now thinking that this window seat facing the door, opposite Hoeller’s wife, would have been the appropriate choice for Roithamer and I wanted to ask whether Roithamer had also sat where I had sat down, but I didn’t ask, the time for such a question had not yet come, everything in the room was already, at this time, against such a question and so I did not pose that question, nor any of the other questions that had suddenly arisen in my mind, I ate and drank and watched and was watched and I mean I was watched even if not openly watched, the children for example were watching me every minute even when they did not look at me directly, just as Hoeller’s wife was watching me every minute even though she did not look at me, she looked down at the table and watched me and Hoeller did exactly the same. Conversation at mealtimes is unknown in these homes, I thought, though just now it was probably my doing that no one said anything, all I had to do was to say something and they would speak up too, but the fact that they were all eating and drinking in silence and that this eating and drinking in silence could be prolonged by my own silence made me go on eating and drinking as silently as they, they were all waiting for a word from me, I thought, but I said not a word. One by one I rediscovered all the things I had seen the last time I was in Hoeller’s family room, years ago, with Roithamer. Suddenly I heard the Aurach and I thought how all this time I’d believed there was a perfect silence in Hoeller’s family room, while in fact one always hears the roaring Aurach here, even I had grown so accustomed to the incessant noise, especially loud at this particular spot in the Aurach gorge, that after a certain point I had ceased to notice it, so that I believed, while actually surrounded by the thunderous roar of the Aurach in the Aurach gorge, that here was perfect quiet, because I no longer heard the incessant roar of the Aurach, just as the Hoellers no longer hear it, except once in a while, when they suddenly become aware of it again, they hear it all the time without a break and because of that they no longer hear it, only for moments, when they think of it, just as I had ceased to hear it, although the most striking feature of the Hoeller house is undoubtedly the roaring of the Aurach, the arriving and the arrived are totally enclosed in this roar, actually it is always hard to communicate with those who live there, one has to scream to be heard, yet everyone gets used to it very quickly, probably because the Aurach roar is so deafening, and then it may be quite soon that one perceives as perfect stillness what is actually in uproar, as I have just experienced it myself. People passing by Hoeller’s house wonder how anyone can stand the uproar of the Aurach torrent, sure that no one can, they don’t realize that the hearing and then the whole being of anyone living in the midst of such an uproar gets used to the fact of living in such an uproar. Hoeller didn’t mind building his house in the midst of this uproar, he did it deliberately in fact, I am building my house right into the Aurach uproar, he once said to Roithamer, who couldn’t see how he could do such a thing, yet Hoeller could have done no better thing, I can see that the building of Hoeller’s house and everything involved turned out successfully. It is precisely the roaring of the Aurach which attracts me, or at least the roaring of the Aurach also attracts me, Roithamer once said, this roaring of the Aurach torrent, when I am in Hoeller’s garret, absolutely fascinates me. So it hadn’t been perfectly quiet in the room, as I had been thinking all this time, but actually very noisy because of the roaring of the Aurach, to which I had, however, already become accustomed during my several hours’ stay in Hoeller’s house. How else could the Hoellers sleep at night, hearing that uproar, they get used to the uproar and fall asleep and wake up and no longer hear the uproar of the Aurach at all. Houses on the banks of torrential rivers are absolutely fascinating, Roithamer had once said, of course the people in them live in constant anxiety of being wiped out by such a flood, from one minute to the next, everyone knows that even the smallest mountain streams may, under the right circumstances, especially when the high snow melts in spring or during those long-lasting storms in the fall, turn into enormous floods sweeping with them everything in their path. Every year we read or hear about rampaging rivers that have swept away many houses with their inhabitants. But Hoeller had so constructed his house, Roithamer said, that it could not be swept away, it is so situated that under no circumstances can it even be affected by the Aurach, he, Hoeller, had constructed his house at the Aurach gorge so that it was immune to all the violence of nature, the very idea of building a house at the most dangerous place on the Aurach, at the Aurach gorge, where no one would ever have built a house for himself, that idea had given Hoeller no peace, he kept thinking that’s where I must build my house, where no one else would build himself a house, right there, in the Aurach gorge, which everyone fears, that’s where I’ll build my house, I’ll build it right in there, and he naturally opened himself up to the greatest opposition, his persistence and intransigence in pursuing his plan, setting his house in the Aurach gorge just where the roar of the torrent is at its loudest and where the danger of being swept away and totally wiped out one day, lock, stock, and barrel, by the floods, is the greatest, Roithamer said, made Hoeller a laughingstock everywhere he went, but he didn’t give up his plan and he went on with his building and finished it. Today anyone can see and say that Hoeller’s house, built the way it is and placed where it is, can’t be swept away by the Aurach, Hoeller says. Yet the general mistrustfulness still lingers. Anyway Hoeller believes that his house can’t be swept away and can’t be destroyed by a mud slide (Roithamer). That it’s the first house on the Aurach that can never be swept away by the Aurach and be destroyed by a mud slide brought on by catastrophic weather because, Roithamer said, all the houses hitherto built on the Aurach ended up being swept away by the Aurach or destroyed by a mud slide coming down the Aurach valley, again and again the Aurach valley people have built their houses by the Aurach and again and again these houses have been swept away by the rampaging Aurach, an Aurach gone suddenly crazy, usually in the night, and they’ve been destroyed in mud slides, but none of this ever prevented these Aurach valley people from building their houses by the Aurach again and again, however it’s a fact that Hoeller’s house is really the first, Roithamer once said, that can never be swept away by the rampaging Aurach and destroyed by a mud slide, because it was conceived and designed and built in full awareness of everything involved in the rising and the turbulence of the Aurach and all the destructive possibilities of the mud slides, and by a man like Hoeller at that, a man who built his house by the Aurach only because he is certain that this house of his cannot be swept away or destroyed and who took four years in all to design and build his house with all these destructive possibilities well in mind.

Though Roithamer was still far from having conceived even the idea of building his Cone, he was already fascinated by the building of Hoeller’s house and by the manner in which Hoeller had personally designed and created the house, unbeknownst to him as yet the idea of building the Cone for his sister had already been born inside him, even before the actual building of the Cone for his sister, and in the middle of the Kobernausser forest at that, existed even as a gleam in his conscious mind, his witnessing of Hoeller s art in building, and Hoeller s work on his house in the Aurach gorge must certainly be rated as an art, Roithamer said, had long since started him thinking about the Cone, sparked the idea of building the Cone, and this idea, to build the Cone and to build it, actualize it, in the Kobernausser forest, came to him in Hoeller’s house, it was in Hoeller’s house that Roithamer had decided, unconsciously at first, but then suddenly inspired by the idea of building the Cone, he reached the fully conscious decision of building the Cone, after watching Hoeller building his house, seeing the progressive stages of that project, in the Aurach gorge, Roithamer decided to confront such a project himself and to build something that so far, as Hoeller had also felt, no one before him had ever built (Roithamer), Roithamer’s constant watching of Hoeller’s building project had effected the creation of the Cone in Roithamer, at first in his head, then on paper, on hundreds, on thousands of papers, then at last in reality, because he, Roithamer, was the kind of man who had to create a reality, always a reality, out of what he had at first only imagined, to make it a fact, just as Hoeller had to turn into a fact the habitation he had at first only imagined for himself in the Aurach gorge, all that preparatory work for Roithamer’s Cone had in reality been done, as I now saw clearly, by Hoeller when he decided to build himself a house in the Aurach gorge, suddenly to sell the old house he had inherited from his parents and build himself the new one in the Aurach gorge with the proceeds plus some bank loans and the strength of his determination and his actual force of mind, he himself, Hoeller, had been hesitant at first in daring to tackle his project, but then he’d hastened with all the more energy to get it done. Like all country folk he, Hoeller, had acquired the basics of building by constantly watching building operations from childhood on, but had expanded his knowledge, once he had decided to build on his own, by private studies and reading of the technical literature, and had managed to perfect himself, up to a point, in the art of building himself a house to live in, basically it was the same process as the one followed later on by Roithamer, that sudden concentration of all his forces in Roithamer, the same Hoeller had been the first to experience, on the building of his work of art, with all the possibilities of expanding his knowledge of the art of building, of steadily developing and perfecting it, this total concentration on building in Hoeller had probably fascinated Roithamer years before his own decision to build the Cone, just as he’d always been highly interested, even absorbed, as I know, in building, the art of building, especially the art of building homes. But whether Roithamer knew that Hoeller had been both cause and model for his own building art, I don’t know, even though Roithamer was always talking about Hoeller’s building activity, meaning he always talked of it with the greatest respect, he was quite possibly not at all aware that Hoeller and Hoeller’s building activity was the cause of his own building activity, that he, Roithamer, might never have thought of building anything without Hoeller and Hoeller’s decision to build himself a house in the Aurach gorge. But just as Hoeller had wanted to build something special, a home, the contrary of what everybody else did, something contrary to all the precepts and all the concepts of the others, contrary to their reason, and in the most dangerous spot besides, something to make their eyes pop, Roithamer also wanted to build something special, something different from all the others, a cone, meaning a cone-to-live-in for his sister, and to top it off, as they said, inhuman in scale, in inhuman surroundings, at an inhuman location, namely in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. They both proceeded in the same way, each seeking to realize himself by means of what they both believed to be, Roithamer as well as Hoeller, and both achieved, an unusual deed in building a unique work of art, each in his own style. It was a good half hour before I broke the silence in which the Hoeller family had been sitting at table watching me without letup, to say that I thought Roithamer had hit on the idea of building the Cone while watching the Hoellers’ house being built. Since neither Hoeller nor his wife had anything to say to my remark, I fell silent again thinking that I was right, that everything in Hoeller’s house proved to me that Roithamer had been motivated to build his Cone by the building of Hoeller’s house, the briefest stay in Hoeller’s house was enough to confirm this supposition of mine, but this supposition had never yet been so clearly confirmed as it was while I had been sitting at table with the Hoellers considering the circumstances that had led to the building of Roithamer’s Cone, as they had led to the building of Hoeller’s house. Hoeller had to build his house in the Aurach gorge, considering all (his) circumstances, Roithamer had to build his Cone in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, all (his) circumstances considered. And in fact everything in Hoeller’s house, I thought, twist and turn it how you will, is original, just as everything in and about Roithamer’s Cone is original, the more closely you study it, consider it, observe, check and recheck every detail, the more absolutely original it must be called. And so, I thought, Roithamer had always sat here at this table, as I was sitting here now, in Hoeller’s family room with Hoeller’s family in the evening, at noon Roithamer was on his own, as I happen to know, he ate hardly anything at noon, a mouthful of clear cold water, a piece of bread at the most, were enough for him, but in the evening, exhausted from his work, he could indulge himself in a little contact with the Hoellers, in their company, he could go down to their family room to share their meal with them, it isn’t every day that a man like Roithamer, incessantly preoccupied with his kind of work, can afford to have such contact with people like the Hoellers, not just any time, but only at quite definite times and at quite regular intervals, such as in the evenings, after he had quite exhausted himself up in Hoeller’s garret, and couldn’t have gone on, not one moment longer, in Hoeller’s garret, Mrs. Hoeller’s three or four knocks on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, with the hazel stick, were actually always his signal for dropping his work and getting to his feet and going down to the Hoeller family room, I know about this routine and I can imagine that Roithamer greatly valued their adherence to this routine as a ritual, Hoeller’s wife knocking three or four times on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, which Roithamer had often told me about in England, had been his signal for dropping his work, and Hoeller’s wife, Roithamer said, always timed these knocks exactly right, not a moment too soon and not a moment too late. He, Roithamer, had never told Hoeller’s wife that she always knocked at the right moment, but she must have assumed that it always was the right moment because it was never followed by any kind of protest on Roithamer’s part. Not that Hoeller’s wife and I had ever come to any special understanding about it, but I had instantly grasped that her knocks on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, meant that supper was ready and that she expected me to come down and join them at the table. In Hoeller’s workshop the noise made by the chamfer bit Hoeller was probably using also stopped immediately after the knocking, a sign that Hoeller too was stopping work and coming in to supper from his workshop. But even had I not been noticing and observing all this for myself, Roithamer had described it all to me, the whole process, how pleased he had been at her punctuality every time Hoeller’s wife knocked with her hazel stick, which meant that he had apparently never considered her knocking a disturbance, it often came as a liberation from some blind alley he had constructed, speculated, thought himself into, andsoforth. The Hoellers, I thought, were probably behaving toward me now as they had behaved toward Roithamer, the moment I had moved into Hoeller’s garret I had become locked into the mechanism of their behavior with Roithamer, everyone who now lives in Hoeller’s garret after Roithamer is probably locked into the same behavior mechanism that functioned for Roithamer, and now it is I who live in Hoeller’s garret, though there would probably be others living there after me, even if Hoeller denies it, I thought, the sort of people suitable for Hoeller’s garret, and it seemed to me that the Hoellers regarded me as nothing else than the man who had taken Roithamer’s place. Most of all it was from the behavior of Hoeller’s children at table that I immediately deduced that they thought they had to behave toward me as they had behaved toward Roithamer. Suddenly I’d discovered on the wall opposite, near the door, a death notice on which I could read Roithamer’s name, all the way across the room, it was a big room, I could read Roithamer’s name. Everything in this room and in this house, I thought, still shows the impact of Roithamer’s suicide, which was of course classified by everyone, Hoeller included, as the result of mental confusion, so-called, and I thought that everyone in Hoeller’s house still behaves, such a long time after Roithamer’s death, as if Roithamer were still among them.

To the left of the door in the wall opposite the window is where they, the Hoellers, had pinned Roithamer’s death notice, and to the right of the door, the death notice of Roithamer’s sister. For a long time to come the mood throughout the whole valley will probably be determined by these two dead people, I thought, and most noticeably in Hoeller’s house with which these two, each in his or her own way, had such strong ties, the one by actually having lived here, in fact until his own violent death, the other as his sister, because she was always welcome in Hoeller’s house and especially popular with Hoeller’s children, with whom she had made friends. While Roithamer had been drawn to Hoeller, originally, by Hoeller having been his schoolmate, and subsequently by Hoeller’s idea of building his house in the Aurach gorge and Roithamer’s sudden clear perception, derived from this building plan, of the kinship between himself and Hoeller, whose inward and outward simplicity had always been attractive to Roithamer, Hoeller’s house as a building, in itself which had interested Roithamer so much that he often took part all day long, for weeks on end, in the building of Hoeller’s house, it was not in Altensam he spent his vacations from England but taking part in the building of Hoeller’s house, then it was, for Roithamer’s sister, Hoeller’s children for whose sake she often visited the Hoellers, at Christmas or Easter, Roithamer’s sister always brought Hoeller’s children presents particularly suited to these children, from time to time she would buy them completely new outfits and take them on trips to the lakes or even into town.

The Aurach gorge with Hoeller’s house, so perfectly, because so functionally, adapted to the Aurach gorge, had always been the destination, in their last years, of these two people whose faces I now saw pictured on those death notices on: he wall opposite me, I thought, and I couldn’t take it in that the deaths of those two should have come so quickly and, after all, so unexpectedly, plunging everything in the Aurach valley into such gloom as had certainly been prevalent here for some time now, ever since the death of those two. The Hoellers had always had a tender spot in their hearts, as I know, for the two Roithamers, as they most affectionately referred to the now dead brother and sister, who were so different from their brothers and parents, they had never looked down on the simple inhabitants of the valley and the villages below Altensam, as their birth might have entitled them to do, as the people hereabouts put it, but had rather, from earliest childhood on, felt more kinship with them than with their own family, the two Roithamers had felt closer to the Hoellers than to their own brothers, their own parents, and they had never made a mystery of it. Whenever they had a moment they’d used it, as I’ve said, to escape from Altensam and go down to the valley, to go down there was all they ever wanted, and always preferably to the Hoellers. It was owing to those two that in earlier days, when they were still children, Hoeller’s house was always filled with life, first the old house and then the new-built Hoeller house, the two young Roithamers had always seen to it that the rather overburdened and drab life of the Hoellers in the Aurach valley, which tended by nature to a certain even, depressing grayness, was brightened up and so made bearable again, every time. By their mere presence, being basically amusing people, Roithamer and his sister had often rescued the Hoellers from one of their usual states of despair, as young people almost always will. They owed much to the two Roithamers just as, conversely, the two Roithamers owed much to the Hoellers. This catastrophe, I suddenly said when we had all finished eating, need not have happened, meaning the death of the sister and the suicide of the brother, though what I had been thinking just then was that everything had led directly to this catastrophe and that actually it had to happen.

Because my remark that Roithamer had probably got the idea of building the Cone from Hoeller’s building his home in the Aurach gorge had brought no reply, whether in agreement or disagreement, for such a long time, from the Hoellers, I felt blocked about saying anything else, yet it was after all impossible to keep sitting in silence at table with the Hoellers, merely eyeing the family room, and anyway I felt that the Hoellers were waiting for me to come up with something, something to say, but I, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite, was not about to come up with another remark for them, it was still possible, I thought, that even after so long a pause Hoeller might have something to say in response to my previous remark or even that Hoeller’s wife, who’d been most attentive toward me, might say something, but what really puzzled me was that the children, who were probably not always so quiet and whom I knew to be not at all tongue-tied, hadn’t a word to say, though they had long since finished eating and drinking and were now sitting there, elbows on the table, poised as if only waiting for their father to give the signal to rise, so they could jump up and run out of the room. The darkness outside was now total, suddenly I heard the roaring of the Aurach again, fatigue couldn’t have been the only reason for Hoeller’s not talking, so I tried again to get a conversation going by making a second remark. Everything’s so very quiet now in Altensam, I said, after the death of our friend Roithamer’s sister and after his own death, nothing but closed blinds, I said, locked gates, everything makes it look like a house of death, the whole valley has been darkened even more under the impact of the two Roithamers’ deaths, wherever you go, that pervasive silence, this speechless wait-and-see attitude of all the people, which simply must be linked with the deaths of the two Roithamers, it was foreseeable, meaning from a certain point in time onward, I said, whereupon they suddenly all listened to me even more attentively than before, and I said that Roithamer’s sister had been doomed, that splendid creature, who simply couldn’t bear the fact of the Cone, that her brother had made his idea come true, to build the Cone for her, meaning for her alone and particularly in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, Roithamer himself had fully realized, when he came back to England after the Cone was finished and presented to his sister, that the perfected Cone could not actually be the greatest, in fact the supreme happiness for her, as he had believed, could have believed, but that it actually meant her death, because there can be no doubt whatsoever that Roithamer’s sister was destroyed by the creation of the perfect Cone, from the moment the Cone was finished, when it was presented to her, as I recapitulated the story for the Hoellers, she was suddenly a different person, at that moment she fell prey to a terminal disease, to this day no one knows what this terminal disease was, people like Roithamer’s sister tend to go suddenly into a decline, all at once at a certain moment in their lives, a moment naturally favorable to such a terminal disease, and they can then be seen slowly sinking deeper into sickness, developing a pathological eccentricity, little by little falling victim to this disease quite in accordance with their nature, because in reality, so I said to the Hoellers, Roithamer’s sister never believed that her brother could make his idea of building the Cone for her come true, she had always considered it a crazy, an unrealizable idea, but then she had underestimated her brother’s abilities and his toughness and his unyielding nature, though she loved her brother above all others, and so she had deceived herself about her own brother, who was closer to her than anybody. Roithamer, I told the Hoellers, was a man who wouldn’t let anything in the world deter him from whatever aim he had once set his mind on, nor was he a dreamer, because he was every inch a scientist, as well as being consistent and incorruptible in every way, he was a natural scientist and the very fact that he taught at an English university made him every inch a realist, I myself, I told the Hoellers, had never in my life met a man with a more down-to-earth head on his shoulders, no character more precise in his thinking and in making his will prevail.

Furthermore, Roithamer so deeply knew his sister, and never ceased from deeply understanding her anew, that it was unimaginable that he should not have foreseen the effect upon her of his finishing the Cone and presenting the Cone to her. A man of such equally far-ranging and deep vision should not have overlooked this, that perfecting and presenting the Cone to his sister must result in her death. The fact is that Roithamer’s sister had consistently refused to believe even in the planning of the idea of the Cone, not to mention the actual realization and completion of it, had in fact, as the Hoellers knew, always refused to visit the site of the Cone while building was in progress, although her brother had kept inviting her to visit the site, to habituate herself to it, as it were; he had tried to visit the site in the middle of the Kobernausser forest with her several times a year, but he never prevailed upon his sister to come because, I now told the Hoellers, she was afraid, afraid in all kinds of ways, not only with respect to the Cone but afraid for her brother, meaning that she felt a growing fear that was becoming nearly unbearable for her, as I know, the ways in which building the Cone was affecting her brother, inwardly and outwardly, caused her increasing anguish through a growing suspicion that the project would undermine his health and could, in the end, because of everything involved with the Cone, kill him, and now I see, as I said to the Hoellers, that the Cone has in fact destroyed them both, first the sister and shortly thereafter the brother. All this I said while staring fixedly at the two death notices on the wall opposite, and my listeners at the still uncleared table in the Hoeller family room were most attentive. From a certain unforeseeable moment on, young men, mostly those getting on toward thirty-five, tend to push an idea, and they push that idea so far until they have made it a reality and they themselves have been killed by this idea-turned-reality, I said. I see now, I said, that Roithamer’s life, his entire existence, had aimed at nothing but this creation of the Cone, everyone has an idea that kills him in the end, an idea that surfaces inside him and haunts him and that sooner or later — always under extreme tension — wipes him out, destroys him . Natural science or so-called natural science (Roithamer’s words), I told the Hoellers, had served as a preparation for this idea, everything in his life had served only as a preparation for the idea of building the Cone, and then the outward spur for building and realizing the Cone had been Hoeller’s building of his house, on the one hand, I said, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite me, the idea of building deliberately in the Aurach gorge, while on the other hand the idea of building right in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, in the one case to assert oneself at last in the teeth of all reason and all accepted usage here in the Aurach gorge, in the other case the same process by other means, but from the same motive, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest.

A man has an idea and then, at the critical point sometime in his life, finds another man who, because of his character and because his state of mind answers to that critical turning point in the other man’s life, brings that idea to fulfillment, finally perfects it in reality. Such a man with such an idea Roithamer undoubtedly was and he, Roithamer, just as undoubtedly found Hoeller at the critical point in his life, who made the fulfillment of his idea in reality possible, I said. And in the last analysis Roithamer’s Cone exhibited some striking characteristics of Hoeller’s house, as conversely Hoeller’s house did, of Roithamer’s Cone. The nature of the case was the same in both. But while Roithamer’s Cone had been his destruction, after his idea and his fulfillment of his idea had first, for good measure, killed his sister, Hoeller was still alive, he lived on not only in his idea, as people say about a dead man, a man killed and destroyed like Roithamer by his idea, which he had realized and fulfilled, but Hoeller was living on as an actual living man in his idea and in the realization and the fulfillment of his idea, namely the Hoeller house in the Aurach gorge, and there could be no doubt that Hoeller would go on living for a long time yet because he, Hoeller, unlike Roithamer, was not the kind of man to be killed off and destroyed by his idea andsoforth, no, Hoeller would ultimately be destroyed, like every man, by something else, not by an idea. While I was looking at the death notices, also at Hoeller’s wife, who was listening to me, and at the death notices above her head, I was thinking that they were expecting me to tell them, even though they were not asking, they were not saying a word, still not saying a word to ask how this disaster could have come about, but they were expecting from me, as one always expects from a person who is believed to have inside knowledge of something as yet unclear to oneself, believed to know the underlying and deepest reasons for it, an explanation of what they don’t know , cannot know, waiting for me now to tell them what I know because they believe that I know something, at least much more than they know, because I’d been with Roithamer longer than anybody and on such an intimate footing, as they know, meaning an intense closeness such as is very often regarded by outsiders as a kind of total absorption in the other man, they were waiting for me to explain to them here and now, sitting with them at their table, what was as yet unclear to them, even if it was not at all clear to them what it was that was unclear to them, waiting for me to solve for them a riddle or various riddles concerning Roithamer which they could not solve, because I was equipped like no one else to judge the worth or worthlessness of the various assumptions or suppositions, because I was, so they thought, even if they did not say so because they clung stubbornly to their silence, while ever more intently staring at me, believing that they had got me not only into their charge but under their control, Roithamer’s best friend who had the key information, so they felt it was time to learn from me more about my friend, who had also been Hoeller’s friend, more than they knew themselves, that is, but for me it was the other way around, after all, I was hoping to find out more about Roithamer from them, especially from Hoeller himself, who must, as I thought, know more than I did at least about Roithamer’s final days, about the last fourteen days in his life, since Hoeller had after all spent those last days, if not always in his company, still always in Roithamer’s vicinity, perhaps Hoeller even was, in the last analysis, Roithamer’s closest confidant, I felt that Hoeller must know crucial things about Roithamer which I did not know, and so we were probably each waiting for the other to say something about Roithamer which he himself hadn’t known, Hoeller waiting to learn something from me which I didn’t know, couldn’t know, while I was waiting for Hoel er to tell me something he didn’t know, couldn’t know, because Hoeller’s friendship, his ties with Roithamer were quite as close as mine, the friendship was probably equally intense in both cases, though the friendship was in each case entirely different in kind, because I’m not Hoeller and Hoeller, conversely, isn’t me. But in the expectation that we, Hoeller and I, would find out something we didn’t know about Roithamer from each other, time passed and soon a whole hour had gone by and Hoeller’s wife had meanwhile risen from the table and taken the empty plates out to the kitchen, the children had followed her out, through the kitchen door we were aware of the dishwashing and the children’s footbaths, while Hoeller and I remained seated at the table treating each other to a copious silence. The thing was, I didn’t want to broach the subject of Hoeller’s having been the one who discovered Roithamer hanging from a tree in the clearing, not yet, the time to speak of it hadn’t quite come, nor did I have any intention to be the first to speak of it, before Hoeller saw fit to broach this delicate and in fact terrible topic. I’d known for a long time, had in fact heard it from one of my hospital visitors, the farmer Pfuster, that Hoeller had found Roithamer in the clearing and had personally cut him down from the tree with his own hands. Roithamer had been missing for some time, he could not be found either at Altensam or at Hoeller’s house for eight days after his sister’s funeral, but both families, the Altensamers and the Hoellers, had assumed that he’d gone back to England without telling anyone, which would have been entirely unlike him, though of course I too was waiting for him there all that time, and without a word from him, despite the fact that we had agreed he would send me word to my Cambridge address every second day, besides, Hoeller should have noticed that Roithamer’s things, the clothes he was wearing on his back, that is, were not in the garret and where could he have gone without his clothes, anyway, it ought to have occurred to Hoeller soon enough that Roithamer must have had some mishap, because it certainly was most peculiar that he had gone away without saying good-bye, to anyone, and then those missing clothes, it’s true the Altensamers for their part had inquired after Roithamer at Hoeller’s but nobody did anything, probably because both families, the Hoellers at the Aurach and the Roithamers up at Altensam, had assumed, after all, that Roithamer had long since gone off to England, until Hoeller went once more to Altensam to ask if they knew anything of Roithamer’s whereabouts, and this time he, Hoeller, had found Roithamer in the clearing between Stocket and Altensam. Not a word from Hoeller about the fact that he personally had found him, nor did I bring it up, since my arrival that afternoon I had several times avoided pronouncing the word clearing, in fact, even though I needed the word clearing several times if I was to make myself understood in a matter I had mentioned. But everyone knows of course that it’s a shock to come upon a hanged man, and in this case it was, naturally, a terrible shock. While I felt I had a right to find out more about our friend’s last days from Hoeller, Hoeller expected to find out more about Roithamer from me, and since both of us kept waiting the whole time for the other to say something, naturally something about our friend Roithamer, we said nothing at all the whole time. I only kept wondering what Hoeller could be thinking about, while Hoeller probably was wondering what I could be thinking about, but in each case it had to be something to do with Roithamer, what else. That this was where he had spent his evenings and, as Hoeller told me, often the whole night, in this room, which was built by Hoeller quite in the style of the old traditional Aurach valley rooms, the floors were made of well-seasoned larch wood planks, so that it was always a pleasure to look at the floor, and Roithamer had often sat here alone till dawn, only listening to the torrential roar of the Aurach, withholding himself from scientific paperwork, so as not to slip into taking notes here as well, where the atmosphere was just as favorable to his ideas and his scientific work as it was upstairs in Hoeller’s garret, and possibly go on to doing more than taking notes, so that he would succumb to his scientific, his intellectual pursuits even down here in Hoeller’s family room which, unlike Hoeller’s garret which served Roithamer’s intellectual purposes, was meant to serve only eating and drinking purposes, it was enough that he let his intellectual work consume him utterly up in the garret, that he daily exhausted himself mentally up there, down here he had been able to relax, sharing food and drink with the Hoellers, and the children were always sure to divert him, everyone knows that he got along well with the Hoeller children, he knew all their ways, unlike other brain workers who have no idea how to behave with children, Roithamer had excellent rapport with children, as befitted his character, he had been able to spend hours with the Hoeller children in the Hoeller family room, playing with them, telling them stories, fairy tales he’d made up himself, that came to him in the telling, so that their spontaneity made them extraordinarily effective, when the children had to go wash up in the kitchen, or to bed, they always begged and pleaded to be allowed to stay, as all children do, though they could not prevail against the Hoeller child-raising routine, so then Roithamer was left alone with Hoeller at the table and they either fell into conversation or else they did not fall into conversation, it was only when such talk, very often of the simplest descriptive kind, or else of a philosophical kind, came about in the most spontaneous way that the two men left alone in the room, Hoeller and Roithamer, continued it. Roithamer had often told me about these conversations. All our talks were always such as would come naturally to us, Roithamer said, and so they thoroughly suited both him, Roithamer, and Hoeller too. Roithamer spoke mostly of England and of his studies and about the things he knew of Altensam, and most recently, of course, he spoke of his preoccupation with the Cone, Hoeller spoke of his work as a taxidermist, he was the only one for hundreds of kilometers around, and about all the noteworthy occurrences in the villages as well as, of course, about the building of his house. He, Roithamer, had kept asking Hoeller, as I know, Why in the Aurach gorge, of all places? and he, Hoeller, as I also know, to Roithamer: Why in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, of all places? These questions never were answered. All that Hoeller had to go on with respect to the middle of the Kobernausser forest was his intuition, it seems to me, just as Roithamer had only his intuition with respect to the Aurach gorge question, just as I have my intuition about it. But Hoeller’s building of his house was not, according to Hoeller himself, comparable to Roithamer’s building of the Cone, to build such a house as his in the Aurach gorge was simple compared with building such a cone in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, which was extremely difficult, a simple head like his own (Hoeller’s) would do for building the house in the Aurach gorge while for building the Cone a scientific head like Roithamer’s was needed. He, Hoeller, had seen the Cone only once after it was ready, he didn’t say, as I and Roithamer did, finished (in the sense of perfected), Hoeller always spoke of it as being done. While the Cone was under construction, Hoeller had often driven with Roithamer into the Kobernausser forest to see how the construction was progressing, to give his expert opinion as well, for after Hoeller’s achievement of his own building project Roithamer naturally regarded him as an expert, the only building expert for him, since basically Roithamer had not engaged anyone else but Hoeller as expert toward the realization of his, Roithamer’s, building plans, considering as he did the so-called building experts to be no better than charlatans, incompetents one and all, and perverse exploiters of their helpless clients. He accused all the professional builders of messing up and destroying the surface of the earth. Those so-called architects (how he hated the term! as I have mentioned) and all the builders and their minions nowadays do nothing but wreck and ruin the face of the earth, every new building they put up is another crime they commit, a building crime against humanity, he once cried out with much feeling: every building put up by builders these days is a crime! And all these crimes can be committed with ease, in fact these criminal builders are actually being encouraged and challenged especially by the governments and their administrators to cover the earth with their perverse cultural filth and to do it in a manner and with a speed that will have the whole surface of the globe choked with these building abominations and building crimes. Then, when the whole world has been most horribly and tastelessly and criminally cluttered up by them, it will be too late, the face of the earth will be dead. We are helpless against the destruction of our global surface by the architects! he once exclaimed. If I had assumed that Hoeller and I, once we were alone, left to ourselves, that is, after Hoeller’s wife had left the room and taken the children into the kitchen, would soon fall to talking, the continuing silence now that Hoeller’s wife had left the room with the children and gone into the kitchen gradually increased my uneasiness, suddenly it was no longer enough to just sit and contemplate the room, to keep me there, yet I couldn’t go back up to the garret so soon after supper, it was barely half-past five, of course I could have gone up to the garret, no one would have interfered, but I really couldn’t on my first evening in the house. The silence between Hoeller and me was probably owing to Hoeller’s expectation that I would ask him about his finding Roithamer in the clearing and cutting him down from the tree, because he probably had nothing else in his head, he’d been haunted by it for weeks now, mostly while finding refuge in his work, in his workshop, or busy with his chores behind the house, the kind we see done all the time behind the houses of the Aurach valley, sawing wood, chopping wood, piling logs andsoforth, all of which probably enabled him to bear up better than the inactivity to which the fact of Roithamer’s suicide had undoubtedly driven him, but he had been countering this inactivity resulting from the fact of Roithamer’s suicide and Hoeller’s finding the body in the clearing by keeping himself occupied with constant work, so that he could bear it more easily, as anyone can bear a catastrophe, once it has occurred, by at least seeming to avoid it through keeping busy, no matter which work routine he forces himself into, Hoeller had more ways of finding work in his house than anyone, which is why he got out of bed very early every day, mostly around four in the morning, after this gruesome and truly shattering experience, because he could not shake it off even at night, those endless sleepless nights afterward had weakened him, as anyone could see at once, Hoeller had told me on my arrival that he never spent a peaceful night in his bed, not for a minute, most of the time he paced the floor in the bedroom they all shared, so that the children’s sleep was also disturbed by his restless pacing, he would spend half the night staring through the window, down at the raging Aurach, probably harboring terrible thoughts, his wife said, a man like Hoeller, his wife said, could get over such an experience, survive its aftermath, only with the utmost effort, she felt free to express herself like this only because I understood her husband better than anyone. But left to himself and with time on his hands he was the image of despair even when she and the children were present, she felt justified in hoping, she said, that my visit would help her husband to recover gradually from the shock of Roithamer’s suicide, especially the fact that her husband had found Roithamer in the clearing and had to cut him down from the tree, she hoped my presence would have a healing effect on his depression caused by that shock. I must say that he gave me the impression of a broken man, as he sat at the table with me, staring down at it. It is my duty, I thought, to speak to him now, to say something, anything, to take his mind off Roithamer’s suicide and everything involved with that suicide. But what I suddenly came up with was how we, Hoeller, Roithamer and I, used to go to school together, first Roithamer, coming down from Altensam, picked up Hoeller, then me, and the three of us walked together to our grade school in Stocket, in winter with a piece of firewood tied to our leather satchels, every pupil had to bring a piece of firewood to school every day, the children of affluent or rich parents, like Roithamer of Altensam, a piece of hardwood, the poorer and poorest a piece of pine or softwood each, with these pieces of wood brought to school by every pupil the old tile stoves kept the school warm, I said. I looked down at the table, then up at the door opposite me, alternately at the two death notices and then again at Hoeller, and I was determined to continue with what I was saying even though I instantly felt and therefore knew that I should have stopped this recital, that I must not go on with it, but I couldn’t stop, it all seemed too significant for me to stop now that I had begun to speak at last, besides I was suddenly aware of the impact on Hoeller of what I was saying, he looked as if he already knew where my reminiscence, this story of our childhood, was going to take us, it was too late for me to stop, and so I said, quite calmly outwardly but inwardly in the greatest excitement, that the most conspicuous thing about the three of us walking to school together was our taciturnity, and again I spoke of the firewood we always brought to school in winter, so that the school could be heated with our firewood, the memory of this firewood brought to school by the pupils seemed to me most significant for what I had to say, and I asked several times whether he, Hoeller, also remembered how each of us had always had to bring a piece of firewood to school in the wintertime, and how we always used to make a fire in the old tile stoves of the old grade school with our wood, the rich kids, I reiterated, had to bring hardwood, the poorer ones and the poorest could bring softwood, and did he remember that I and he both had always brought softwood, because it was all we were supposed to bring, while Roithamer, as I recall, had to bring not one but actually two pieces of hardwood. Where this order came from, I couldn’t remember, probably from the principal’s office, but it could have come from the city administration of schools, in any case it was based upon absolutely correct information. You and me one piece of pine or softwood each, I said, Roithamer two pieces of hardwood. And I continued my description of our way to school, going to school together had of course been the basis for our friendship, I said, which had become a friendship for life, even though we had often lived for a long time very far apart, our friendship had never been affected by that, regardless of all the ups and downs of history we had already lived through, for example all through the war; on the contrary, the friendship that bound the three of us had deepened from year to year and was, I actually said this too, because I suddenly felt that I must get it all said after that long and finally tormenting silence, I had to get everything said all at once, it was the most beautiful of friendships. And I let myself go so far as to state that such friendships as ours had been, for the three of us, endured beyond death itself. The minute I made this statement I felt embarrassed by it, and Hoeller noticed how painfully embarrassed I was to have come out with such a statement even though it was probably quite a natural thought in itself, and so, to put this embarrassment behind me as quickly as possible, I tried to say a great deal quickly, moving purposefully toward my point, suddenly I’d found a way to make up for that overlong silence between us earlier on. It was as though that unbroken silence at table, in the presence of Hoeller s wife and Hoeller’s children, had been necessary for what I could now say with all the more vehemence and yet vividly as well. Suddenly I no longer had to hold back anything. I said, putting off a little what I’d primarily meant to say, that my finest memory, and probably Hoeller’s as well, and Roithamer’s too, was my memory of our walks to school together, it was on our way to school that we had our most intense experiences, I said, when we think of everything on that way to school over the rocks and through the woods, along the Aurach, past the mine workers’ cottages and on past Stocket, that is, right through the village, where we noticed all sorts of things, things that would determine our lives, rich in meanings, already determining the whole shape of our future and in fact already controlling it, since actually everything we are today, everything we see and observe and _ encounter on its way toward us, is influenced by what we saw and observed on our way to school then, if it isn’t altogether made up of it, as I actually asserted to Hoeller, after all our way to school was not simply a way to school, I said, since, to begin with, we were scared on our way to school, it was an extremely dangerous way to school, dangerous because it led only over rocks and through dense woods, along the Aurach which was dangerous all along the way, and most of the time on our way to school we were frightened, too, I identified our way to school as my way through life, because our way to school was from beginning to end comparable, with all its peculiarities, occurrences, possibilities and impossibilities, to the course of my own life and probably also the course of Hoeller’s life, since the course of our life was after all also always a dangerous course, on which we are bound to be frightened always, with all its occurrences, peculiarities, possibilities and impossibilities to be faced by us day after day as we go over rocks and through woods, I said, my childhood is always connected for me with this walk to school and nothing in my childhood exists apart from it, there we had all our experiences, the kind we’d have later on again and again, everything that happened later had in some way already happened on this walk of ours to school, this fear that we often feel today we already felt on our walk to school, these thoughts, closely attached to that fear, they keep coming today, though differently, yet always referring back to the thoughts we had on our walk to school, our way to school, just like our way through life, has always been a Via Dolorosa to us, a way of suffering, yet it was always also a way to every possible discovery and to utmost happiness, indescribable happiness, I said, did he, Hoeller, also remember our way to school so well, did he remember many thousands and hundreds of thousands of details, sensations, perceptions, feelings, intimations of feelings, those earliest important beginnings of thought on our way to school, for it was then we began to think as we still think today, the kind of precise thinking which has since then become the mechanism of our adult intelligence, I could remember those thousands, hundreds of thousands of weather conditions on our walk to school, abrupt shifts in the weather, I felt them suddenly take place, transforming our way to school from one minute to the next and thereby transforming us inside from one minute to the next, and the incessant changing of colors in the woods and in the Aurach as it tumbled headlong from the woods down to the plain, everything on our way to school had always been changes of color and of temperatures and of our moods, that muggy atmosphere in the summertime that sickened us on our way to school so that we came to be horribly sick later in school; or the cold in winter that we could cope with only by attacking it all along the way to school, we had to counterattack the cold, stomping all bundled up and scared through the deep, the deepest snow, running through the Aurach gorge where the snow was not quite so high, from one clump of ice to the next, and in school we felt as though we had lost our minds through the effort of making our way to school so that we no longer had the strength to keep up with the lessons. Did he, Hoeller, remember the young teacher who always appeared in a black dress buttoned high to the neck, whom we liked to listen to and whom we loved because she behaved considerately toward us, she was always considerate of us and therefore of our conditions and circumstances, when as a rule people and especially teachers are never considerate, I never again had a teacher who was in the least considerate of me, I said, but this teacher was considerate in every way, took everything about us into consideration, all my life long I never forgot this considerateness in the midst of so much ruthlessness, at the mercy of which life or anyway existence, all human existence, finds itself. Our way to school took its course just as our subsequent life did, I said, with all its passages through darkness, back to light, with all its habits and unexpected coincidences, our way through life like our way to school kept being subjected to abrupt changes of weather, kept following the course of a torrential river always to be feared, for as we always lived in fear on our way to school, fear of falling into the raging Aurach among others, so on our way through life we always lived in extreme fear of falling into this river where we lived, always terrified of this river which is invisible but always torrential and always deadly. However, I said to Hoeller, while we were always suitably dressed for our way to school, we weren’t always suitably dressed for our way through life, and I said that, of the three of us, Roithamer had the longest way to go, that he, Hoeller, had the second longest way to go, and I had the shortest way to school, Roithamer had had to clamber down those rock-faces from Altensam all alone on his way to Hoeller, the two of you, I said, Roithamer and you then came to me in Stocket and from Stocket all three of us then went on together to school. So by the time Roithamer met you, I said to Hoeller, he’d already experienced quite a lot, and the two of you had been through quite a lot together by the time you picked me up, all things considered, Roithamer always had the longest way to school, seven kilometers, Hoeller had five kilometers to go, I had three, of course the Altensamers up there could have put some sort of vehicle at Roithamer’s disposal to take him to school, but it was never customary for the Altensamers to put a vehicle at the disposal of their school-age children, and I said that the three other Roithamer children were at boarding school, our Roithamer had not been sent to boarding school, by their deliberate choice Roithamer was the only one not to be sent to boarding school, the others had spent their entire childhood and adolescence in the cities, in the city boarding schools, while Roithamer attended the village school in Stocket, at his own request, as I know and in accordance with his father’s wish. This fact was crucial for Roithamer’s life, I said. Then, later on, I said to Hoeller, the others returned from the cities and stayed in Altensam, where they are still today, while Roithamer left home just when they returned, and this departure at the right moment was decisive for Roithamer’s whole development, he even attended preparatory school in this area, in Gmunden, the county seat, but never went to a boarding school, nor was he forcibly sent to a boarding school, Roithamer’s wishes with regard to his so-called schooling were all granted by his parents, and especially by his father, he was not required to enter a boarding school, in contrast to his siblings, all of whom, including his sister, were eager from the first to go to boarding school, they had left Altensam prematurely, I said to Hoeller, only to return, to return, that is, as complete failures, while Roithamer, our friend, left Altensam only at the right moment, the moment of their return, that is, and then went directly to England, which had always fascinated him, and where he gradually, but with the greatest assurance, became the man we knew, I am not classifying Roithamer at this point, because no classification would hold one hundred percent for him in any case, but my remark about Roithamer’s personality certainly showed that I hold him in the highest esteem, as Hoeller’s reaction proved. In England Roithamer became the man we admired, I said, the man whom, as his friends, we still admire today, as a scientist, I said, and as a personality, I had managed at the last possible moment to switch from the word “man” which I already had in mind to the less embarrassing word

“personality.” It was amazing, every time, how many people go to England early in life, and very often at exactly the right moment, for a chance to develop, and almost all of those who went to England made something of themselves, they became distinguished personalities, at this point I used the expression distinguished personalities deliberately, to convince Hoeller, just as Roithamer himself in England became a really distinguished personality, a so-called distinguished personality, because every personality is distinguished, I said, but what the world means by a distinguished personality is something else, which is why I now speak of a so-called distinguished personality. Because he went to England at the right moment, in the right, the ideal circumstances, I said. Had the idea of building the Cone not surfaced, he would still be in England today, but his life had to turn out as it has, in fact, turned out, the idea of the Cone brought his life to a new high-point, the highest possible in fact, I now said, the six years he spent on the Cone were undoubtedly the high-point of Roithamer’s life, certainly the perfecting of the Cone was. At the moment he had finished, perfected, the Cone, he had to put a period to his own life, with the Cone perfected, Roithamer’s existence had come to.1 close, that’s what he felt and that’s why he put an end to his life, with the perfecting of the Cone two lives had lost their justification, they had to cease, I said to Hoeller and looked again at the two death notices on the opposite wall to the ‘left and right of the door, the life of Roithamer himself and that of his sister, which he had uncompromisingly bound up with his own life. The time had possibly come now, I thought, to say what I had actually wanted to say before, but had put off saying because it had, seemed premature, reverting to our walks to school I tried to test Hoeller’s memory, I imagined that Hoeller’s memory was as good and as clear as my own, but after all Hoeller is an entirely different kind of man and no two people are the same in any respect, on that assumption I began to remind him of details along our common path to school, beginning with certain characteristic, striking rock formations jutting out into the road, then the less striking, less characteristic ones, then I recalled the odors at certain points along the way, plant odors, earth odors, our path was characterized by constant changes in earth odors and rock odors and plant odors, certain birds’ nests, bird swarms, bird species, I kept testing Hoeller’s memory in general using objects such as, for example, had been tossed into the Aurach and left lying there by all sorts of passersby, old bicycle parts, cans, boxes, mill wheels, all of which I remembered vividly, I questioned him about remarks I had made frequently and others I’d made less frequently on the way to school, about all sorts of things, about remarks made by Roithamer, too, about encounters along the way, for example in the Aurach gorge where formerly, during our grade school days, the gypsies often made camp, we were afraid of them because we had been told that gypsies kidnapped children, the more the better, about reflections in the air, on the grass, and most of all on the riverbank, about peculiarities in the bark of the trees, about certain oddities in the behavior of the animals particularly along this stretch of our way to school along the Aurach, did he remember how I, together with him and Roithamer, had once discovered twelve frozen deer among the trees and pulled them together in a heap, how we suddenly, yielding to an impulse when halfway between my home and our school, decided to cut school and went instead to the abandoned mill standing where today there is nothing but an overgrown hole in the ground, like a bomb-crater, and anyway, did he remember certain things along the way that had to do with the war and how we lived in fear all that time, and I found that Hoeller remembered everything or almost everything that I still remembered.

My mind keeps coming back to that schoolway, I said to Hoeller, and then: One day we came to school in winter, I said, and we had to face the fact that the teacher had hanged himself in our schoolroom during the night. Because he had been accused by a schoolmate of ours, we both knew his name, of having molested him, the pupil, down by the Aurach under a rock ledge. This accusation, though never proven to this day, I said, led to the suicide of the teacher, whose name I have forgotten, Hoeller also had forgotten his name. I can see us now, the first to arrive as always, opening the classroom door and putting down the pieces of wood we had brought beside the tile stove, intending to start the fire with them, for as he, Hoeller, knew, we had never waited for the school janitor, whose job it was, to do it, but had always started the fire ourselves right away, it was no trouble because there were still glowing embers in the stove, so we’d never needed any kindling, all we had to do was put the fresh logs inside and the schoolroom was soon warm enough for us, I can see myself bending down to put a log on the fire, I said, and it was then I noticed that the teacher had hanged himself above the tile stove, from the hook where usually only the saw hung which the teacher took down spring and fall to trim the apple and pear trees in the schoolhouse garden. There was no need to remind Hoeller of this incident which had probably influenced Hoeller all his life as it had influenced me all my life as a primal experience, and yet it was in order suddenly to bring up the teacher’s suicide again, and the slandering of him by our schoolmate, whose name we had now forgotten, which led to the teacher’s suicide by hanging, I was impressed by how calmly I could now speak of the teacher’s suicide and of how I had discovered his hanged body, it was the first time after so many years, after two decades in fact, that I was able to speak calmly about this experience, Hoeller was also impressed by my calm in speaking of all this, anyway I could have made these remarks about the teacher’s suicide only in this calm way, because I had been moved to make these remarks by the two death notices opposite me, which is why I had begun to speak, by way of preparation, of our walking to school together and all the circumstances of our walking to school together that have remained as present to our minds as they were in the earliest school days of our childhood, circumstances which are different today, and so I had brought up our schoolway and perceptions related to our schoolway then as perceptions of today, in preparation, so to speak, for what I basically wanted to say, all that description of our way to school, my own recollection of it, as well as Hoeller’s recollection of it by way of first testing my own memory and then Hoeller’s memory, all used in order to arrive at the fact that our teacher hanged himself because of a vulgar slander against him by a schoolmate of ours. Probably there is some connection between our teacher’s suicide such a long time ago and Roithamer’s suicide, naturally, I said to Hoeller, there’s a connection, Roithamer’s suicide and the teacher’s suicide so many years ago, since, as I know, Roithamer’s life too had been crucially affected by the teacher’s suicide. Anyway, like all children in such so-called remote places, we were no strangers to suicide quite early in our lives, such country places always have their share of chronically unhappy people and the resulting general unhappiness leads to dozens of suicides annually within the smallest circumference, with the help of the oppressive weather conditions in these foothills, here everybody is always inclined to suicide, everyone feels he is suffocating because he can’t change his situation in any way, in this landscape they all have a keen sense of being handicapped by their birth, nor was it any use, evidently, for one of the most vulnerable, like Roithamer, a man whose actions were determined by his head and not, as with all the others, by his feelings, to leave the country, as Roithamer quite simply left it, because he had the opportunity to leave, but everywhere he went, no matter where he sought refuge, he could not escape this handicap of his birthplace, the landscape of his birth and the depressive constitutional tendencies so characteristic of his fellow countrymen, and of course, I said to Hoeller, Roithamer finally did kill himself anyway, he’d tried to escape his fate by running off to England, hoping to get away, he’d soon settled in England because he had the (financial) means to do so, but it was no use, he was doomed just like the others who have no chance of leaving the country, I said. Even a man like him, who seems to have every chance of escaping, I said, can’t overcome the fact of having been born into a chronically depressed state of mind and body, it is precisely that kind of a man in whom the general unhappiness reaches its most tragically concentrated form, yet it would be wrong to regard a man like Roithamer as someone who is always unhappy, no man is always unhappy, especially not a man like Roithamer, so variously gifted and certainly capable of always keeping himself in trim mentally and physically, there’s no limit to such a man’s possibilities, the utmost unhappiness, for one, but of course also the utmost happiness, naturally a constant intense alternation of happiness and unhappiness will eventually make an end of any man’s life, it will lead to a death according to his nature, whether he comes to a quiet end or to a troubled end, it is always an end consistent with his nature, clearly a man like Roithamer, with his capabilities, always straining toward some ultimate experience, or achievement, could not endure life as long as lesser men might. In our country suicide is commonplace, nothing unusual at all, I said, quite a natural subject of conversation. Anyone who pays attention can see for himself that everyone in our region and in fact all Austrians everywhere talk about suicide all the time, quite openly, even habitually, they would all have to admit that the thought of suicide is never far from their minds, at the very least, though of course they don’t all kill themselves, but the idea of killing oneself, of doing away with oneself in the quickest possible way, of obliterating oneself as best one can, is an idea shared by all of them, no matter what anyone thinks, it’s actually their only idea. Basically we have here a people given to constant discussion of its own suicide, while at the same time constantly having to prevent itself from committing suicide, this is as true of each individual as of the population as a whole, they’re always at it, singly and collectively, and what it actually amounts to is a state of incessant suffering made bearable, however, by the high intelligence applied to it by each individual and therefore by the people as a whole. It’s a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it’s an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it. We’re a nation of suicides, I said, but only a small percentage actually kill themselves, even though ours is the highest percentage of suicides in the world, even though we in this country hold the world’s record for suicide, I said. What mainly goes on in this country and among these people is thinking about suicide, everywhere, in the big cities, in the towns, in the country, a basic trait of this country’s population is the constant thought of suicide, they might be said to take pleasure in thinking constantly, steadily, without allowing anything to distract them, about how to do away with themselves at any time. It is their way of keeping their balance, I said, to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves. But of course the rest of the world doesn’t understand, and so whatever they think about us and regardless of what they say about us and of how they always and invariably treat us, every single one of us, they are all wrong. It’s a simple fact, I said, that our country is misunderstood, no matter how well intentioned the rest of the world may appear, what it sees when it looks at Austria and its people is total madness as a stable state of mind, a constant. I’m going to start, I said to Hoeller, by putting all of Roithamer’s books and papers in order, even though I’ve no idea how to do it, since the chances are that the disorder among Roithamer’s books and papers is their order, no matter, I would try first of all to get myself acclimated to the garret up there, to make myself at home first, and only then organize myself with respect to my work on Roithamer’s literary legacy. That he, Hoeller, had put the garret at my disposal for this purpose, was the greatest help to me, just as my recent sickness, from which I have just recovered, even though not quite recovered, is an equally opportune circumstance for my work on Roithamer’s legacy. A stay of four or five days, I said, would give me time to look everything over, and I’d need another four or five days for a more intensive study. More I could not say as yet. Hoeller then gave me his account of finding Roithamer in the clearing and how he had cut him down from the tree, the big linden tree out there. Suddenly there was no problem about getting him to talk, he told me everything, in his own orderly fashion showing signs of Roithamer’s influence, he restricted himself to what was important and necessary, told in proper sequence. His account took a quarter of an hour and as I listened to him I felt that everything was exactly as he said, Hoeller was a so-called truth fanatic, his voice and its rhythms were familiar to me. There was no further sound coming from the kitchen, the children had gone to bed, their mother was still at her sewing machine, audible on the floor above, though it was already nine-thirty, a late hour for the Hoeller house. The rattle of the sewing machine above and the roar of the Aurach below combined in a quite definite musical rhythm. It would be a pleasure for me to take my meals together with the family, I said to Hoeller, then I got up, said good night, and went up to the garret. But I was far from ready for sleep, just like Hoeller who did not go to bed either as I soon noticed, probably because of his insomnia, but went instead to his workshop, his preservatory as Roithamer always called Hoeller’s workshop. I’d expected that if I sat still long enough on the old chair by the door, fighting off the new thoughts that kept coming after I’d forced myself to think through all the old thoughts, to cut them off if necessary or else spin them out to a conclusion if possible, I’d get sufficiently tired out for bed, but it didn’t work and I finally had to get up from the old chair to pace the floor. Suddenly I was full of doubts, had I done the right thing in moving into Hoeller’s garret, in accepting Hoeller’s offer so precipitately, without considering what it would do to me and to my immediate future and in general, all of a sudden I asked myself, what am I doing here anyway? Should I have taken on Roithamer’s papers so soon, perhaps it would be better to go up to the mountains, into a shepherd’s hut up there, far better, probably, for my still convalescent body, the doctors had in fact recommended such a stay in the mountains, for the mountain air, the absolute quiet up there, the doctors would probably have been totally against my staying down here in the damp, the cold, the darkness of the Aurach valley, especially the Aurach gorge, after my premature release from the hospital which was nobody’s idea but mine, I should have aimed to avoid stress of any kind, instead of which I’d moved into Hoeller’s garret, which would be in itself a strain on any organism and any mind, and in addition I’d taken on the burden of working on Roithamer’s legacy, I wondered whether I should not postpone this, leave tomorrow, end my stay in Hoeller’s house early tomorrow morning, I could easily make up some excuse for breaking off my stay, and go up to the mountains. Caught up in this question, whether to break off my stay in Hoeller’s house the next morning or not, always coming back to the decision to leave, then again the decision not to leave, not to start working on Roithamer’s legacy, not now in any case, then again, working on it now is sure to do me good, especially now, I kept pacing the floor in Hoeller’s garret, considering all the advantages of a stay in the mountains and all the disadvantages of staying at Hoeller’s house this time of year and in the Aurach gorge in my present condition, then again I could see only disadvantages in a stay in the mountains this time of year and in my present condition, while seeing only the advantages of staying at Hoeller’s house, swinging like a pendulum between preferring the mountains and downgrading the Hoeller house, and vice versa was rapidly driving me crazy, walking to the window I thought, for instance, that I must have the strength and the guts to pack my things in the morning and leave, no need to lie to Hoeller, I’d tell him the truth, get out of his house and up into the mountains, up to an elevation that would be better for my health than Hoeller’s house, with its atmosphere which, taken all in all, could only make my condition worse, I thought, and then again, turning back from the window toward the door, where I stopped, thinking that it was wrong to move out of the garret again tomorrow, an affront to the Hoellers, only to go up to the mountains, any mountains, which deep down I hated, I’ve simply always hated high altitude mountain landscapes with their distant views, their so-called infinite horizons, I’d be making a mistake to leave the Hoellers’ house for some furnished mountain hut or even a mountain hotel, the mere idea of having to live in such a mountain hut for even the shortest time imaginable, or in one of those horrible mountain hotels, I’d always regarded those mountain huts and mountain hotels as nothing but horrible, and soon I found myself thinking how well off I was here in the company of Hoeller and his wife, together with the Hoeller children, and after all I could stay here without working on Roithamer’s legacy, since I was under absolutely no obligation to work on it, simply to stay here in Hoeller’s garret and in the Hoeller ambience and simply let this atmosphere have its effect on me and to simply let myself go in this atmosphere would at the moment probably be the best thing for me, I thought, the chances were I’d probably be feeling much easier the very next day, it was too much to expect that easing of tension which I had hoped for, expected, on my very first day in Hoeller’s house, such relief, though in fact I needed it immediately, could not come at once, it could come only gradually, perhaps only after a few days, I could find other reading matter than these papers which had to do exclusively with Roithamer and would be constantly reminding me of Roithamer, virtually chaining me to Roithamer, after all there were plenty of other books in Hoeller’s garret, books which need not remind me of Roithamer, as I had noticed as soon as I got here, a few walks along the Aurach, maybe even longer walks out onto the plain, toward Pinsdorf, would help to calm me down, maybe it was simply idleness, perfect idleness that I needed, to put myself into a state in which I could gradually become more and more relaxed, I thought, while hearing Hoeller down there in his workroom, his preservatory, busily filing and honing and sawing away, I had become so accustomed to the roaring of the Aurach that I could hear Hoeller at work all the way up here in my garret, from the various sounds coming up from Hoeller’s workroom I was able to imagine the tasks he had just finished, I felt that Hoeller was a man who, just like myself at this moment, was wholly under the spell of Roithamer’s suicide, he too was trying to distract himself by means of activity or inactivity from the fact that Roithamer, our friend, had killed himself, perhaps it would have been better had I not reminded Hoeller, and thereby myself, in such exact detail of our old teacher’s suicide, of the horrible discovery of his corpse in our classroom, anyway it was all wrong to have brought up our walks to school together and everything connected with those walks, to have spoken in my insistent way only of miseries and horrors which after all precipitated Hoeller as well as myself into disastrously sickening recollections from which we now both found it hard to escape, Hoeller is going through the same thing as I am, I thought, as I stood by the window, he’s also trying, so late at night, to cope with his problems and simply can’t cope with his problems, instead of making it easier for him, all I have done with my appearance and my subsequent by-no-means cheering presence is to have disturbed him as I should never have done, just as I have disturbed myself in the same inadmissible fashion, instead of easing my mind, there’s a great deal I should never have done or said, never have suggested, it is my suggestions above all, my habit of suggesting everything without explicit statement, which tends to disturb my interlocutor, or at least my listener, instantly makes him uneasy, as I’d made Hoeller instantly uneasy with my tactic of suggestion, possibly made all the Hoellers uneasy during our meal together, although I was as silent as they were, whether I was silent because of them or they because of me I don’t know, that it may have been wrong, I thought, possibly, for me to have stayed on after Hoeller’s wife and the children left the room, to keep sitting there and do my worst in irritating Hoeller. Most of all, to be quite honest with myself, I could have spared myself forcing Hoeller to give his description, his account of how he discovered Roithamer in the clearing, because Hoeller wouldn’t have said anything about it of his own accord so soon, but I’d wanted to hear his story now and I forced it out of him without saying a word, by my silence, it’s a way I have which I myself find distasteful, of forcing people who are with me, now and then, to statements or accounts or even more descriptions which at the very least create an uneasiness, yet I drive them to make statements and give accounts which cause the speakers to become extremely upset mentally and emotionally, hard to calm down afterward, just as I tend to drive myself into an upset mental and emotional state. This characteristic relentlessness of mine is rooted in my extremely complicated nature which is always striving toward simplicity but by that very effort keeps moving more and more and further and further away from simplicity, dealing with others as it does with myself, capable only of relentlessness and thereby driven very quickly to exhaustion. It may be possible to transform by sheer willpower everything which is at the moment undoubtedly harmful to me in Hoeller’s garret — and I suddenly felt almost everything here to be harmful to me, everything in Hoeller’s garret suddenly had a destructive effect on me, not to say a deadly effect — possible to transform all these harmful and destructive, not to say deadly, influences into something useful, useful to me. The willpower to turn a dangerous situation, a situation of absolute danger, which is how I suddenly had to regard the garret, into a situation that might be useful at least for my constitution, the willpower, meaning the intellectual power and the physical power as well. Suppose I asked Hoeller to let me work in his workroom, to give me something to do, no matter what, because I believe that at the moment any physical activity would be better for me than mental activity, just now I dread mental activity more than anything, yet what was I intending to do in Hoeller’s garret if it wasn’t mental activity, working on Roithamer’s legacy was naturally a mental activity, one which in fact is likely to tax me beyond my mental and physical capacities, to let me bevel or saw or cut or pack or unpack things or paste them on or carry them in or out of the workroom or let me chop wood or saw wood or pile up wood behind the house or plant or dig or improve something in the garden. In my present vulnerable physical and therefore mental condition I cannot allow myself, permit myself, a mental activity, especially not the infinitely exacerbated kind of mental activity I can expect in occupying myself with Roithamer’s legacy now, leading to cerebral exhaustion and so also to physical exhaustion. But then again I thought that it might be precisely such mental work as my work with Roithamer’s legacy which could restore me, regenerate, normalize, my head and my body. Absorbed in these considerations I’d slowed down my pacing the floor in Hoeller’s garret. Then, standing by the window and looking down at the river as the light from Hoeller’s workroom windows fell brightly on the water, I was thinking that the greatest effort of all would probably be required for working on that part of Roithamer’s legacy which dealt primarily with Altensam and with everything connected with Altensam, with special emphasis on the building of the Cone for his sister, a radical statement from beginning to end, which never for a moment neglected the philosophical aspects involved, it described Altensam as the making of Roithamer, the source of all he ever was and still is in what remains of him, his legacy, a most extraordinary personality entirely devoted to his scientific work, yet on the other hand it also described Altensam as the cause of his destruction, how Altensam simultaneously and with equal force destroyed him, how it killed and annihilated him. This manuscript of Roithamer’s which, with its corrected version, makes up Roithamer’s testament, as aforesaid, gives a full account of Roithamer’s conscious existence as well as a full account of the destruction of Roithamer’s conscious existence, and so it represents Roithamer’s entire life in the form of this verifiable manuscript, which I placed at once, before I did anything else, in the desk drawer, when I entered Hoeller’s garret, for fear that I might otherwise go immediately to work on it, a self-destructive thing to do, sure to have a devastating effect on me or at least on my mental state, as shown by this manuscript which is simultaneously, in consequence of his total correction of it, a destroyed manuscript, it is his own destruction of his manuscript which makes it the only authentic manuscript. While still at the hospital I’d started, timidly at first but soon driven by mounting curiosity and uncontrollable interest, to glance over this manuscript and its corrected version, quite superficially, in full and clear awareness that I must first concern myself with the original and only thereafter with the corrected version and only then with the original and corrected version, this idea as my basic condition for working on his manuscript at all I’d had at my first contact with the manuscript, from the first it seemed a death-defying undertaking to let myself in for Roithamer’s manuscript at all, and thinking about it, as I again paced the floor of Hoeller’s garret, one moment I’d feel capable of working on it, then again I’d feel incapable, optimistic one minute, apprehensive the next, alternating between feeling fully capable of working on the manuscript not to mention Roithamer’s other posthumous papers, and feeling definitely not up to such work, especially after so grave an illness by no means overcome as yet, how could I let myself in for such a backbreaking task, besides, what if I wasn’t the right person for it? Roithamer’s show of confidence in me by leaving me his papers moved me deeply, of course, but I also knew full well what a terrible business this was. More than anything else Roithamer needed freedom of thought, but while he had to be free to think anything whatever, he had to speak only the truth, something he, like any other thinking man, found most difficult to do, but his life had actually been based on this tacit understanding with everyone else, how easy it is to say of one man or another that he’s been a man of intelligence or even of intellect, but actually to be such a man of intelligence or intellect is the hardest thing in the world, and to be a man of intelligence or intellect all the time is impossible, Roithamer said. Just a few cursory inspections of Roithamer’s papers had given me a clear idea what sort of task I was taking on in accepting Roithamer’s literary legacy, yet I still had the courage to address myself to it again, time after time, in giving me this task he may well have meant to destroy me, which is why I lived in constant fear, actually, of getting involved with this legacy of his, I fully expected to be annihilated or at least destroyed or at the very least to become permanently disturbed by it, irreparably chronically disturbed. On the other hand I could understand Roithamer’s line of thought, first making an end of himself and his sister, then of me, by leaving me his papers, what else could he have meant by making me his literary executor than to destroy me, because I was so entirely part of his development, as he felt. Such thoughts, which I had as I continued pacing the floor this way and that, hither and yon, in the garret, thoughts suddenly in my mind, even against everything in my mind, actually did have a devastating and destructive effect on me, all these thoughts connected with Roithamer, and I was suddenly made up of nothing but such thoughts, I’d already spoken of this downstairs at Hoeller’s table to Hoeller, of my fear that working on our friend’s literary remains would disturb me for a long time, and that it would get in the way of my own work which I had totally neglected all this while, though during my hospitalization I had always thought that, once I was released and had recovered or at least halfway recovered, I would immediately resume my work which I had abandoned months ago, before Christmas in Cambridge, yet suddenly the fact that Roithamer had willed me his papers, incidentally by an unequivocal proviso tacked on at the end of the slip of paper which he designated as his will and which he had probably written just before his suicide, probably when he was already in the clearing, this fact that Roithamer’s will ended with the proviso that his literary remains were to go to me, because by means of this unequivocal proviso, presented in a fashion as if to say that this was the most important concern in his head at the last moment, he had taken complete possession of me, so that it had now become my foremost duty.

But what if this is my chance to free myself of this legacy? I thought, having meanwhile taken my jacket out of the closet and put it on, why don’t I just leave this whole mass of papers I’ve brought with me, the whole legacy, right here in Hoeller’s garret, leave it here, leave it here, I kept thinking while pacing the floor and wondering whether I was disturbing the Hoeller family with my endless pacing back and forth, disturbing the children in their sleep, who would know that I’d quite simply left the Roithamer legacy here and gone away again, perhaps up into the mountains after all, I could take refuge somewhere as high up as it was possible to go, I thought, I could leave everything behind me for once and think of nothing but my own health, all I had to do was stack up the papers neatly and leave them here and work on them later, at the right time, suddenly I felt that the moment for working on Roithamer’s papers hadn’t come yet, I’ve been too hasty, I kept thinking, I’ve acted overhastily, too precipitately, this needs time, preparation, it can’t be done in such a rush, so thoughtlessly as I’ve gone about it, better put it off for a year or two, or at least a few months or a few weeks, after I’ve had a chance to pull myself together and only then, when I’m really fit for the job, I can try to come to terms with Roithamer’s legacy. I’ve always had this unfortunate tendency to rush things, Roithamer hated rushing things and the tendency to rush things more than anything, everything in the world is done in a great rush nowadays, he’d say, everything is rushed, too rushed, every time, nothing is allowed to develop at its own natural pace, it’s all done in a mad precipitate brainless rush wherever you look, people simply rush into action and the results are sheerest chaos. The universal chaos in the world today, especially in recent times, is chiefly the result of every kind of precipitate action taken without first carefully considering what should be done, precipitateness and rushing things are the most terrible characteristics of our world today, Roithamer said, and this is why everything is so chaotic.

In every area of life there’s nothing but chaos. Wherever we turn there’s chaos, in the sciences there’s chaos, in politics, it’s chaos, whatever we do, it’s all chaotic, wherever we look, purely chaotic conditions, chaotic conditions are all we ever have to deal with. Because everything is being done precipitately, in a rush. In such a time of precipitateness and overhastiness and the consequent chaotic conditions a thinking man should never act precipitately or overhastily in anything that concerns him, but every single one of us constantly acts precipitately, overhastily, in every way.

What a terrible situation I’ve let myself in for by accepting Hoeller’s invitation and moving into Hoeller’s garret, I thought. I looked down at Hoeller’s workshop windows and I thought, there he is working away on and on because he can’t sleep, and then I thought that he must be thinking that I can’t sleep either, which is why I keep pacing the floor of the garret. People are always having to face things that upset and disturb them, mostly it’s at the very moment when they suppose themselves to be at peace, that they’re catapulted into turmoil, when they feel well balanced, they’re thrown out of balance. All we ever have is an illusion of peace, because at the very moment at which peace could enter into us, could could could, I say, we’re right back in the worst turmoil. So Hoeller down there in his workshop, his preservatory, may well be thinking that I’m in the greatest turmoil up here in the garret, because all the indications down in the workshop must be pointing that way, just as I was bound to think of Hoeller down there being in the greatest turmoil, because up here in the garret all the indications pointed to it. Of course I could leave the attic and go down and walk into the workshop and ask Hoeller why he was still working at an hour when nobody was up and at work any longer, I could probe into the reasons for his present condition, his work obsession, and I could in turn let Hoeller probe into my reasons for pacing the floor of the garret, marching up and down and back and forth as I was doing instead of going to bed. But I controlled myself and sat down on the old chair beside the door and stared at the floor. One lamp is enough, I thought, and I got up and turned off the ceiling light, with only the desk lamp on, I thought, the garret won’t be so brightly lit, and that may help to calm me down, I tried everything I could think of to calm myself down, but because I was so intent, working so hard without a letup at considering what to do in order to be able to sleep, to be able to go to bed in hopes of getting to sleep, I was undermining my own effort to relax, on the contrary, these efforts of mine kept driving me deeper into sleeplessness.

Still there’s nothing so extraordinary for me, I thought, in not being able to sleep, I’ve had to struggle with insomnia all my life, let’s face it, from the beginning of a certain stage of mental development, a certain age, that is, I never again had a real, satisfying, deep sleep in the natural way, in a fully relaxed state of my brain and my body. From a certain point in time onward, probably from the beginning of my present state of mind which has now been going on for two decades and which I call, as Roithamer did, my English state of mind, I haven’t even been able to imagine myself in a fully relaxed sleep, I see it as a privilege reserved for others, I said to myself, for a quite different breed of men, quite a different sort. Some people are so constituted that they can sleep well all their lives, or during the best part of their lives, or at least a tolerably good part of their lives, I thought, while some others, those like me, can’t sleep, they never sleep, they are condemned never to be able to sleep, for even when they are sleeping they are never really relaxed by nature and what they do can’t be called sleeping, these people never sleep as long as they live because all their lives, no matter how long they live, they have never had the advantage of a perfect relaxation of their head and their body. This entire valley is now at this hour filled with people who’re asleep, probably even deeply asleep, in all these houses and huts they are sleeping, and there isn’t a light anywhere, but here in Hoeller’s house there is lots of light and they’re not asleep, I’m sure that even the kids aren’t sleeping now, I thought, even Hoeller’s wife isn’t sleeping, because they’re all disturbed by the light from Hoeller’s workshop and from Hoeller’s garret. They’ve gotten used to the roaring of the Aurach, I thought, but not to the light from the workshop and from Hoeller’s garret. In this unusually disturbing condition they quite naturally can’t sleep, I thought. And for how many more nights will they be unable to sleep, because this unusual situation connected with Roithamer’s death will certainly continue for a time, I thought, Hoeller is likely to be in his workshop and not in bed for days to come and I, unless I’ve picked myself up and gone off altogether, and as I thought this, everything in me was against getting out and away, suddenly I was all for staying put again, I too would be unable to sleep in the nights ahead and I’d be leaving the lights on in Hoeller’s garret, after all I really couldn’t stand it in the pitch-dark in Hoeller’s garret, I thought. And I doubted that Roithamer had ever succeeded in falling asleep in Hoeller’s garret, because Roithamer was another one of those who can never sleep, who can’t ever relax by any means whatever, a man condemned to lifelong sleeplessness despite all those much-discussed and propagated relaxation gospels of our time. Even as a child Roithamer, as he often told me, couldn’t sleep, he fell asleep in the evening and woke up in the morning but to call it sleep, whatever it was between his nodding off and waking up, would be a lie. People made like Roithamer (and me), really always defenseless characters, beings, whatever, had no sleep capability, they may fall asleep and wake up again, but they never sleep. They’ve got something forever in their heads and their nerves that won’t let them sleep. All their lives they keep looking for a cure for this unbearable condition and they never find one because there is no cure for this disease, which really is nothing but a mental disease. All those insomniacs are born with this mental disease, they already have this mental disease in childhood and whether they are of the Roithamer type or the Hoeller type, they are incurable. The nights, Roithamer said, are always the worst. Everything is blown up out of all proportion at night, no matter how insignificant, at night it becomes monstrous, the most insignificant, the most harmless thing there is grows monstrous at night and won’t let a man like me or Roithamer or Hoeller sleep. And this persistent thought that one can’t sleep, under any circumstances, makes it worse. Sitting on the old chair by the door I was thinking with what a difference, and yet with what in difference, we went our ways, he coming from up in Altensam, me from down in Stocket, Hoeller, whose father had already been a zoological taxidermist in the old Hoeller house, the one Hoeller sold, which has since been torn down by its subsequent owner. How we moved from our different points of departure, our positions, toward one single point, the single acceptable point, death. Now Roithamer was dead, after first catapulting his sister to her death by his idea, and I lived, and Hoeller lived, and how he lived and how I lived. But it is already clear that I too must now be going quickly toward my death, even though I am differently constituted from Roithamer, not with the same bent toward suicide, probably somewhat more of a survivor than Roithamer, for I always seem to find a way out, while Roithamer could no longer find a way out, but one day I too shall no longer find a way out, everyone is destined, one day at some moment which is the crucial moment, to find no further way out, that’s how a man is made.

Thinking it over, one’s life is both the longest possible and the shortest possible, simultaneously, because it can be rethought and reexperienced in a moment, always in that moment in which such a (bold) thought occurs to one. Always wanting the impossible and left with the possible in his minimal existence, the individual always finds himself in the lowest depths of dissatisfaction. Nevertheless he always manages to create another life situation for himself, probably because he really loves life, just as it is. We always crave something other than we can have, than we have, other than what is suitable for us, and so we’re unhappy. When we’re happy we immediately analyze this happiness to death, if we’re like Roithamer andsoforth, and are right back in misery. As I’d heard something that was different from what I’d been hearing till then, I’d gotten up and gone to post myself at the window, to look outside. The darkness was kept at bay by the workshop lights, Hoeller was busy stuffing a huge bird, I couldn’t tell what kind of bird. It was a huge black bird which Hoeller held on his knees, cramming polyurethane into it with a stick. It was eleven o’clock, and inasmuch as Hoeller always got up at four in the morning, all his life, even as a child, he’d always gotten up at four in the morning, because his father also had always been up by four in the morning, everybody in the Aurach valley got up between four and five o’clock in the morning, and so because Hoeller is always up at four in the morning, keeping such late hours, such very long late hours as these in these circumstances, will undermine his health, I thought. From my window up in the garret I kept watching Hoeller down there in his workshop stuffing that huge black bird, how he kept cramming it with more and more stuffing, I thought I’ll watch him from this. excellent vantage point until he’s finished stuffing that bird, and so I stood there motionless for a good half hour until I saw that Hoeller had finished stuffing the bird. Suddenly Hoeller had thrown the stuffed bird down to the floor, he’d jumped up and run off into the back room where I couldn’t see him anymore, but I waited, looking into the workshop, until I could see Hoeller again, he came back and sat down on his chair again and went back to stuffing the bird, now I noticed a huge heap of polyurethane on the floor beside Hoeller’s chair and I thought this huge heap of polyurethane is now going to be crammed into this bird which I’d supposed had already been crammed full long since. By stuffing this bird he is making the night bearable for himself, I thought. At twelve he was still busy stuffing that bird. Off and on I kept wondering what kind of a bird this was, I’d never seen so large and so black a bird before, probably a species never seen in our country at all, and I toyed with the idea of going down to the workshop to ask Hoeller what species of bird this was. It’s certainly possible that this bird is of a so-called exotic species, that one of the hunters living out there on the plain, living in affluence in that fertile country out there, men who take frequent hunting trips to foreign countries and overseas, brought the bird back from South America or Africa, with what incredible energy Hoeller was now stuffing that bird with polyurethane, I couldn’t imagine that so much polyurethane could be crammed inside that bird, yet Hoeller kept stuffing some more of the polyurethane into the bird, suddenly I felt repelled by the process of stuffing polyurethane into the huge black bird, I turned around, looked at the door, but found it impossible to look at the door for more than a second or so because even looking at the door I kept seeing the huge bird Hoeller was stuffing with polyurethane, so I turned back again and looked out the window and into Hoeller’s workshop, if I must see Hoeller stuffing this huge, black, really horrible bird, then I might as well see it in reality and not in my imagination, clearly I could not possibly expect to get any sleep now, full as I was of my impression of Hoeller stuffing that huge black bird with polyurethane, constantly accelerating the speed with which he was doing this job, it was nauseating, still I had to keep looking out the window and into the workshop as if hypnotized. I could no longer turn away, compelled to surrender myself entirely to watching this procedure of Hoeller’s cramming that bird with polyurethane, I was about to vomit when Hoeller suddenly stopped his horrible activity and set the bird down, with its huge claws and long heavy legs, on his worktable. Now he’s going to sew the stuffed bird together, I thought, and sure enough Hoeller had gotten up and disappeared into the back room of the workshop to bring in whatever he needed for sewing the bird up. Or else he’s stopping work now and is leaving the workshop to go to his room and lie down, I thought, but Hoeller was already back with various balls of thread and needles and had sat down at his worktable to continue his work. Why am I watching Hoeller at his work, I thought, why don’t I do something myself, start something that I can keep on doing all night if I like, I thought, no matter what I do, as long as it gets me through the night. But what could I do? There was no manual work of any kind I could have done in Hoeller’s garret, it wasn’t set up for anything like that, and my head was no longer clear enough for any kind of mental work. On the other hand I didn’t permit myself to go down to Hoeller’s workshop, in case I could be of some help there. I certainly could have found something to do in Hoeller’s workshop, even if it was only to sweep up. It took all of my willpower to get myself away from the window and I turned around and took a few steps toward the door, thinking as I did so that my situation was really desperate, that I was possibly already quite seriously insane. Had I gone crazy as a result of moving precipitately into Hoeller’s garret? I wondered, but then I immediately thought, what an idea, that’s what’s crazy, such an idea as that, and I walked over to the desk and took the yellow paper rose out of the top drawer. Something happened to Roithamer at that music festival, I thought, as I held the yellow paper rose up to the light, a change had come upon him during that music festival, even if I don’t know, or can’t know what kind of a change it was. But don’t we always immediately see and seek a meaning in everything we see and think?

How could a man who never fired a shot in his life, suddenly, at a music festival, pick off twenty-four paper roses with twenty-four shots? And then hand twenty-three of these paper roses over, in passing, to an unknown girl, or an unknown young woman, keeping only one yellow rose for himself. And then keep this one yellow paper rose for so many years, taking it along wherever he goes, apparently unable to live without it ever again. By taking the paper rose out of the drawer I’d calmed myself down. I sat down with the paper rose in my hand on the old chair and held the paper rose up to the light. We mustn’t let ourselves go so far as to suspect something remarkable, something mysterious, or significant, in everything and behind everything, this is a yellow paper rose, the yellow paper rose, to be precise, which Roithamer shot down at the music festival in Stocket that one time, together with twenty-three others in different colors, that’s all. Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought. We may see only what we do see which is nothing else but that which we see. Again I watched Hoeller from my window in Hoeller’s garret, as he sewed together the huge black bird which he had stuffed to bursting. Suddenly I saw, perhaps my eyes had become adjusted to the lighting down there in Hoeller’s workshop, or else the lighting had suddenly changed, anyway I saw several such huge birds, the back of Hoeller’s workshop was filled with such birds, not all of these great, indeed huge birds were equally large, not all of them were black, but these were absolutely no local birds, probably, I thought, these are birds from the collection of some bird fancier, one of those rich bird freaks who can afford to travel to America, to South America or to India, in order to shoot such huge birds and add them to his collection. A huge bird collection, I kept thinking, a huge bird collection, and I slapped my forehead as I thought again and again, a huge bird collection, a huge bird collection! Roithamer had always spoken at length about Hoeller’s work, his procedures in preserving, stuffing andsoforth all kinds of animals, every possible kind of fowl, Roithamer had always profited, so he himself said, from watching Hoeller at work, seeing how those dead creatures were dissected and stuffed and sewed up. For Roithamer, I now thought, these products of nature, stuffed and turned into artifacts, always provided an occasion for various reflections on nature and art and art and nature, to him they were almost the most mysterious products of art because they were only just barely works of art andsoforth, mysterious by virtue of the fact that they had been made into artifacts here in the midst of a natural world still abounding with hundreds and thousands of creatures still purely natural andsoforth, that they had been turned into artifacts by Hoeller, products of nature turned by Hoeller’s hands into products of art here in nature’s own bosom andsoforth. Hoeller turns nature’s products into art products and these artificial creatures seem always more mysterious than the purely natural creatures they once were.

Hoeller’s work of turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures had often served Roithamer as a basis for ideas on art vs. nature, and all these ideas, which Roithamer naturally always linked immediately with everything else, everything other than these ideas, that is, were all coming back to me now. However, I was no longer up to formulating a definition. But I did muse about how it could be possible for so many generations, at least four or five forebears of Hoeller can be documented, to give their lives to the stuffing and preservation of animals and to keep on for centuries, consciously or unconsciously, turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures. This meditation lasted an hour. Pacing the floor in Hoeller’s garret I thought that I need only approach Roithamer’s legacy, approach it to begin with, if I tackle Roithamer’s papers now it is in order to sift them and then possibly edit them, which I have no right to do, neither the right nor the necessary ruthlessness, for editing involves a certain ruthlessness toward the subject, but I can never muster the requisite ruthlessness in the face of Roithamer’s legacy. For me to bring together all these bits and pieces, perhaps to put them in the right relation to each other so as to make a whole out of all these bits and pieces of his thought, something to be published, was out of the question, for I’d had to consider, from my first contact with Roithamer’s papers, that they consist for the most part of mere fragments which he had intended to combine into a whole himself, after completing or perfecting (Roithamer), finishing (Hoeller) the Cone, first he had devoted all his powers to the completion of the Cone, once I have completed the Cone (Roithamer), once he had finished the Cone (Hoeller), he would immediately set to work with all the intensity of which he was capable and after the completion of the Cone with a fresh, even more intensive intensity, with a fresh afflatus, as Roithamer said just a few months ago in England, to work on completing (Roithamer) or finishing (Hoeller) his writing, for all these years, Roithamer said, while I was busy with the Cone, I’ve been able to put together only fragments of my scientific writings, and such mere fragments by themselves aren’t enough, such fragments must be combined into a whole when, and only when, I’ve got my head in shape for it, when my head’s really set up for it, you understand, Roithamer said to me. So what we have here are in fact hundreds, or thousands, of fragments which Roithamer left to me, but which I shall not edit, because I have no right to edit them, anyway no one has a right, no matter who is editing what, he never has a right to do it, even though everywhere in the whole world socalled unfinished works, the labors of heads which suddenly could not continue their undertakings for whatever reasons, though mostly because of sickness or despair or self-criticism, Roithamer said, because they had rejected their ideas and simply abandoned everything they had thought all their lives, and then other people come along and proceed to edit such fragments, shreds of ideas that have been abandoned and left lying around, thinking they must edit and publish them, no matter where, publicize them, all these publications are criminal acts every single time, perhaps the greatest crime there is, because what’s involved is a product of an intellect, or many such intellectual products that have been abandoned, lying around, for some sufficient reason, by their begetter, pacing the floor heatedly in Hoeller’s garret I said to myself what I had already thought many times, thought it already at the hospital, I shall never edit Roithamer’s legacy, I shall not commit this editorial crime, I shall never be a so-called editor, the most detestable kind of criminal there is, I shall put Roithamer’s papers in order, sift them, then possibly pass them on to his publisher, only because he has expressed an interest and not only to Roithamer but also to me, he expressed his interest in a letter to me at the hospital, though he did so in a way that has greatly aroused my suspicions, I shall let this publisher, have a look at Roithamer’s legacy, I thought, pacing the floor and possibly disturbing the Hoellers in their bedroom as I did so, I didn’t really believe that the Hoellers, I mean the mother and her children, were actually asleep anyway, I simply couldn’t imagine that they could sleep, everything was against it, even the sudden change in the atmosphere and wind direction militated against it, suddenly I’d understood the real reason for my sleeplessness and still growing unrest, it was a change in the weather this evening which was making everyone terribly restless and which is probably also the reason that Hoeller stayed up and took refuge in his workshop, a quick glance down at the workshop window was enough to ascertain that Hoeller was still busying himself with that huge black gigantic bird, there was no sign whatsoever that he would stop now or shortly, not even in a foreseeable time would Hoeller stop his work on that bird, I thought, and right away it struck me that here at the Aurach gorge they’re exposed, always, to these sudden, these lightning changes of weather, in many cases lethal changes of weather, that people are driven to the very edge of their existence by these abrupt turns in the weather and can work their way out of this despair, this total desperation, only by some form of activity, like Hoeller busying himself with that bird, like Hoeller’s wife who sat down at her sewing machine again after supper and who is probably not in bed yet, I thought, but still at her sewing, though not at the sewing machine, she’s probably sitting at the little table in her room and sewing by hand, or mending, or knitting, whichever, she has to get through this night that has brought such a change in the weather somehow, they all have to get through this night somehow, all of them, all of them, everything, I thought and while I was thinking this and again walking to the door and then again back to the window I was feeling a little easier in my mind, because thinking about other people like this always brings a little relief. I would sort and sift Roithamer’s legacy, I now concentrated on these two concepts of sorting and sifting and said it aloud several times, sort and sift, and then, again several times more, sort and sift, but I will not edit it. I won’t change a line, I won’t move a comma, I shall sort and sift it, I just kept saying sort and sift over and over again and in saying sort and sift out loud I gradually succeeded in calming myself after all, I felt myself calming down while I was saying sort and sift, which is why I repeated it so often and then again, sort and sift, I said to myself, but no editing, absolutely none. As to Roithamer’s major work, the paper entitled “About Altensam and Everything Connected with Altensam, with Special Attention to the Cone,” which after all contains everything Roithamer ever thought in the most concentrated form and in his most characteristic style, as I perceived at once when it first came into my hands at the hospital, and which is more publishable than anything else he ever wrote, I shall pass it on to his publisher untouched, just as I found it, the first eight-hundred-page draft, and the second three-hundred-page revision of this first draft, and the third version, boiled down to only eighty pages, of the second version, all three of these versions of Roithamer’s handwritten manuscript, for all three versions belong together, each deriving from the previous one, they compose a whole, an integral whole of over a thousand pages in which everything is equally significant so that even the most minor deletion would reduce it all to nothing, and now I thought, again pacing the floor of Hoeller’s garret, that Roithamer, after completing the first version after many years of working on it and then being of two minds about it and then substituting a second version for this first version and then being of two minds about the second version and writing a third version, each a revision of the previous version about which he could not help being of two minds, and when he finally, just before his death, already on his way from London to Altensam, in fact, had started on the train revising even his final eighty-page version, correcting it and taking it apart and thereby, as he believed, starting to destroy it and by proceeding to shorten even that latest shortest version, as he believed, to arrive at an even shorter one, imagine! boiling down the material contained in over eight hundred pages of manuscript to a mere twenty or thirty pages, as I know he did, anyway this whole piece of work, to which he always referred as his major, his most important work or brainchild, though he would later find fault with it and destroy it, as he believed, yet it was precisely through this process of always overturning every earlier conclusion throughout the whole work and correcting it and ultimately, as he believed, totally destroying it on his journey to his sister’s funeral, when he had passed beyond London, through Dover, Brussels, etcetera, as I can see by his corrections, that it was nevertheless by this process of boiling down a work of over eight hundred pages to one of only four hundred pages and then a mere one hundred fifty pages and then no more than eighty pages and then finally one of not even twenty pages and in fact, ultimately leaving absolutely nothing of the entire work behind, that all of it together came into being, all this taken together is the complete work, I said to myself, as I stood looking down at Hoeller’s workshop, watching Hoeller and thinking at the same time that I had dragged this whole thing in my knapsack from the hospital into Hoeller’s garret, this so-called major work of Roithamer’s together with the rest of Roithamer’s legacy, in the knapsack my mother brought to me at the hospital and how grotesque it is that I dragged Roithamer’s legacy out of the hospital in this knapsack, of all things, which ordinarily contains only our family’s provisions when we move up to the mountains, only such things as woollen socks and sausages, goose fat and foot warmers, earmuffs and shoelaces, sugar and bread, all scrambled together, to think that I dragged Roithamer’s legacy into Hoeller’s garret in this mountain climber’s backpack, of all things, and I have to say dragged it, because it’s a matter of thousands of pages, however, as I know, it’s a case of hundreds of thousands of fragments, interrelated ones on the one hand, but completely unrelated ones on the other hand, and then again, standing by the window and considering whether to go sit down on the old chair or not, I thought: I won’t edit these fragments, I absolutely will not edit this legacy, I shall sort it or at least try to put this huge heap of writings into some kind of order, but I shall edit nothing, the mere word edit or edition was always enough to nauseate me. On my arrival here I actually put only Roithamer’s so-called major work, the manuscript on Altensam and everything connected with Altensam with special attention to the Cone, into the desk drawer, while the rest of the papers were still in the knapsack, because I was uncertain how to get them all out of the knapsack without mixing them up even more, I had extracted the so-called major work and put it in the drawer and put the knapsack on the sofa beside the desk, there on the sofa it was still, the knapsack which, as I now saw, was stained with dried rabbit blood, probably my father’s doing, and I was now considering whether to unpack the knapsack, to remove its contents carefully, all those hundreds of thousands of pages, and put them all away in the desk, whether this might not be the right occasion, while I was in this well-nigh alarming condition, totally undecided and in a steadily increasing state of tension over the actual abrupt change in the weather, to remove the contents of the knapsack from the knapsack, little by little, with great care and using my head and keeping my hands as steady as possible, so as not to turn what seemed to me to be the great disorder of those papers into an even greater disorder, this dilemma, whether to unpack the knapsack or not, drove me to the edge of despair, I kept changing my mind, now I’d think I’ll unpack the knapsack, then again, I won’t unpack the knapsack, finally I walked over to the knapsack and grabbed the knapsack and emptied its contents on the sofa, I had suddenly grabbed the knapsack and turned it over and dumped its contents on the sofa. This was not the time to do it, I said to myself, and took a step backward, and then another step and then still another step and watched from the window, with my back to the window, that is, how some of the pages slid down from the top of that heap of papers, which was still in motion as I watched it from the window, where there were still some air spaces left in the heap of papers, these air spaces caved in and more papers slid to the floor. I clapped my hand to my mouth to hold back an outcry and I turned around as if in fear of being seen in this horrible, this farcically horrible situation. But in fact, and of course, nobody had seen me. Hoeller had that huge black bird on his lap and was sewing it up. I went over to the sofa and grabbed handful after handful of the Roithamer legacy and crammed the desk drawers full of it. Again and again I grabbed a handful of papers and crammed it into a drawer, until the last sheet of paper was inside, in the end I had to use my knee to force the drawer shut which, being the last drawer, I had crammed full to bursting. Then I grabbed the knapsack and threw it on top of the wardrobe. With my back to the window I now said to myself that I had done a terrible thing. But what matters, I thought, is that those remains are now out of sight, that I don’t have to see those papers anymore. But of course the fact that the papers were now inside the desk and no longer inside the knapsack hadn’t in the least changed the situation in which I now found myself, it was an atrocious situation. If anything, my conscience was hurting even worse because in unpacking the knapsack, by abruptly turning the knapsack over on the sofa, I had probably, I thought, mixed the papers up even more hopelessly than before. And since Roithamer’s papers are hardly ever dated or numbered or anything, as I know for a fact, there was no hope at all that I could ever put them in order again, even to try to put them in order would drive me crazy, I thought, over and over, putting them in order would drive me crazy, so there I stood and said over and over that such a hopeless effort to put them in order would actually drive me crazy, and I kept thinking what a mess I’d made, I know what a mess I’ve made even if nobody else knows what a mess I’ve made. I sat down on the old chair by the door, in a state of exhaustion, of total exhaustion, it was suddenly clear to me what a hopeless fix I was in, I had apparently in a moment of total confusion lost my mind altogether and grabbed the knapsack and dumped its contents on the sofa and got all the papers so thoroughly mixed up they could never be straightened out again.

So there I sat on that old chair and again said sort and sift, sift and sort, several times, until I had said it so often that I burst out laughing, suddenly I was laughing out loud, very loud. Afterward it was quiet as never before.

Hoeller had turned out his light and I stood up and looked down and saw that it was dark in Hoeller’s workshop. Now I didn’t know why Hoeller had turned out the light just then, had he turned out the light because I had burst out into a laugh, or had he turned out the light without hearing me at all, simply because he had finished working on that huge black bird, actually Hoeller must have stopped working on the bird and left the workshop, unless he was still inside the workshop and had, for whatever reason, turned out the light, to stay in the workshop in the dark? I moved quite close to the window and listened, but I heard nothing, except suddenly the roaring of the Aurach again, but nothing else, as if all at once everything were asleep, as it seemed to me, on what basis I made this assumption I don’t know, but all at once it seemed to me that the whole house was asleep, but why had Hoeller turned out the light at the very moment I burst out laughing, just after my laugh the light in Hoeller’s workshop had been extinguished. But what would Hoeller be doing in the dark of the workshop, where he can’t see anything, or is it possible that the light from my window, from the attic window, falling on the Aurach, is enough light for the workshop as well, could Hoeller have thought that if he turned out his light he’d have enough light coming from the attic window, I thought as I stood at the window, and then I thought but why should Hoeller suddenly stop working now, at half-past twelve in the morning when he seemed to have been all set for work all through the night, it wasn’t at all an uncommon thing for him to do to stay at work in his workshop all night long, while his wife sits up in her bedroom all night long sewing or mending or knitting, with only the Hoeller children able to sleep, it was possible, I thought, that Hoeller was still there in his workshop, with his ears pricked up, watching me because, so I thought, once he had turned out the light in his workshop and could no longer be seen by me from the attic window, it was easy for Hoeller to watch me, that’s the kind of man he is, I thought, to watch me up here at the attic window where I am looking down at his workshop, while he’s hidden in the dark, watching me from where he sits, protected by the darkness at his workshop window, possibly observing the state I’m in and possibly drawing conclusions based on his observations with regard to my constitution, my mental and physical constitution, so that in the morning he may treat me quite differently, because of these nighttime observations, than he would have, had he not observed me, after all it was I who attracted his attention to myself by bursting into a loud laugh after all that brooding over sorting and sifting the Roithamer legacy, I thought, he can hardly do otherwise than keep me under observation now, turning out the light gave him the opportunity to observe me. He didn’t even have to get up and come to the window, he can keep an eye on me from his workbench where he might even yet be working at sewing up his bird, from where Hoeller is now sitting, as I suppose, watching me, he can observe me very well when I show myself at the attic window, I thought, if I show myself at the window I can be seen by Hoeller, in that case why am I showing myself?

I thought, after all I don’t have to show myself at the window, I can step back, I can step back so far that Hoeller can no longer see me, can’t possibly see me, and so I stepped back and I thought, now that I’ve stepped back Hoeller might turn the light on again in his workshop, because he’ll assume that I’m no longer interested in him now that I’ve stepped back from the window, he can feel free to turn on the light, as I’m no longer looking down there, I thought, he may well think, now I can turn on the light again here in the workshop, because he (me) is no longer looking down, quite possibly Hoeller was annoyed to see me constantly watching him, nobody likes to have someone constantly watching him, especially when he is absorbed in his work as Hoeller was absorbed just now in stuffing and sewing up that huge black bird. Now he has no reason not to turn up the light in his workshop again, I thought, as I was no longer watching him, Hoeller, I had sat down again on the old chair, though as I sat down I did slap my forehead with the flat of my hand several times, as though slapping my forehead was any use, I’d slipped into a state of excitement I couldn’t get out of, here I’ve tried every trick in the book already, I thought, pacing the floor, walking to the window, walking away from the window, walking to the sofa and away from the sofa, to the door and back again, then staring at the floor, studying my own hands, my own feet, for I’d taken my shoes off as soon as I’d come back from supper downstairs, then later on I took off my socks too and I’d been barefoot the whole time I was up in the garret, barefoot if only to avoid disturbing the Hoellers by my constant pacing the floor, I had this habit of rapidly pacing the floor, when I pace the floor barefoot, I don’t disturb anyone, so I’d always thought, and I’d always taken off my shoes, and naturally also my socks, even in England, anywhere at all, when I succumbed to my habit of pacing the floor, but studying my hands and feet and finally every object in Hoeller’s garret, including a black rubber sausage hanging on the wall of Hoeller’s garret which the Hoellers formerly used for driving cattle and which had attracted my special attention, what was this rubber sausage doing in Hoeller’s garret of all places, I thought, probably Hoeller himself one day cut this piece off a black rubber cable and converted it to a truncheon with a steel-band grip, back in the days when he still had cows and goats, he had to have this kind of rubber sausage, everybody around here has such rubber sausages made out of pieces of old cable, you can see them all over the Aurach valley, driving their cattle with these black cable sausages, out of their farmyards and into their farmyards, but what was this rubber sausage doing in Hoeller’s garret? I asked myself, could it have meant something in particular to Roithamer, and if so, what? but I couldn’t waste any more time on this rubber sausage, so I simply broke off thinking about this rubber cable sausage and took up another idea: namely, that thinking always came easier to me when I was barefoot than when I wasn’t barefoot, and why should it be that I can think not only more easily but more thoroughly about everything when barefoot, so that by now it’s an almost lifelong habit of mine to take off my shoes at once indoors wherever it’s permissible, and to run about barefoot, in Hoeller’s house I hadn’t taken off my shoes at first, I’d realized on entering that here I couldn’t take off my shoes, not right away, but upstairs in Hoeller’s garret I’d immediately taken my shoes off and walked around in my socks, going back and forth in my socks, unpacking and sitting down and inspecting Hoeller’s garret for the first time, until I put on my shoes again to go down to supper because it seemed impossible to me to go down to supper in Hoeller’s family room in my socks, because the Hoellers all wore shoes too, they didn’t go barefoot, probably it was on my account they didn’t go barefoot, just as it was on their account that I didn’t go barefoot, so none of us went barefoot, even though it would have suited all of us, the Hoellers as well as myself, to go barefoot, but right after supper, once I was back in the garret, I took off my shoes and my socks too and went barefoot. Going barefoot dates from my childhood, when I always went barefoot too, I even went barefoot to school, throughout the year, except only in the coldest months, we all went to school barefoot, all but Roithamer who wasn’t allowed to go barefoot because no child had ever come down from Altensam barefoot, how he’d longed to go barefoot with us, but it was never allowed, so he was always the one in school who never went barefoot, as even I had always been allowed to go barefoot, a rarity for the son of a doctor. If I walk barefoot they won’t hear me, I’d thought, and so as soon as I’d entered Hoeller’s garret I walked around and back and forth a lot in my bare feet in order to practice this barefoot walking in Hoeller’s garret, but once I’m aware how walking barefoot cuts down on the noise, even the barefoot walking becomes louder, I thought, so I mustn’t be aware that I am walking barefoot and therefore walking quietly. Actually, Roithamer had always gone barefoot in Hoeller’s garret, as I know for a fact, but he never went barefoot down to meals with the Hoellers, not even in summer, when it was quite normal and natural for all the Hoellers to go barefoot. Somehow that rubber cable sausage on the wall annoyed me and I took the rubber cable sausage off the wall, it was black and heavy and I cut the air with it a few times, then I repeated this cutting-the-air several times while looking out the window, in case I might be observed doing it. And suppose, I thought briefly, suppose I hit the desk with this rubber sausage? but I didn’t hit the desk with the rubber sausage, for fear of doing something with this rubber sausage that I’d better leave undone, I hung the rubber sausage back on the wall. But I couldn’t get my mind off the rubber sausage so I took it down again, opened the door, and hung it on a hook, out in the corridor, which had a straw hat hanging on it, probably Mrs. Hoeller’s straw hat, I thought. Back inside Hoeller’s garret I thought, all right, so now the rubber sausage is no longer inside Hoeller’s garret, and I wonder if I’m not being watched after all, it seemed to me that I was being watched but I couldn’t say for sure. People always do whatever they do for themselves alone, only for themselves and never, in no instance, is it done for someone else’s sake. If Hoeller is still in his workshop, I thought, then why hasn’t he turned on the light again, it seemed to me that I’d heard a sound from Hoeller’s workshop, a sound connected with Hoeller’s work, as I thought, so Hoeller must still be down there in his preservatory, but if so why was he hiding from me, at half-past one in the morning? I thought. Just then some metal object must actually have dropped from Hoeller’s hand, for I heard something metallic fall in the workshop. But then again: why isn’t he turning the light on again? So it suddenly occurred to me to turn out my light, to cast Hoeller’s garret into total darkness, to make Hoeller think I’d gone to bed now, finally gone to bed, so that he could keep on working undisturbed in his workshop, unobserved by me, working on his huge black bird, with all his lights on. I’d turned out my light and posted myself at the window in the expectation that Hoeller would now soon turn on the light in his workshop again, I was convinced that Hoeller was still in his workshop, after all I’d never heard him leave his workshop and go to his room, so he had to be in his workshop still, now that I’d completely darkened Hoeller’s garret, actually it was now pitch-dark in Hoeller’s garret, and when I looked outside I could also see nothing but total darkness, I might have suddenly heard the roaring of the Aurach again but I couldn’t see the Aurach, couldn’t see a thing, for it is well known that the darkness here along the Aurach, in the Aurach valley and most of all in the Aurach gorge, is the most impenetrable and so the darkest possible, that Hoeller chose the darkest point of this darkness, the Aurach gorge, to build his house in, and that Roithamer felt most comfortable here in this darkest darkness or, more precisely, that he found in the darkest place of all the ideal conditions for his purposes, is just what you’d expect. As for me, I never felt anything but frightened by the Aurach gorge, every minute I was there, at least that evening after my arrival and the subsequent night I have just described. From one moment to the next I expected Hoeller to turn on his light, but he didn’t turn it on, possibly, I thought, because he’d caught on that I’d turned out the light in the garret only so he’d turn on the light in his workshop again, because he knows that I haven’t gone to bed as I’ve tried to make him think but that I’m still at the window only waiting for him to turn on his light in the workshop again so that I can see him and watch him again. Better be on my guard against such people (like me) he’d probably thought and kept putting off turning on the light in his workshop, he’d sooner sit there in the pitch-darkness without turning on the light, I thought, ruining his eyes because he’s probably continuing to work on his huge black bird in total darkness, but as for turning on the light and letting himself be watched again by me, never. So I simply couldn’t stand it anymore and suddenly turned my light on again in Hoeller’s garret and I rushed to the window to see Hoeller’s reaction to my turning the light on again in the garret. I actually saw Hoeller sitting there at work with that huge black bird on his lap. He, Hoeller, is looking up at me, he’s working on the bird and looking up at me too, I thought. But then I stepped back from the window, because I didn’t want him to see me, and in stepping backward I overturned the big clothes tree that was standing beside the window, in my haste I’d stumbled over it.

Almost immediately my door flew open and there stood Hoeller, at the door, in his nightshirt. What happened, he said, and I pointed to the fallen clothes tree. He helped me to pick up the clothes tree. He expressed surprise that I hadn’t gone to bed yet but was still up and dressed. Once he had helped me to set up the clothes tree again, he left the garret without saying a word. So he hadn’t been in his workshop, in his preservatory, at all, I thought. I took off my clothes, turned out the light, and went to bed. It was half-past two and I thought, just before falling asleep, how utterly exhausted I felt. In the morning I’ll sneak up on Roithamer’s legacy, I’ll just sort of sneak up on it first, then I’ll sift it and sort it.

He, Roithamer, had never had to get away from Altensam, he had, in fact, struggled all his life only to draw closer to Altensam, to make himself understood where it had always been impossible, a crazy dream, where it always would be impossible for him to be understood, Roithamer had written, nor had he ever achieved the slightest rapprochement with Altensam, for he had always been a foreign element in Altensam. He simply wasn’t the man to adapt himself, against his grain, against the dictates of his character, the word opportune was totally alien, totally inapplicable to anything he could ever think or do, but as for me and my outlook and my ideas and everything, I’d always been an opportunist, Roithamer wrote. Everything in Altensam had always been impossibly hard for him, so he couldn’t stand Altensam from the beginning, he couldn’t give in to Altensam and its rules, he took the first opportunity to get clear of Altensam. Just as Altensam was alien to him, so he must have seemed a foreign element to his family, they had in the end worn each other out and used each other up in chronic mutual recriminations, primordial recriminations, Roithamer wrote, that is, he, Roithamer, on the one side and Roithamer’s family on the other side, were wearing each other out all the time in Altensam in the most inhuman way, a way least worthy of human beings, in this process of sheer mutual exhaustion. His natural bent for studying, i.e., for studying everything, however, had enabled him quite early in life, by studying Altensam, to see through Altensam and thereby to see through himself and to achieve insight and to take action, and thanks to these constant ongoing lifelong studies he’d always had to do as he ended up doing; all his life, though he’d rather call it his existence, or better still, his deathward existence, everything he’d ever done had been based on nothing but this habit of studying which he’d never been able to shake off, where other people get ahead easily and often quite rapidly, he’d never gotten ahead easily or rapidly, obsessed as he was with the habit of always studying, all of him, his organism, his mind, and everything he did, determined by this habit of studying. Everything had always come to him the hard way, the hardest possible. Yet it was evident almost from the beginning that such constant, above normal efforts paid off, Roithamer’s words, because of them everything I did went deeper, no step was taken without a thorough grounding in what preceded it, Roithamer wrote, nothing without completing all prior studies or at least trying to complete them, without trying to have first a clear understanding of everything that went before, although I knew, of course, that no clear understanding of anything is possible, only an approach to an understanding, an approximate though not an actual understanding, nevertheless an approximation. And so, while I loved Altensam more than anything in the world, because Altensam has always been closer to me than anything in the world, I also hated it more than anything in the world, because I’ve always been a foreign element there from the outset, and all my life, my whole existence, my deathward existence, had always been determined by that circumstance, causing a monstrous waste of all my energies. The question has always been only, how can I go on at all, not in what respect and in what condition, so Roithamer. But no one in my vicinity had even the merest inkling of what was going on inside the young man I was, they were never capable of conceiving the possibility of so devastating a state of mind that could determine and devastate and ruin an entire life like this, because they simply did not want to think about it, everything in Altensam always opposed thinking as such, it must be said categorically once and for all, to the discredit of Altensam, that Altensam was opposed to any kind of thought.

Altensam was always a place disposed to take action, there one took action without stopping to think, there action always excluded thought, and it still is like that, except that nowadays there’s not even any action left in Altensam, the Altensamers today are incapable of taking action, they are condemned to impotence, for lo these many years, they’ve been condemned to inaction, because their time is up, it’s all up with them. But what was Altensam like only thirty or thirty-five years ago? It’s a question I must face again and again, it’s the most important question of all, I must ask myself, What was Altensam, where I come from, thirty or thirty-five years ago, when I was beginning to think for myself? A composite of masonry and men where action was taken without prior thought, for centuries on end. At the outset, in earliest childhood, he, Roithamer, had not yet revealed himself as the person he manifestly came to be later on, not for a long time, not until he was well into grade school, had he himself understood who he really was, that basically, even though he was from Altensam or because he was from Altensam, he had always been against Altensam, as a child he had not yet been recognizably against Altensam though he’d turned against Altensam long since, but outwardly his childhood, at least his earliest childhood, had seemed to be a normal Altensam childhood, not yet an anti-Altensam childhood, although even then, as soon as I began to think at all, as I’ve said, everything inside me turned against Altensam, against everything connected with Altensam, connected with Altensam to this day, anyway there have always been two Altensams, so Roithamer, the one that I loved because it was not against me and the other one, the second one, which I’ve always hated because it was absolutely against me, from the start and with the utmost ruthlessness. The Altensam that I always loved, however, is not the Altensam that has nothing to do with the people in Altensam, Roithamer wrote, it is the one in which my nature always found sanctuary, while the other one, the one I hated, was always the one in which I never found sanctuary, the one that always rubbed me the wrong way. So when I say that I hate Altensam I always mean the Altensam in which I never found sanctuary, the one that always rubbed me the wrong way, rejected me, which is why I had to reject it in turn, and not the other one in which my nature always found refuge and where I was at least left in peace. Of course I tend to be preoccupied with the Altensam that refused me and rejected me and rubbed me the wrong way, not with the other one, as I am always preoccupied with everything that gives me no peace, repels me, rubs me the wrong way. There’s always the kind that leaves us in peace and lets us be ourselves and lets us develop in so many, sometimes quite wonderful ways, and then there’s the other kind that rubs us the wrong way and gives us no peace, no peace all our lives long, and so we are preoccupied with it all our lives long, it makes us fidgety, we become more fidgety day by day, there is no escaping it for the rest of our lives, and so we become angry with everything for the rest of our lives. All the stuff that’s constantly on my mind comes from this, this turmoil, and not from the other, the one that leaves me in peace, Roithamer wrote. From my earliest childhood, in Altensam, it was always the one that gave me no peace that I kept thinking about, not the other one, naturally. We speak, when we speak with all our being, only as we are driven by that unrest, not the other, Roithamer wrote. I have always spoken only out of that unrest, I was never driven to speak by the other one, which after all leaves me in peace, and so enables me to speak of my unrest.

It is not only a need we have to speak constantly, and to complain, and at least keep our attention on whatever is born of our unrest, since only these thoughts and feelings and thought-feelings and vice versa of course have the greater significance. Peace is not life, Roithamer wrote, perfect peace is death, as Pascal said, wrote Roithamer. But such phrases will get me nowhere, I must get away from these phrases, so Roithamer, I shouldn’t waste my time on truisms already demonstrated by history. My awakening in Altensam was the simultaneous decision to get away from Altensam, to get away from everything, to push off from everything that is Altensam, and this process of pushing off is all I have accomplished so far, no matter where I did it, or under what circumstances, and even when on the face of it there seemed to be no connection with Altensam whatsoever. An awakening in my room in Altensam, perhaps, in my turret room, an awakening at the south wall or the east wall, I loved the south wall and the east wall equally, an awakening perhaps under the linden tree or in the kitchen or in the entrance hall where I often sat for hours on end, waiting for my parents, in the icy cold, studying the floor planks in the hall and then, beginning with the floor planks, studying everything, the staircase, the lamps on the staircase, the chapel door, the kitchen door, the objects in the hall, or else an awakening in one of the cellars where I used to hide so often, sometimes in the wine cellar, sometimes in the beer cellar, sometimes in the apple cellar, so many cellars in Altensam, in one of those cellars came that awakening against Altensam, against everything connected with Altensam, or perhaps on that cliff in the woods where I went so often, or in the clearing where they put up the iron-cross memorial for an ancestor who was killed by a falling tree hit by lightning, or in my brothers’ room or in my sister’s room, the music room perhaps, or possibly the farm buildings, wherever the woodcutters, the farmhands, the maids are put up, I don’t know, Roithamer’s words. It might have been during one of those walks I took with my father, those silent walks, always in the same direction, year in, year out, the same way down from Altensam into that vast primeval forest, that forest which my father always referred to as the natural forest, since it hadn’t been planted in accordance with the rules of forestry but had simply grown, without human intervention, a forest that simply blew in by the most natural route, as my father always said, my father loved this forest, Roithamer wrote, his walks took him only into this forest, and I could come along, but I had to keep quiet. Quite possibly it happened on one of those walks that lasted six or seven hours during which the silence must never be broken. Deep down my father had loved only this natural forest, with its seeds blown in from anywhere, its random mixture of trees, Roithamer wrote, and nothing else.

My father’s life was unimaginable without this natural, wind-seeded, mixed forest, Roithamer wrote. On one of those walks my sudden awakening against Altensam and against everything connected with Altensam, Roithamer wrote, “everything connected with Altensam” is underlined. Or else it happened the time I was with my mother in the socalled pine woods, or with my sister in her room which was next to my room, I don’t know. But it was an awakening, a sudden awakening of my opposition against Altensam and against everything connected with Altensam, which determined the entire rest of my life. From that moment on I wanted to get away, to get out, but I had many more years to wait. Light broke with my school years, with the opportunity to get away from Altensam on the way down to school, to make contact by myself with other people on this road, with the kind of people who at least had nothing directly to do with Altensam, a wholly different sort of people. For I’d had no opportunity to make contact with other people, in full critical awareness, before my school days, for I’d always been prevented from making such contacts as I could have had in Altensam, in preparation for later contacts as it were, from making contacts up in Altensam to prepare for making contacts down below. If I visited the woodcutters, I was immediately called back home, the same for our own farmhands, but of course I’d always felt attracted to these people, probably from my earliest days and to a great degree, because such contacts were forbidden. And it was precisely their keeping me away from all others than those born at Altensam which caused me to hate them, later on, to hate all of them and everything connected with them. It was hatred, nothing but hatred, Roithamer wrote. The word “hatred” is underlined. But the people with whom I was denied and forbidden to make and keep contact, I loved, so Roithamer. The word “loved” is underlined. My childhood was nothing but wanting to get away from what I’d been forced into from the beginning, in Altensam, that is, and wanting to get into that other world which I was refused and denied and forbidden, wanting this with a perverse determination, as I now see. They must have sensed that I was different even from my own siblings, who had unquestioningly obeyed all the rules at Altensam, who had never rebelled, in contrast to myself who had rebelled from earliest childhood, three or four years old, as I know, against the regulations and against the brutality of those regulations enforced by my parents or the other socalled authorities in Altensam, they had sensed that from my earliest childhood I had felt absolutely independent, and later on had thought along absolutely independent lines, never willing to submit to their ideas and their orders. It was their misfortune to have brought me into the world, this could not be undone, though they probably often wished they could falsify history to this extent, so Roithamer. Neither my parents nor my siblings nor any of the others who came from Altensam or were connected with Altensam, the whole family in all its distant branches, could ever understand that they were confronted with someone who was always against them and their circumstances and conditions with all his mind and feeling, someone they themselves had brought into the world and who bore their name. And so the fact that my father left Altensam to me, so Roithamer, thinking that his other two sons and his only daughter, my sister, could be satisfied with a financial settlement by me, is nothing but an expression of my father’s intention to destroy Altensam by making such a will, giving a rude shock to all and sundry, a will which incidentally was contested in vain, by my brothers, father meant to destroy Altensam by such a will because he knew and above all consciously felt that he was destroying Altensam by leaving it to me, so Roithamer. No mad caprice on his part, he knew what he was doing, so Roithamer had added. For my father knew (seismographically) that Altensam’s time had come. But he preferred, so Roithamer, to destroy Altensam totally by willing it to me, thereby to destroy it totally in the shortest possible time, because he always fully understood that I hate Altensam, rather than let it gradually sink further into decline as would undoubtedly have been the case had he left Altensam not to me but to my oldest brother or to the younger one, or to both of them together, for there was never any question but that he’d have my sister’s share paid out to her.

When I sell Altensam, as I now intend to do, so Roithamer, and use the proceeds, and that must be a very high sum, I’d rather drag out the sale a little longer than rush it, Altensam must bring a very high price indeed, and when, using these high proceeds, I do all I possibly can for the ex-convicts after their release from the penitentiaries, then my father’s wish to destroy Altensam totally will have been fulfilled. Ads, possibly contact real estate agents, but cautiously, so Roithamer. By selling Altensam I’ll fulfill my dream of doing all I can for the outcasts of society, for the most outcast of all, whom society itself has always most complacently driven into crime, and by that I mean always most complacently without giving it much thought, let alone paid any attention specifically to what it was doing to them, I shall be helping those people whom society has made into, as it pleases to call them, criminals, because society doesn’t think, because it hates thinking, which is alien to its nature, more than anything. For me nothing can be more important than helping those released prisoners, using the proceeds from the sale of Altensam, but also to do something for those still imprisoned, as much as possible. And to smash, to destroy such a property as Altensam, which has simply outlasted its time, for the sake of such an undertaking, is at the moment more important to me than anything else. First, I must put the finishing touches on the Cone, the end is in sight there, secondly, I must sell Altensam for the sake of the convicts. Human society is absolutely shameless vis-à-vis its criminals, whom it locks up in its penitentiaries, so Roithamer, in full consciousness and with all the brutality and meanness and inhumanity which are its distinguishing characteristics, society catapults these people into their so-called crimes which are simply nothing but traps, death traps, set up for them by this inhuman society, and then turns away from them. If I have a mission at all, it is surely this, to help the convicts, those so-called criminals, who are actually our sick people, so Roithamer, those whom society has catapulted into their sickness. No man has the right ever to speak of criminals, no one and never, so Roithamer, it’s always, as with the others, a case of sickness, of those sickened by society, and all of society is nothing but hundreds and many hundreds of millions of people fallen sick of themselves, except that some of them, the unlucky and the most unlucky of them, the most slandered and betrayed, the victims of all the ridicule and mockery and meanness and all that human filth, are locked up and the others aren’t. The purchase price must be the highest possible, so Roithamer. Get various assessments etcetera, so Roithamer. Use the money to do everything possible for those people, so Roithamer, build homes, buildings for them, taking into account my experiences with the Cone project, so Roithamer, always near the centers, population centers, avoid anything contributing to isolation, disregarding the fact that everything is isolation, opportunities for work, opportunities to find occupations, optimal freedom of the individual. Intellectual freedom, physical freedom, so Roithamer. Create new provisions for these people. Provision for their entertainment. Growth, so Roithamer. When we are obsessed with an idea and suddenly have an opportunity to realize this idea, because we have been constantly and incessantly preoccupied with this idea and always to the highest degree, always concentrated upon this idea (see Cone), until we became nothing but a mind concentrated only on this idea, when we can make our prediction come true, no matter how crazy we’ve been thought to be and even considered ourselves to be on account of such an idea. When despite everything we’ve succeeded in the realization of this idea. When for years, for decades, we’ve paid attention to nothing but this idea; with which we are identical. We achieve only that aim upon which we concentrate one hundred per cent, including our so-called subconscious, when we pay heed to nothing but this one aim for the longest time until the moment when we have fulfilled this aim. When we are always aware of the fact that everything unites in conspiring against our aim, that everything outside ourselves and very often too a great deal within ourselves is nothing but a conspiracy against our plan, against our aim. When we ruthlessly take a stand, and most ruthlessly of all against everything that obstructs our work toward our aim, everything that torpedoes our aim, until we finally take a stand against ourselves, because we also can no longer believe that we can achieve our aim despite this whole comprehensive, all-comprehending resistance and therefore revulsion against our aim, because we are constantly attacked by doubts of ourselves and thereby of our aim and become weakened by these doubts, which makes it seem impossible that we will achieve our aim, but we must allow nothing, “nothing” is underlined, to deter us from our aim, as I have never let myself be deterred from an aim of mine, so Roithamer, for, so Roithamer, everything is always against every aim. Even the smallest objective must be achieved despite total opposition, how much more so the great objective, so Roithamer. Suddenly there’s an idea and it demands realization, our entire life, our entire existence consists only of such ideas demanding realization, once this process breaks off, our life breaks off, we’re dead. We consist of nothing but ideas that surface inside us and that we want to realize, that we must realize, or else we’re dead, so Roithamer.

Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life, so Roithamer, the lack of ideas is death. And the person under consideration may appear as simple as we choose to think, which he never really is, however, or else as complicated as we like to think, which he never is either, so Roithamer. A man’s lack of ideas is his death, so Roithamer, just think how many there are quite without ideas, entirely lacking any idea, they don’t exist. Ads to begin with, then real estate agents, so Roithamer, but the utmost caution is called for with those real estate agents, it’s the same as with everything else, the utmost mistrust is in order, the more mistrust the better, but then, once a certain point of understanding has been reached, action must be taken. We always need to compare the various possibilities, without a chance to compare, we can’t think, we can’t act, we’re stymied, so Roithamer. Compare properties and prices, so Roithamer. Find out about the actual situation in real estate, the market situation. Understand that sellers and buyers always play the same roles, always liable to be conned by the other fellow. What a sensation when I sell Altensam, so Roithamer, so it must all be kept in the background, handled as inconspicuously as possible. No talk about it, not even when it’s done, no talk whatsoever about it. And take care beforehand that, first of all, my sister’s interests are safeguarded, that no one is unfairly implicated in that sale, not even my brothers, although to spare my brothers verges on idiocy, when did they ever spare me? they are not sparing me even now, but I won’t throw them out without compensation, though they have no right whatever to compensation, neither legally nor morally, they’ve always been against me, their aberrant brother, they made no bones about their contempt and their hatred for me, they really worked at becoming adepts in the art of tormenting me, not to forget their inventiveness in torturing me, their finesse in humiliating me was always extraordinary, not to forget that they never had any use for me whatsoever, still, that’s no reason to treat them without any consideration at all, anyway I’ll spare them, not because they deserve it, they don’t deserve it, but only because I want them out of the way, out of my way. And I want my sister inside the Cone I’ve built for her, once the Cone is all furnished she’ll move in, it’s the perfect work of art, building art, for her to live in, which I was actually capable of though it runs counter to my mind and counter to all, even my, reason. The Cone’s placement in the center of the Kobernausser forest is exactly right for her. Supreme happiness? Then we wake up and see that we’ve achieved what we wanted to achieve by being relentless and most of all relentless toward ourselves, by not deluding ourselves and by paying no attention to what other people say, for if we’d paid attention to other people, so Roithamer, we wouldn’t have achieved anything, because the others are always against us, that’s the only truth. Sell Altensam and use the proceeds to put the released convicts back on their feet. Offend against so-called good taste, against which I’ve always offended, all my life I’ve always offended against so-called good taste. Once we fail to offend against so-called good taste by doing something tasteful, we can say good-bye to our character, our reason, our self. Anyway it wouldn’t make sense to remodel Altensam for the convicts, the place wouldn’t suit them. It would make Altensam nothing more than one of many such places, in our country so many penitentiaries are located in the most beautiful landscapes, oh no, that’s out, why, that would be crazy! “that would be crazy” is crossed out, then stetted. The thing is to sell Altensam with everything in it, sell it at a good price, not at a loss, without squandering it, to sell it, using my head and perfect timing. Keep a sharp eye on the notary and pay him only for work actually done, not by the official legal tariff (or his own inflated expectations). His fee must reflect his actual success with the sale. But the question is whether I can’t sell Altensam myself, on my own, by some lucky chance perhaps, in which case I’ll save the middleman’s fee. They’ve always let themselves be taken by the notaries and the lawyers, all of them, that hasn’t changed. “Buy a smaller property for my brothers” is crossed out. Take care of all my sister’s needs for life.

“Contractual basis” is underlined. We reject everything having to do with contracts, because we reject bureaucracy in toto, but in fact the world is only held together by a patchwork of contracts, as we soon perceive, and in this network of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of contracts the trapped human beings are squirming. There’s no way to get around contracts except by suicide. Contracts everywhere, they’ve already choked everything to death, a whole world choking to death on its contracts, so Roithamer. To suppose that it is possible to exist without contracts or other written agreements and run away, anywhere at all, is to find ourselves soon caught again in contracts and written agreements, anyone who thinks otherwise is a madman, a malicious falsifier of the nature of things. It’s only in childhood that we don’t know what kind of a trap it is in which we squirm and despair and keep on despairing as we go on squirming in it, ignorant that these are the nets of contracts and other written agreements made by the grown-ups, by history. If anyone were to succeed in doing away with all these contracts and other written agreements, all he’d have accomplished would be the end of the whole world. In the future, where everything is possible, this too is possible. But so far it hasn’t been possible, nor is it possible in the immediate future, so Roithamer, the foreseeable future is all contracts, written agreements, and the resulting fits of despair, impediments, sicknesses, causes of death, that’s all. Our entire being is tied to contracts, written agreements, assessments, we’re trapped in them for life, no matter what we do, no matter who we are. Still we keep trying all our lives to escape from these contracts and other written agreements, efforts as painful as they are senseless, so Roithamer. Look up lawyers, notaries, find out just how sharp they are, conversely, how defenseless I am, compare the ignorance of the lawyers, the notaries, with my own defenselessness. Remember that everything that was sold hitherto was sold too cheaply, everything bought hitherto, bought too dear. Commercial instincts, perceptions, money, usury, swindle, forgery, sharp practice, so Roithamer.

Ours are the finest forests in the world, as well as the most productive, a hundred years’ growth. Quality of the soil A-1. And all those rights belonging to Altensam, fishing rights, lumbering rights, hunting rights etcetera. Bound to fetch a record price, anything else unthinkable. All living and dead inventory included. Make a study of traditional and untraditional agreements-to-purchase, financial regulations, buying-out nonsense, so Roithamer. Get the Cone finished, forget work on Cone, resume my scientific work while also getting on with selling off Altensam, so Roithamer. Working out of England at first, because I must get back into my Cambridge routine, where I hardly feel at home anymore, using Hoeller’s insights in Hoeller’s garret everything’s to be considered toward securing my career, my future, then operate from Hoeller’s garret. Observe my sister as she enters the finished Cone, show her the Cone’s interior from top to bottom, not from the ground up, may have to blindfold her when we enter the Cone, lead her up to the inside tip of the Cone, then open her eyes and bit by bit familiarize her with the entire interior of the Cone. Clear my head of everything connected with Richter’s Fundamentals of Statics and stress analysis, forget Chmelka, Melan, forget everything I was absorbed in during the building of the Cone, first during three years of planning, then during the three years it took to build the Cone, try to clear my head of everything connected with the Cone, try especially to get rid of the word “statics” that keeps turning up through the night, makes it impossible for me even to think of falling asleep, the moment I drop off, the word “statics” comes into my head and actually stops me from falling asleep, for years now. Terminate everything connected with the Cone and with finishing the Cone before I liquidate Altensam. Sister provided for by being stuck away in the Cone by her brother, as I hear it, that crazy eccentric brother, so Roithamer, that crazy, mad, eccentric, blasphemous, insane construction. Just the same I shan’t let any so-called architects come near the Cone even in the future, I must secure the Cone against all building professionals. These so-called architects and building professionals only show up in order to kill off the work of art, which it is, by setting foot in it, they destroy it, merely by looking it over. It’s the work of a madman, a violent intellectual, a crazy obsessed with a senseless idea, so said my brother, so Roithamer, the word “crazy” underlined. But I’ve never in my life cared what people said, not even what they always thought (about me), so I’m sure that I won’t bother about them in the future either. Professional riffraff, so-called architects, intellectual charlatans, so Roithamer, exploiters of their clients, knuckleheads, brains of cement. Never answered a single inquiry, its origin suspect, some architect or building professional might be behind it. They never heard of James Gandon, for example, Sir John Soane, John Nash etcetera. When we act, we know the source of our action, when we think, the source of our thinking. Boulle, Hamilton, Vignon, conceptual change etcetera, so Roithamer, we mention in vain. I’d merely make a suggestion, and they go to pieces. Nothing from Neutra’s publications, everything from Mies van der Rohe’s, “nothing” and “everything” underlined. No dealings with the professionals because they destroy our ideas, they are single-mindedly intent upon undermining our idea, upon destroying it. Never advance an idea to a professional because if you do it won’t be long before that idea will be shaky, the image dubious, impossible to realize, leave the idea in its hiding place until it’s realized, fulfilled. Leave the thought and the idea in its isolation cell until the utmost degree of realization, substantiation, perfection has been reached. Think how many will then be living off our idea, the idea we had, “we” underlined, our idea gets picked up and shamelessly exploited, we see it happening time and again, how an idea is picked up and shamelessly exploited by hundreds of imitators, which is a way of destroying the idea, but if it’s a good idea it can’t be destroyed. An idea, always an extraordinary idea, attracts hundreds of parasites who hook onto it and suck it dry and ruthlessly capitalize on it, always to the loss of the person who had the idea in the first place. Keep thought and idea immured as long as possible. Yield it up when perfected, pay the price of absolute misery for it. Most people, the highest percentage of people, live off ideas not their own, which they exploit to the utter limit without shame, but they’re never called to account for this, on the contrary, they’re praised for it everywhere. Wherever we turn we see exploiters of (other people’s) ideas, making good money off them. So, I won’t let the so-called professionals come near my Cone, but the time must come when I can no longer hide the Cone, whereupon the so-called professional world will pounce on the Cone and exploit the idea, there’s no point in holding back the inevitable, sooner or later the Cone will be discovered, they’ll all pounce on the idea and on the hundreds and thousands of ideas connected with it, and the Cone will be exploited, ruthlessly. But no one can say the idea is mine, mine for life, “for life” underlined. We draw attention to something new and they all hurl themselves into this new thing even though this new thing was pointed out by us, but that’s never mentioned anymore. We’re the ones who make a discovery but we don’t exploit this discovery, it’s the people who exploit it who make a splash with it. First I must finish the Cone, then concentrate on the sale of Altensam, then resume my scientific work, Cambridge, London, London, Cambridge alternately, because that’s always done me good, if this leave of absence is to have served its purpose, in that the Cone will have been built and finished, Altensam will have been sold off. Although we hate everything at times, we find it possible, or even because we at times hate everything, it is at times possible to move onward, propelled by nothing but hatred, to move ahead.

Because we are weak, infirm, we must tolerate no weakness whatever. And if it isn’t life and if it isn’t nature then it’s what we read, it’s the life and the nature of what we read, for long stretches there’s only the nature we get out of our reading, life out of books, periodicals, all kinds of writings, we bridge the gaps between our contact with nature Itself by reading that represents nature, represents life. Because we can’t always, no organism is capable of it, absorb nature into ourselves, absorb life-as-nature into ourselves, we go for long stretches, for years on end absorbing it only through reading matter, from the newspapers, from written stuff. In several languages, for variety’s sake. At certain points in our existence we break off the nature of our existence and proceed to exist only in books, in written stuff, until we again have the opportunity to exist in nature and continue to exist in nature, very often as another person, always as another person, “always as another person” underlined. We couldn’t endure a life in nature, necessarily always a free nature, without respite, so we always step outside nature, for no reason but survival, and take refuge in our reading, and live for a long time in our books, a more undisturbed life. I’ve lived half my life not in nature but in my books as a nature-substitute, and the one half was made possible only by the other half. Or else we exist in both simultaneously, in nature and in reading-as-nature, in this extreme nervous tension which as a form of consciousness is endurable only for the shortest possible time span. The question can’t be whether I live in nature as nature, or in reading-as-nature, or in nature-as-reading, in the nature of nature-as-reading andsoforth, so Roithamer. To everything that we think and fill our own life and that we hear and see, perceive, we always have to add: the truth, however, is … as a result, uncertainty has become a chronic condition with us. Those abrupt transitions from one nature into the other, from one form of awareness into the other, so Roithamer. When we think, we know nothing, everything is open, nothing, so Roithamer. The nature of the case is always something else, so Roithamer. First, the Cone offers views in all directions, then, the Cone offers views only southward and northward, then, only to the west and to the east, finally, only to the north. The spaces, not rooms, the spaces are such as to correspond perfectly to my sister’s nature, they are designed to adapt themselves to whatever state of mind my sister finds herself in as she enters these spaces, and to do so immediately. To achieve this it was naturally necessary to have kept my sister under constant observation, continuous observation of my sister from earliest childhood on, it’s been most helpful that I’ve always kept her under the most intensive observation, and always quite objectively, trying to understand her nature through all the years of her life, even before it ever occurred to me to build the Cone for her. My observation of my sister turned into an art and into a science of observation.

And I naturally also observed everything connected with my sister, above all her habits, her possibilities, “possibilities” underlined, her impossibilities, what she was born with, what was bred into her, what she displays openly.

Constant study of her inner life, insofar as this was possible by means of constant, continual observation and the constant and continuous study of her appearance, the inside and the outside are the same, everything depends on the observer’s judgment. Knowing that I must never relax this observation of my sister, must never relinquish this observation, mustn’t allow my judgment to be swayed, to become imprecise. First I had to concentrate my entire being, meaning all my mind and feeling, on my sister, then I had to do the same for the construction of the Cone, finally I applied my observations as insights to the construction of the Cone, so that I must assume that the Cone is ideal for my sister. The Cone’s interior corresponding to my sister’s inner being, the Cone’s exterior to her outward being, and together her whole being expressed as the Cone’s character, the inside and outside of the Cone are as inseparable as the inside and outside of my sister, but the incessant observation of my sister and the incessant observation of the construction of the Cone have led to the result which now stands in the center of the Kobernausser forest. Therefore, if my observation of my sister is correct, then the construction of the Cone is correct, so Roithamer. The consistent study of one object (of my sister), the consistent mode of construction of the other object (the Cone). The construction of such a Cone for such a person as my sister is feasible only after the study of the person (my sister) for whom such an edifice (the Cone) is being erected, has been completed. First I study the person for whom I am building such an edifice, then I build the edifice on the basis of my study, and such a study must be ultraconsistent. And only after I have truly studied that person’s nature and gone far enough in my study to have grasped that person’s nature, or at least grasped it insofar as it is humanly possible to grasp it, can I be sufficiently clear in my own mind as to what I am building and what materials I must use to build with. This is an edifice of stone and brick. The problem of the statics of the one (the Cone) is the problem of the nature of the other (my sister). And to build against that person’s will, because one can build only against the will of a person like my sister. Not because of this person for whom I am building, but because of the person’s character, and in that character the one, if not emotionally sensitive, perhaps the one intellectually sensitive point. We decide to build though we don’t know what it means to build, as everyone knows, especially not what it means to build such an unheard-of edifice as the Cone for a person like my sister, we don’t realize that it is basically a lethal process.

Insofar as we have taken into consideration everything that must be taken into consideration we have to say that the art of building is a philosophical art in the highest degree, but the building professionals or the so-called building professionals have never understood, they shy away from this realization and refuse to enter into the problematics of it, and so we almost never get an art of building, all we see is the vulgarity of building. We must know the person and have seen through the person, or at least know the person up to the crucial point, and be familiar with him to the crucial, necessary degree, before we can build for him, for even after we have passed our tests on this score it remains questionable whether our edifice truly suits the person for whom we have built it, we assume that it suits him, just as I only assume that it suits my sister one hundred percent, because I must make this assumption, had to make this assumption all the time I was building, otherwise I’d have gone crazy and could never have finished the Cone at all, the completion of the Cone would have remained a utopian dream. Our buildings, no matter which, those intended as habitations as well as the non-habitations, would look rather different if those who built them had been in the least concerned about the people for whom they were building them, all of these buildings were built without asking those who would be affected, not to mention studying them. Just as we investigate the causes of disease nowadays, knowing they must be investigated, as the doctors can no longer evade this necessity of investigation, those who build should investigate those for whom they are building, they must investigate them, the investigation of the man for whom a building is being put up should be the duty of the man who is doing the building, the builder should be forbidden to build for someone he has not thoroughly investigated or at least understood to the necessary or the minimal necessary degree. The builders build without having concerned themselves with the nature of those for whom they are building, though the builders of course deny this when confronted with it. With nothing in their heads but their fees and their careers, those professional builders or whatever they may choose to call themselves put up their buildings without any idea of the people for whom they have built them, thereby committing one of the greatest crimes, “greatest crimes” underlined. After all it took me six years to build the Cone, a long time when subtracted from my life, and yet a short time when I consider that first I solidly prepared for it and then did a solid job of building.

And I actually worked with a clear head the whole time, no building sickness, no building psychosis, so Roithamer. Then, after I had thoroughly studied my sister, above all her mental and emotional condition, it was clear that the edifice to build for her was the Cone. No other form. And I knew that no cone had ever been built before by any man, not even a Frenchman, not even a Russian, my Cone will be the first cone ever built to be lived in, I told myself, and I decided to build the Cone. When we set out to do something we’re constantly being sidetracked, we’re thought to be crazy, our refusal to yield and to compromise makes many enemies for us (enemies we’ve always had), but that’s just what impels us onward, those constantly mounting accusations against us, slanders against us, ruthlessness against us which is far greater than our own ruthlessness, all of it ultimately makes it possible for us to make our way through this human filth to which we’re continually exposed, through the filth of their slander, their false accusations. The world around us is constantly balking and hindering us and it is precisely by this constant inhibiting and hindering action that it enables us to approach our aim and finally even reach it. We’re told and we’re made to feel that we have neither the right nor the nerve nor the brutality to achieve our aim, but we do have the right and the nerve and the brutality and because we are what we are, our nerve and our brutality and our right keeps increasing. We’re constantly badgered with insinuations by those who don’t want us to accomplish our aim because they begrudge us our achievement, so we’re constantly subjected to their meanness, their spying presence which only fills us with disgust, they never cease their vulgar spying. Most of the time we have to deal with human filth, so Roithamer, we’re forced to wade through it, and when we’ve made our way through one heap of filth we must get through the next, on and on, each time faster, more radically than the last, because we’ve caught on that there’s nothing but this human filth, which we have to get through. To reach our aim we must traverse this human filth, human filth in the form of common filth in the head, the sole purpose of which is to do us in. Whoever says otherwise commits the violent crime of hypocrisy, “violent crime of hypocrisy” underlined, the words human filth always first underlined, then crossed out, then stetted. At first we hope for support from the person closest to us, but to cling to our “neighbor” would mean, as we soon find out, the suicide of the (of our) spirit, suicide of our being, our soul, “soul” underlined. Then we think that we must turn to the professionals (of the mind, the soul, the world of things), because we’re constantly looking for help, but there we keep meeting only with deepest disappointment, “deepest” underlined, we encounter only disappointments.

We’re up to something, as we know, it’s invariably something stupendous, even our most insignificant, unimpressive brainchild is always the most stupendous thing, and we feel we must speak of it, go into it, and we’re disappointed, either we’re not understood, no matter how clearly and force-fully we put our case, or else we don’t want to be understood. We’re always left without an answer, and of course in a more debilitated state than before, because no one, no expert or person, whichever, wants to help us. And so we naturally have to depend entirely on ourselves all our lives and we go our way alone, depending on ourselves only, working to earn everything ourselves, with no outside help. And so we’re always full up and never come to rest, so Roithamer, “never come to rest” underlined. We’re surrounded by malice, so Roithamer. First twenty-one chambers in the Cone, then eighteen, then seventeen chambers. A single chamber under the Cone’s tip, with a view in every direction, but in every direction the same vista into the forest, nothing else. Three-storied, because a threestoried edifice accords with my sister’s character, “my sister’s character” underlined. Of the seventeen chambers, nine are without a view, among them the meditation chamber on the second floor, beneath the chamber in the tip. The meditation chamber is so constructed as to make it possible to meditate there for several days in a row, and it’s intended for no other use but meditation, it’s totally devoid of any objects, there’s not to be a single object in the meditation chamber, nor any light either. A red dot in the center of the meditation chamber indicates the actual center of the meditation chamber, which is also the true center of the Cone. The radius from this center in every direction is fourteen meters long. Spring water on tap in the meditation chamber. Underneath the meditation chamber, areas for diversions. Above the meditation chamber, the circular chamber inside the tip of the Cone, affording views in all directions, but in every direction nothing but forest is to be seen, the Kobernausser forest, under this rotunda the meditation chamber, under the meditation chamber the diversions areas and under the diversions areas what I call the antechambers into which whoever enters the Cone, enters to prepare himself for the Cone, on the ground floor, in fact. On the ground floor there are five chambers, all without any designation in particular. These chambers must be left without the specific designation, like all the chambers in the Cone, always, without designation, except for the meditation chamber.