Correction

If the person domiciled in the Cone, my sister, in fact, should be tempted to assign specific functions to the individual chambers, for she is sure to be suddenly inclined and then impelled to designate the individual chambers as, say, a bedroom here and a workroom there and thirdly a kitchen andsoforth, she must remind herself, if necessary tell herself aloud, that the individual chambers in the Cone are not to be specifically designated, it must be possible to live in a building in which the individual chambers are undesignated, though it is only natural for the chamber constructed as a meditation chamber to be designated as a meditation chamber. The chambers are all whitewashed. No windows but look-outs that are neither to be opened nor shut, natural airing of the inner-spaces always without having to open or shut the look-outs. Solar energy for heating. Stone, bricks, glass, iron, nothing else. The Cone is whitewashed outside as well as inside. The Cone’s height is the same as the height of the forest so that it’s impossible to see the Cone unless one is standing directly in front of it, the road leading to the Cone! doesn’t lead directly to it through the Kobernausser forest but winds toward it six times in a northeasterly and six times in a northwesterly direction, so that the Cone can be seen only at the moment when the new arrival finds himself directly in front of it. Eight thousand loads of coarse gravel, two thousand loads of a finer grade, so Roithamer. At first I was going to let my sister in on my plans from the beginning, but I dropped the idea when she showed her aversion to my plan, I’ll build about a third of the Cone first, I thought, then I’ll show her the Cone, a third of it already done, but I dropped that idea too, because I suddenly realized that I must finish the Cone before I show it to my sister, there’s the risk in showing my sister the Cone before it’s finished, that I may (owing to her reaction) lose the strength to finish the Cone, the Cone must be finished, perfect, when I show it to her, it was built to be perfection for her. If anything happens to my sister during my lifetime, I’ll let nature take its course with the Cone, so Roithamer, after my sister no one is to set foot in the Cone, this stipulation to be included in my will to be drawn up eventually, so Roithamer, this will musn’t be put off too long. (Roithamer did in fact stipulate in his will, viz. the slip of paper he had on him when Hoeller found his body, that no one should be allowed to set foot inside the Cone now, after his sister’s death and after his own death, and that the Cone must be entirely abandoned to nature.

There’s no telling how far Roithamer’s heirs will go along with that stipulation.) Once she sees the Cone, she’s bound to be happy, “bound to be happy” underlined. A perfect construction is bound to make the person for whom it was constructed happy, “must make her happy” again underlined.

The idea was to make my sister perfectly happy by means of a construction perfectly adapted to her person, so Roithamer. Perfect to the degree to which perfection is possible, anyway, let’s say nearly perfect, “nearly” as with anything else. To materialize the idea to the point of securing my sister’s perfect happiness. But what if she doesn’t understand any of it? I ask myself.

We’ll see. The idea was to prove that such a construction, bound to bring perfect happiness, is possible, so Roithamer. Then, when my sister has moved into the Cone, so Roithamer, when she has entered the Kobernausser forest, I shall have no more fears for my sister. For the time has come when my sister also must leave Altensam behind, must above all leave my brothers, who are as alien to us (my sister and me) as we (my sister and I) are alien to them. Once a year, at most twice a year, I shall visit my sister and shall observe and study her and the Cone and both of them together in their mutual relationship, so Roithamer. And then I’ll retreat to Hoeller’s garret to work up my notes. I shall personally bury all the cost accounts regarding the Cone on the ground floor, so Roithamer, the day the Cone was finished. The Cone was meant to be a surprise, it is no longer a surprise because my sister knows of my plan and also knows how far I have progressed in my plan. Nevertheless she will be surprised when she actually sees the Cone, when she sees how it expresses her one hundred percent, or let’s say nearly one hundred percent, because a one hundred percent expression is impossible. Then everything within me will be resolved, as it will be resolved in my sister, at the moment when I show her the Cone. We have to go along with a crazy idea, our own, even when we don’t remember how we got it, we must go along with this crazy idea all the way, bring it to realization in the teeth of all the doubts and all the rules and all the recriminations, despite everything. We bring this idea to realization in order to bring ourselves to realization for a loved person, “loved person” underlined. It was always obvious that no help was to be expected from anywhere at all, and under no circumstances from Altensam. To finish the Cone means to destroy Altensam, once the Cone is finished, Altensam is destroyed. It’s all directed against my brothers, everything I’ve ever done in my life perhaps.

Everything always for my sister, but against my brothers. These proceedings, against my brothers, for my sister, I have made into a personal art.

Instinctively I have always acted against my brothers and for my sister. And now, by realizing my idea of building the Cone, I am proceeding most radically against my brothers and for my sister. The Cone, my proof, “my proof” underlined. I kept telling them I can do what I like with my money.

And because the time has come. The Cone is the logical consequence of (my) nature. But I won’t satisfy the curiosity of the professionals or those who call themselves professionals though they’re not. None of them shall get near my Cone. So far I’ve managed to keep the site fenced off. By deploying my lookouts everywhere, who report anyone they see approaching the site, people are turned away, pushed back, before they have had even a glimpse of the Cone. But there’s no preventing people from coming one day, at a certain point when I have lost all influence over this situation, and from taking possession (mentally) of the Cone, or from thinking they have taken (mental) possession of it, and from exploiting my idea. “Exploiters of ideas” underlined. At first I kept my idea of building the Cone under scrutiny for a long time, while engaged in my scientific pursuits, I kept mulling over this one idea, scrutinizing it, then I tested it, and then I proceeded to work on its realization. I never asked anybody, one never should ask anybody, when one has this kind of an idea, whether it’s a good idea and whether the idea should be put into practice or not, because the reply is sure to be deadly. I turned to no one, no other head, and started to put my idea into practice without knowing what the realization of my idea means. The question of the meaning of the realization of this idea arises only after the Cone is finished.

It’s because I got away from Altensam so early in life, and went to Cambridge, because I got away from the actual scene of my thoughts, which has always been, and still is Altensam and its environs, whatever I’m thinking about, having to think about, that I had the opportunity to concern myself with problems and ideas which, had I remained in Altensam and its environs, let’s say within a radius of two or three hundred kilometers, I never could have concerned myself with, I could not have thought the thoughts I could think in Cambridge, I’d never have had the ideas I’ve had in Cambridge. To do one’s thinking on a scene, though actually far away from the actual scene, one’s best thinking by virtue of being at the farthest possible remove from the scene of everything relating to that scene. Everything about Altensam, for instance, is always best considered at the farthest remove from Altensam, not in Altensam itself, everything concerning the Cone, for instance, is best considered in Cambridge. It was not on the Kobernausser forest site itself that I supervised the building of the Cone, but from Hoeller’s garret. We must be removed as far as possible from the scene of our thoughts if we’re to think properly, with the greatest intensity, the greatest clarity, always only at the greatest distance from the scene of our thoughts, in Cambridge my thoughts about Altensam became the clearest possible thoughts about Altensam, conversely in Altensam the clearest possible thoughts about Cambridge. Always the problem of how to get to the farthest point away from the subject I must consider or think through, in order to consider or think through this subject the best possible way. Approaching the subject makes it increasingly impossible to think through the subject we are approaching. We become absorbed in the subject and can no longer think it through, we can’t even grasp it. And so I, wanting basically only to think about, to think thoroughly about my native scene, Altensam, Austria, etcetera, had to go to Cambridge. In that sense my scientific pursuits in Cambridge were always nothing but an opportunity to think hard, in Cambridge, about the scene of greatest interest to me, Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, to go over it in my head. To think a subject through, one has to assume a position at the farthest possible remove from this subject. First, approach the subject as an idea, then, take the most distant position possible from this subject which at first we’d approached as an idea, to enable us to evaluate it and think it through, a process leading logically to its resolution. A thorough, logical analysis of a subject, whichever subject, means the resolution of the subject, an analysis of Altensam, for instance, means the resolution, dissolution, of Altensam andsoforth. But we don’t, we never think with the utmost analytical rigor, because if we did we’d solve, dissolve, everything. In that case I’d never have been able to get the Cone ready, as Hoeller puts it, so Roithamer, “get ready” underlined. Hoeller has made no changes in the garret since I last stayed in it, so Roithamer, and none of the Hoellers was allowed to set foot in the garret, because I asked Hoeller to let no one, not even his own wife and his own children, into the garret in my absence; now that I’ve entered Hoeller’s garret I have the proof that Hoeller hasn’t changed a thing in the garret in my absence, that I’d only imagined that Hoeller had changed something in the garret, so Roithamer, but now I have proof that he changed nothing in the garret, everything in the garret is in the same place where it was when I left the garret, he, Hoeller, enters the garret once or twice a week only to air it, so that there’s absolutely no musty smell in Hoeller’s garret, my thoughtchamber at the Aurach gorge, so Roithamer, “thoughtchamber at the Aurach gorge” underlined. At the very instant I entered Hoeller’s garret for the first time together with Hoeller who wanted to show me his garret because he thought it might be a suitable place for me to think especially about building the Cone, it had always occurred to him, every time he stepped into the garret, to wonder whether his garret wasn’t the most suitable place for me and my purposes, I’d known at that earliest instant that Hoeller’s garret could enable me, as no other retreat so far had enabled me, to get on with my thinking, especially in regard to the Cone, and so I told him immediately, while we still stood in the doorway to the garret, that this was the most suitable place for my purposes and that I wished to rent it, rent is what I said to Hoeller, but Hoeller said that I could move into the garret as often and whenever I wanted, stay there whenever and for however long I wanted, he wouldn’t rent it to me, he was of course putting it at my disposal gratis, this offer I immediately accepted and I moved into Hoeller’s garret that same day and was confirmed in my assumption that I could advance in my thinking in Hoeller’s garret, from that point where I had gotten stuck in Cambridge. Here in Hoeller’s garret I’d been able to make my most important calculations, those referring to the statics of the Cone, in a short time. If I’d become blocked in thinking about the Cone at Cambridge, I enjoyed a fresh start in Hoeller’s garret. I lost my fear of having to give up the idea of building the Cone, of realizing it, perfecting it. When it comes to finishing the Cone, I owe everything to Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer. Suddenly it was possible to “go on living, go on working,” underlined. The problem of everything coming at once, so Roithamer, beginning with early childhood (three years old, four years?) having to cope with myself, with those around me, with the past on the one hand and with future prospects, so Roithamer, and with a constantly rising degree of responsibility, irresponsibility. Because we were born into Altensam, without preparation, as we’re all born unprepared into some environment unknown to us, a world that does its utmost to destroy the newborn, born into it, just as Altensam has always tried to destroy me, the concept Altensam, destruction of my person, of a being at its mercy, defenseless, totally unprotected. Suddenly facing Altensam without knowing what it is, and everything beyond and around Altensam, without knowing what that is. Our parents were not the right teachers for us, our rightful educators as it’s called, but they had no right to educate us, they merely brought us up for their own purposes, always only for their own purposes, with the result that my brothers were always ready to serve their purposes, but I was always against their purposes. By bringing me up for their purposes my parents succeeded in setting me against their purposes, my brothers for their purposes, me against their purposes, education for a purpose, “education for a purpose” underlined. The restlessness of my parents, everything in and about my parents was unrest, but unrest against everything, not for everything, the way they’d move from one bedroom to another every week, for instance, use a different room as a dining room every week, constantly change their preferences, now they’d opt for one thing and then again for quite another, now for one set of characters and then for the opposite kind of characters, for one kind of landscape, for the opposite kind of landscape, in reality they lived in a constant state of unrest because they were incapable of deciding in favor of a definite person, a definite landscape, anything definite for the long run, because they always believed they had to think, have, reject, attract, everything at the same time, so they were basically the unhappiest people imaginable. They’d punish us constantly, thinking it was a way to draw us closer to them, but they always repelled me with their strategy of punishment, parents taking possession of their children by means of punishments, so Roithamer, “taking possession of their children” underlined. How my father always referred to the tragedy, my mother always to the drama of their shared life. Weeks of silence between them, not a word spoken, openly parading their shutting each other out, weeks at a time of never opening the one (father’s) being to the other (mother’s), and the chaotic conditions that always reigned at Altensam because of this situation between my parents. They made children together, but were basically quite unsuited to having children and never really wanted children, my father only wanted heirs, not children, not descendants, just heirs. I remember my parents only as old people, “old people” underlined, who couldn’t stand each other and who could stand their children even less, miserable to have brought into the world these basically alien, strange creatures, to have them on their conscience, to be guilty of the crime of giving life, actually more than once, though without knowing toward whom, with respect to whom, they were guilty. Misfortune comes overnight, my father always said, so Roithamer, “overnight” underlined. My mother lived in a state of chronic anxiety, with frequent fainting spells that came on the heels of my fainting spells or vice versa. We children weren’t allowed to ask questions, so that our parents wouldn’t have to find answers. We were kept, as they say, on a tight rein. If the world only knew on how tight and short a rein we were kept throughout our childhood, the stinginess and meanness with which we were kept, like cattle in a farmyard, that’s how we children were kept in Altensam. We were always forced to do things, something was always demanded of us against our will, but even if it was something we wanted to do, it was demanded of us at a time when we didn’t want to do it. We were ordered to read, for instance, what we didn’t want to read, listen to what we didn’t want to hear, visit people we didn’t want to visit, wear clothes we didn’t want to wear, eat food we didn’t want to eat. My brothers, and my sister too, always gave in but I never gave in, they had to punish me to make me give in, I never gave in of my own free will. We had to live by strict rules in Altensam, rules made long ago for other people, for all those generations who’d lived in Altensam before us, rules not made for us at all, but we never had a chance to make and live by our own rules, nor by new rules made for us, so we constantly and on every occasion and non-occasion had to obey rules never made for us, rules that were decades behind their time, as everything in Altensam has from the start been behind its time. Because I understood this early in life I found myself in a situation which was constantly life-threatening to me, because I would not submit to those outdated rules and did not submit except under duress, even though the others always submitted, my siblings have always been submissive creatures, but I balked at everything. To my parents, everything about me and inside me had been disturbing, all my life, so I wanted quite early in life to live apart from my parents, and from my siblings as well, because they sided with my parents, which always made life easier for them, and it also made them turn out differently from me. I’m not a submissive man even today, rather I am more and ever more contrary, refractory, a quarrelsome character actually, in many ways more unyielding than necessary, all because of my years of desperation as a child, my long years of living in Altensam as a prison, Altensam always did feel like a childhood dungeon to me, it was never anything else, my good days at Altensam can be counted on the fingers of one hand, I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can’t remember committing, a judicial error probably. There I was, in solitary, in almost uninterrupted darkness, and speaking with my father was no different from being interrogated by a magistrate after an arrest. I was threatened with ever harsher punishments though my life was already enough of a harsh punishment. When I asked what I had done to be kept in this punitive fashion in solitary confinement at Altensam, I received no answer. Possibly I was kept in prison, in my parents’ dungeon, Altensam, to atone for their crime, for which I was, after all, so far doing a twelve to thirteen year stretch. The only witnesses to my innocence would of course have been my parents, but then my parents were also my prosecutors, they had conceived and born me directly into that dungeon, “conceived and born me” underlined. When, in unflagging despair, we have to regard our parents as nothing but our prison wardens in this vast, terrible dungeon, which is what I must call my parents’ house, father as the warden of his dungeon, his house, his property, my parental home, parental property, i.e., Altensam.

When we can never hope for a review of our case, because such a review is out of the question, for every reason in the world. We can dream of escape but we can never escape because, once escaped from our parental dungeon, we’d perish in no time. Then we’re released, they say prematurely released, “prematurely” underlined, and we’ve taken up the struggle against the dungeon, against the institution of this dungeon into which we were conceived and born, our lifelong struggle, struggle of despair, “struggle of despair” underlined, which is being held against us, first we’re imprisoned and almost wholly destroyed by our parents and now, after being released from our prison, having simply gotten away from it by reaching a certain maturity, we are rebuked for opposing our parents, quite openly opposing them. I never visited my parents, incidentally, I went to Altensam only to discuss Altensam and the problems of running it insofar as I was concerned with these problems, I never again felt the need to see my parents, neither my father nor my mother, when I went there it was only to see my sister, who was as if chained to her parents, to visit my sister, on such occasions I simply accepted the presence of my parents and that of my brothers who always sided with my parents as part of the bargain. They went on living for years, all those years I was already living in Cambridge, by and on my own initiative (“own initiative” underlined, then crossed out, then stetted), until they died, I never saw them again for at least twelve years before their deaths, they both died within a week, my mother immediately after my father, she couldn’t survive without my father, Altensam would have crushed her, she’d probably realized this, people die in such cases, as they say, of natural causes, the heart stops, but it’s actually a case of suicide. But by that time I’d already built half of the Cone and was engrossed in working up toward the tip and I hadn’t allowed my father’s sudden death followed immediately by my mother’s death to distract me in the least from continuing my work in building the Cone, surely these people who’d just died practically overnight were total strangers to me? is what I thought and felt, too. For the funeral, arranged by my brothers, I drove to Altensam, nothing had ever gone more against my grain than that funeral, actually a double funeral, for the first turned into the second almost without any noticeable transition, father’s funeral turned into mother’s funeral, so I attended my parents’ funeral, two weeks of tragic spectacle at Altensam, “tragic spectacle” underlined. Two such people die and all we feel is hatred for these people.

Death changes nothing in our attitude, it comes too late to change our feelings for these people. Even later on, no change for the better, on the contrary, in time these people seem to be more and more responsible for our misfortunes. That I am alive and working today I owe to my having been able to extricate myself from my parents at the crucial moment in my life, had it been up to them my life would have been over years ago, even though they might not have consciously wanted to kill me off, they’d soon have killed me off. And my siblings too continue to exist only because they’d completely given themselves up to my parents. Survival by self-surrender, so Roithamer. We go to a grave where we have buried our parents, buried them in accordance with their expectations, a so-called prominent grave along the church wall, where all their predecessors on Altensam are already interred, but all we feel is hatred, we haven’t even a chance, we simply have it no longer or never had a chance of feeling the least sympathy with them. That’s why I no longer go to my parents’ grave either. Because to go on living with such a lie afterward could have only the most destructive effect on everything else. But of course a man can never really liberate himself from anything, he leaves the prison into which he was propagated and born only at the instant of his death. We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can’t cope with this world we’re done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we’re living in our own world, not in some previous world, one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us. Beginning with our earliest flickers of intelligence we have to explore intently our chances of making this world, that’s been put on us like a worn, shabby suit of used clothes much too tight or much too large but in any case a shabby and torn and ragged and stinking outfit handed to us, as it were, off the world’s rack, we must explore the whole surface of our world and its subsurface, and keep probing it deeper and deeper, so as to discover our chances of making this world, which is not our world, our own after all, our entire existence is nothing but concentrating on such chances and on how, in what way, we’re to change this world which is not ours, ultimately to change it, so Roithamer.

And the moment of this change, such a moment is followed by the next andsoforth, must always be the right moment, so Roithamer. So that we can say at last, at the end of our life, that we have lived at least for a time in our own world and not in the given world of our parents. But ninety percent of us die without ever having lived in a world of their own, only and always in a world that was ready-made, presented and adapted to them by their parents’ generation, never, please note, in no way and never in their own world, they live and work out their lives in their parents’ world, not their own. Unless ten percent is too high an estimate for those who live in a world of their own making, not that of their parents? Isn’t it actually a much smaller percentage who’ve had a world of their own to live in? We must, from the first signs of intelligence, make the effort to change the parental world into which we have been conceived and born, into a world of our own, each for himself and each entirely for himself at the very first signs of intelligence, so that this effort that takes years, decades, will bring results, admittedly by overexertion, “overexertion” underlined, so that we can say, at the end of our existence, that we existed in a world of our own, so that we will not have to go to our death in the disgrace of having existed only in the world of our parents, because that would be the worst disgrace of all. We must use our heads from the very first to get away from our parents, birth is not enough, it does just the opposite, we must do it ourselves by our own unyielding effort, always strengthening our willpower, so that we can say, one day, that we have lived in our own world, and not only in the world of our parents. I remember that my mother always used to lock me up, in summer, in the so-called southeast turret room with its total exposure to the sun, when she’d been unable to make me submit to her will on some point or other, no doubt I was hard to handle, just as there’s no doubt whatever that my parents never shied away from brutality, so she’d lock me up in the turret room which never was unlocked all summer long except to lock me up in it, it was opened for no other purpose, nor were the windows in the turret room ever opened, the window bolts had been immobilized by rust for decades, so the windows couldn’t have been opened, that’s where she locked me up where the air, the hot, sunbaked air, had long since been suffocated and thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead flies lay about on the floor and on all the furniture, heaps of dead flies, in this turret room with its terrible smell, with those windows covered from top to bottom with fly shit by all those flies in all those years of their hectic death throes, this room left in an indescribable state of filth was where she locked me up for hours on end until she had me begging her through the locked door to let me out, because I was choking to death. I remember how she wanted to hurt me and did hurt me, by telling me again and again that I was the last straw, that I was evil incarnate, at an age when such words can already have the most deadly effect on a child’s soul. And father said nothing, he devoted himself to my brothers, not to me, he always treated my brothers as his successors, while punishing me most of the time by always referring to me, from the time I was only three or four years old, as a foreign element in Altensam. Even after their death my parents can’t be transformed into an idealized image for me, not even a bearable image, I’ve nothing to support me in such a falsification, so Roithamer. And father’s greatest punishment, or shall I call it his last move in his chess game against me, was to toss Altensam at me in his will, Altensam! though he knew how I felt about Altensam, that it filled me with loathing, nothing but loathing.

When he did that, however, he also handed me the means of showing my appreciation, in fact and in full accordance with my character, by selling Altensam, selling it and destroying it and using the proceeds for the purpose I’ve set my mind on. My parents would turn in their graves (this remark is crossed out). It’s like dissolving a dungeon, to dissolve Altensam, so Roithamer. Are my hatred and my aversion, these two weapons still in effect against my parents today, also in effect against my brothers? I ask myself.

Yes, but to a much lesser degree, so much less as to be basically insignificant, so Roithamer. While our eye is on our work and on the riskiness and vulnerability of our work, we spend most of our time barely trying to bridge over the next time span just ahead, and we think that getting through the time just ahead is all we need to think about, not our work, let alone the complicated work that claims our entire existence. To get through the time itself, no matter how, is what we think, what we instinctively feel we need.

Beginning in childhood. How to get on with it, that’s what we keep thinking constantly, and yet most of the time it doesn’t matter a damn how we get on with it, only that we get on with it. Because we have to concentrate all our mental and physical forces on just getting along, without achieving anything beyond that, so Roithamer. Work, to bridge over time, no matter what work, our occupation, whether digging in the garden or pushing on with a concept, it’s all the same. Then we’re obsessed with an idea though we’ve barely enough strength left to go on breathing, torment enough in itself. We’re obligated to (do) nothing, so Roithamer, “nothing” underlined. When we were children, how they talked us into believing that we had a right to live only if we accomplished some sensible work, how they assured us that we had to do our duty. All of it a case of irresponsible parents, irresponsible so-called authorized educators, irresponsibly plaguing us. Stuffed into the same kind of clothes regardless of our different personalities, our different characters, marched to church, made to eat, made to visit people, so Roithamer.

Mother’s fixed idea that we brothers must always be dressed alike and appropriately for Altensam, whatever that was, and her equally fixed idea, always, that all three of us should always think the same, act the same, believe the same things, do or refrain from doing the same things, but I always did something else and I always refused to wear the same clothes as the others, which led to daily anticipations of apocalypse. We weren’t alike, never, so Roithamer, but neither was I, ever, eccentric, it’s not true that I was eccentric, though they never tired of calling me an eccentric, it was their way of slandering me, because I acted in accordance with my nature without concerning myself with the others and their opinions, I was denounced as an eccentric, I, who simply tried to live always in accordance with my own, absolutely not eccentric nature, all I did was simply to be true to my own nature, day after day, but that’s how I was turned into an eccentric from earliest childhood on, and they also always called me a troublemaker, rightly, in this case, because I really always did trouble their peace in Altensam, I troubled their so-called peace all my life, in the end I made it my mission to trouble their peace in Altensam, so the term troublemaker really suited me more than anyone. That we were something special because we came from Altensam, that everything having to do with us and Altensam was something special, is a notion I always fought off, there was every indication that we, my parents, my siblings, me, everyone in Altensam, were ultimately something special, of course in the sense that everything in the world is something special, but nothing is more special than anything else, everything is so equally special that there’s nothing further to be said about it, so Roithamer. The ideas our parents had of us, and the hopes which our parents attached to these ideas of us and which were not fulfilled, ideas are not fulfilled, so Roithamer, not ideas all by themselves, “not all by themselves” underlined. We’d had to learn to play violin, play the piano, play the flute, partly because mother insisted and partly because each showed some talent for one or the other musical instrument, but all four of us hated these music lessons equally, music began to interest me, to fascinate me, only after I no longer had to practice it, once I could choose freely I became for a time, in fact for years, totally absorbed in music, I’d started to think that I must study music on a higher, on the highest, level, I’d even started on such a course of study but then gave it up again, because the formal study of music would have put me off, the formal study of music did not endear music to me, on the contrary, it affected me the same way as the compulsory music lessons at home in Altensam. Disobedience at Altensam had always been punished by inflicting deadly injuries on the psyche. I’d always lived in fear of that sunny-side turret room, but this special torture was reserved only for me, neither of my brothers was ever locked up in the turret room. For them, a slap in the face would be deemed enough, but me they locked in the turret room, the worst punishment of all, or else they said things about me that did me in, did me in emotionally and mentally, the worst possible punishment, of course. We were constantly forced to do things we didn’t want to do. But we’d always been told that our parents meant it for our own good. Every day, very often, we’d get to hear how much they meant it all for our own good, they never tired of repeating that phrase, it was one of their favorite maxims, time and again, we mean it for your own good (speaking to one or the other of us) until I felt more and more intimidated and humiliated, they could easily bully us, our parents, we were so naïve. Such a beautiful house, so artistic, so cultivated, our visitors always said, what could anyone say to the contrary? Such delightful surroundings, every piece of furniture a work of art, all the interiors they ever got to see the most splendid anywhere, all the vistas from Altensam opening on the loveliest, most farflung landscapes.

How, I often asked myself, how is it possible to see oneself going to ruin in so, to quote my mother’s constant phrase, luxurious an atmosphere? To be dying by inches, for no reason any outsider could see. Of course I wasn’t wholly a stranger to such concepts as joy, beauty, even the love-of-life, the beauty-of-nature andsoforth, so Roithamer. My eyes were as open in that direction as in the other. A man like me, who finds his greatest happiness in thought, most of all when engaged in thought out in the open, in the free (philosophical) world of nature, is saved by this fact in itself, by such an observation as this in itself, so Roithamer. Happiness can even be found in the so-called acceptance of pain, so Roithamer. One might, for instance, find supreme joy in writing well about supreme misery, so Roithamer. The ability to perceive, the ability to articulate one’s perception, can be a supreme joy andsoforth, so Roithamer. A statement in itself, no matter what is being stated, can be a supreme joy, as is ultimately the fact of simply existing, no matter how, so Roithamer. But we mustn’t keep thinking such thoughts all the time, keep mulling over everything we’re about, otherwise we may suddenly find ourselves deadened by our own persistent, relentless brooding and end up simply dead. I began by playing violin, against my will, so Roithamer, piano, against my will, because forced into it, later on the (voluntary) effort to study music on a higher and the highest level, the history of music andsoforth, so Roithamer, all came to nothing because under duress in the one case, in the other voluntary but formal, in the end serious involvement with music, getting into music of my own free will and without formal backing (university etcetera), Webern, Schönberg, Berg, Dallapiccola andsoforth. Began by reading against my will, read everything against my will, because my parents forced me to read, they’d thought that I was inclined to read, but because they assumed I had such an inclination, respect/inclination etcetera, I refused to read, never read anything but schoolbooks till my twelfth year, then, from about my twenty-fifth year on, I read incessantly, everything of my own accord, whatever I could lay my hands on. Because they demanded order, I chose disorder, because they demanded that we wear hats on our heads, never a hat on my head for decades, aversion to hats etcetera, so Roithamer. Because they always tried to stop me from going down to the various villages from Altensam, for all sorts of reasons which were bound to seem unreasonable to me, I’d always go down to the villages behind their backs, I made myself independent down there below Altensam, timidly at first but later with great firmness, while they believed me to be in my room, I’d actually gone down to the villages at night. And so more and more often behind their backs down to Altensam, so Roithamer, until one day I left Altensam for good and went down, never to come back to Altensam, never again, “never again” underlined. But in these outbreaks I was also alone. My siblings never and in no way followed me.

Absolute mutual incomprehension among us children even then. There’s nothing more for us to explain to each other, so Roithamer. Typical, mother’s fainting spells as a form of blackmail, her constant bouts with nausea, she controlled the household from her so-called nausea chair, I almost never saw mother free from nausea or the signs of nausea, father was the opposite, a robust constitution by nature, but she, my mother, always in her moods, always gloomy, bad moods because of her gloominess, father always in a good mood, she couldn’t stand it. Unlike his first wife, who had borne him no children, which was his reason, naturally, for divorcing her, as he always said, so Roithamer, she was the daughter of a Klagenfurt attorney, though all she’d ever had in her head was theaters and amusements, my father regarded everything connected with the theater and music as mere amusements, which is what he quite contemptuously called it, he had married this woman because he’d made her pregnant, but the child was born dead, its mother had been half insane for a long time after this stillbirth, so father said, until he, my father, simply couldn’t bear it any longer, because it was obvious that she could never have another child, hence the divorce, but then he overhastily married my mother, who certainly could and did give birth and to living children at that, so father said about my mother, she was never anything more to him than a good breeder, my father kept saying and he said it to anybody, even mere acquaintances, even strangers when he was drunk, unlike his first wife, who was always young and fresh, but then was completely ruined by that stillbirth, she’s still living, my father kept saying, whenever anyone asked him about her, his first wife, she’s still living, in France I think, anyway unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was always an old woman, even as a young woman she was already old, her sort are old even as children, so my father said, a good observation, as I can attest, such people are born with wizened old faces, it’s always frightening how ancient their faces look, the kind of newborn human being my mother apparently was always looks from the first moment as he or she is likely to look at seventy or eighty, but this aged look stays on that face, always, our mother was always the Old Woman, from the beginning, unlike his first wife, his second, our mother, was also a calculating woman, she was all calculation, she never did anything without calculation, while my first wife, so my father, so Roithamer, without being at all calculating, suddenly became an unhappy creature as a result of that stillbirth, my second wife was always calculating, with every fiber of her being, to such an extent, so my father, so Roithamer, that she’d get into a terrible state whenever one of her calculations didn’t happen to work out, but basically her calculations always worked out, this type of woman will get a bee in her bonnet, for instance something unnecessary she wants to buy, so my father, and she gets her way, even though by getting her way she weakens the relationship, which she doesn’t notice, but she thinks that she is strengthening her position.

When it comes to trying things, she always got her way when it came to trips or innovations at Altensam, and she did it almost always by using her sick spells with which she ruled Altensam for long periods of time without a letup, especially in the spring, when Altensam was ruled entirely by nothing but our mother’s nausea, in the heat of summer, in the sudden chill of autumn. If she’d failed in getting her wish, those wishes and ideas and projects of hers that always had so devastating an effect on Altensam, she resorted to threats, and most of all to the most terrifying of all threats, so my father, so Roithamer, suicide, she’d throw herself off the top of the wall one day, see if she didn’t, she’d be smashed to bits, because her life meant nothing to us, even though we all depended on her, she was the heart and core of our life, but basically she wasn’t the heart and core of life in Altensam as she kept telling us, but rather the heart and core of our creeping death in Altensam, and she never made her threat good, these people, so Roithamer, never stop talking of suicide, they threaten suicide every time their wishes and ideas are balked, and because they have no other resources except this threat, because they’re basically without resources, absolutely without resources, but they don’t kill themselves, they go on living for years, for decades, with this threat and by grace of this threat, and then they die a perfectly natural death, so Roithamer. When she was alone in Altensam, because my father was away on business, she thought about how she might torment him when he’d come back home, what kind of horror she could surprise him with, it had to be a horror with at least a touch of perversion in it, which would instantly put him in a frightful mood which would of course have the most frightful effect on us children and on all of Altensam, and when father was coming home to Altensam, she’d sit for hours, always looking at her watch, in her turret room watching the road from the village by which he had to come up, watching everything that went on down there, always glancing at her watch. noting who was coming up to Altensam on what errand, who was leaving Altensam and on what errand and with what baggage and especially what kind of tools, because more than anything else mother was mistrustful, she completely mistrusted not only us but everything, and it was probably this mistrust that had undermined her health from her earliest years because even as a child she had been most noticeably mistrustful, and so of course, what with her organism weakened by her incessant mistrustfulness, she was almost always sickly, or pretended to be sickly, you could never be absolutely sure at any given moment whether she was sickly or pretending to be sickly, what was interesting about it was just this, that she was always sickly, but never really sick, never seriously sick so as actually to arouse real concern, but only always sickly, this sickliness of our mother’s was one of the main characteristics of the atmosphere at Altensam as far back as I can remember, with her chronic sickliness she finally infected all of Altensam so that the entire atmosphere there was sicklied through, everything there in addition to herself was always equally sickly, it seemed as though she was quite consciously using this sickliness of hers as a means to her ends, meaning that she used it against us, also against her husband, our father, with this sickliness she controlled not only the most important aspects of life at Altensam but also all the secondary aspects, even the most insignificant ones, and this sickliness was instantly sensed by everyone who’d come to Altensam, even those who don’t know Altensam that well and those for whom Altensam was something new, such a newcomer was immediately included in this sickliness which had already seized and taken hold and poisoned everything at Altensam, he couldn’t know. what it was that had brought him into this peculiarly ailing condition when he’d barely set foot in Altensam, but it was nothing else than our mother’s sickliness, whereas father’s first wife was always fresh and young, so my father always said, so Roithamer, his second, the one he called the nanny, was always old and sickly, he always stated this quite openly and he’d often told my mother to her face that her only weapon apart from her boundless stupidity, was her sickliness, stupidity and sickliness which she used against him and against everything that made up Altensam, against everything Altensam had been until she appeared on the scene, and it is a stage entrance, my dear! I can still hear my father telling her to her face, a stage entrance, my dear! stupidity and sickliness, so Roithamer, were our mother’s chief attributes, father was right in his judgment of her, we children had always suffered from her stupidity and her sickliness, because our mother’s ill nature was fed as much by her stupidity as by her sickliness, which most times was a crafty production of hers, a spectacle she put on for us every day, in which she played the lead. My father had soon turned away from this wife, our mother, she had borne him children, whelped them, but even this at a time when he no longer wanted any children, once they were born he realized that he didn’t really want them at all, and so, since they (we) existed, willy-nilly, we were treated accordingly, always as creatures to be considered his own children but whom their progenitor basically no longer wanted and hadn’t wanted for the longest time. Mother, always unkempt, her appearance invariably neglected, as father said, so Roithamer, sloppily dressed, her buttons half undone, her stockingless feet in unlaced shoes, that’s how I remember her, on her feet all day long only in the hope of catching one of us or one of the so-called staff out, running or limping all the time, another typical trait of hers was a quick succession of injuries or ulcers, inflammations on her legs, mostly the calves, so she ran or limped along always smelling of every kind of medication, bought from so-called quacks, always bought in large quantities, always disseminating the smell of such medications throughout Altensam, most of the time wearing an old bathrobe, a legacy from my grandmother, in this bathrobe, which hadn’t even been worn by my grandmother any longer, she’d only used it to cover the dahlias against the autumn frosts, but my mother had dragged it out from the heap of rags in the gardener’s shack and put it on and then worn it for years afterward, my father loathed that bathrobe, we children loathed that bathrobe, but mother was always wearing this bathrobe we all hated, she even appears in this bathrobe in family photographs, the woman in these pictures is always a total stranger to me, these pictures convince me more than the reality did that my mother was always some strange woman, she’d turn up suddenly everywhere and always unpredictably, as if she had sneaked up on you, to check up on things, no matter whose room it was, suddenly there she was checking up, she’d always wanted to know what was going on in the various rooms, she’d rip the door open like a bolt of lightning and stand there, demanding an explanation, because we’d always just done something which, in her view, we shouldn’t have done or hadn’t been allowed to do, something improper always, if not strictly forbidden, nevertheless improper or useless or embarrassing, in any case something typical of us. In the farm buildings she was generally feared, she was always checking on everybody’s work and accused the farm workers, who’d stayed at Altensam only on account of my father, whom they loved, she accused them of getting nothing done, or not enough, she always criticized all of them for being too slow or careless, yet not one of them was ever slower or more careless than that woman, our mother. All day long she was on her feet in her repulsive state of slovenliness, toward evening she’d always retreat to her room and put on a simple black dress, basically even elegant, very expensive too, but on her it somehow didn’t look good, something seemed wrong with it, it was a collarless dress with a large diamondstudded gold pin on her chest, this pin had come into her hands from the estate of my grandmother’s sister as a wedding present, and so she got herself ready to go to the theater. She’d get one of the stewards to drive her to the Linz Theater, on principle she never missed a première, and returned toward midnight, never without a totally adverse opinion on everything she’d happened to see at the Linz Theater, making fun of everything, it was always the same story, she’d get out of the car in the courtyard, the steward would drive the car back to the car barn where all the cars were kept, and from the moment she’d come in the big front door, even before going to the downstairs kitchen for the hot coffee that was kept for her there, she’d unloose a tirade against everything she’d just experienced at the theater, I have never heard her say. anything positive about the Linz Theater, though I must admit that it’s one of the worst theaters extant, always producing only wellintentioned plays which invariably turned into some kind of catastrophe or other, in some repulsive way, too, anyway I never heard her say anything positive about it. Still she had never managed even once to pass up one of their premières. She was an addicted theatergoer even though she understood nothing whatever about the theater, a passionate theatergoer; that the Linz Theater was absolutely the worst theater in the world, as she said time and again, was of course no secret to her, especially since she was repeatedly confirmed in this judgment by others, so-called theater buffs with whom she’d chatted during the intermissions, but I happen to know that she only went out to the theater in order to lay in a supply of colognes and face creams at a certain cosmetics shop on the way to the theater, before curtain time, she had hundreds of these face creams and colognes in her bathroom and she made incredibly lavish use of the contents of these hundreds of bottles and tubes, unfortunately all these so-called fragrances, our mother’s taste in fragrances is debatable, were always overwhelmed by the stinking salves and concoctions of her quacks, they’re called health practitioners in our country, so they were basically always superfluous. The theater is only a pretext, so father said, so Roithamer, for stopping at the cosmetics shop for a supply of all that chemical stuff which is so totally ineffective on that woman (our mother), the grand opera is only a pretext for her crazy perfumes, the comedy or the tragedy in Linz is only a pretext for her ghastly moisturizing delusions. She understood nothing, neither the theater nor music, and cared less, but the theater (in Linz) and the music (in Linz), for she also attended the more important concerts in Linz, provided her with an opportunity and a pretext, not only to pick up supplies of every possible kind of aromatic filth (so my father) at the Linz cosmetics shop, but all this theater-and concert-going had also always served to prove to us her appreciation of art and her cultural requirements, but most of all they served to humiliate my father, this uncultured man, as she always said, who hasn’t the least regard for great art, all these forays to theaters and concerts, which cost heaps of money, so father said, just to rub it in how cultured she was. But in reality our mother was not at all a cultured woman, not cultured in the least, and our father, who in fact couldn’t care less about her kind of culture, the kind of culture she had in her head, she was quite right in this respect, he cared nothing at all about it, but the very fact that he cared nothing at all for her kind of culture makes him a cultured man, so Roithamer. Father had at least read a so-called good book from time to time, but mother had never, to my personal knowledge, read a good book, she detested everything that had to do with books, especially good books, as she herself said, hated them like the plague, and she’d always done everything in her power to keep us, my siblings included, away from so-called good books, away from all books on principle, she’d aborted any possibilities for us to get anywhere near good books or any books, it was typical that our three- to four-thousand-volume library at Altensam, dating back to the times of our great-grandparents and grandparents, was locked up, and that we had to ask mother, not father, when we wanted to get into the library, which incidentally was always in a state of terrible neglect, it was never put in order, never even dusted, for decades on end, and our mother never approved of our desire to read, she’d always sidetracked us, when we wanted to read a book in the library, any book, into the music room instead, that’s where she wanted us to spend our time, not in the library, the library was off limits to us, but she’d maneuvered us into the music room, doubtless the less dangerous of the two, even though our mother, our parents, knew that we, my siblings too, loving music as we did, nevertheless hated making music, because we’d been forced to practice. We were locked out of the library, the others were also less interested in it than I was, so Roithamer, I had no way to get into the library, because mother had locked the library keys up in her key safe, books were meant for grown-ups, they’d go to your head like a disease, mother always used to say, we could read fairy tales, but we didn’t want to read fairy tales, fairy tales yes, everything else, no. She was afraid that I, in particular, might discover in the library that the world was bigger than Altensam, that it was basically entirely different from the world I knew, I am speaking of the time prior to my eighth or ninth year. In my eighth or ninth year there was a sudden complete reversal: she, my mother, had persuaded herself that I should be devouring the library, that I should go into the library everyday, but now I no longer wanted to go in, I refused to read a single book, she couldn’t make me, my mother was of course totally baffled by this, so Roithamer, first I want to go in but I’m not allowed in, then I’m supposed to go in but I no longer want to go in. She’d been of the widespread opinion that children to the age of eight or nine have no business in a socalled adult library, but that at age eight or nine they should be introduced to these socalled adult books, and she’d meant to follow these recommendations. But now I was no longer interested in our library. It’s such an old library, I thought, after all, I’ll find new books once I’ve left Altensam, why bother with these old books now, they’d certainly have interested me, so Roithamer, but I refused to give in to force. Of new books there were none in Altensam, they were all at least forty or fifty years old, and many much older, without counting my father’s books on woods, forestry and hunting, which were always kept up-to-date with the latest information on woods, forestry, both practical and research, and hunting. Attempt at a description of father: we’d always trusted him absolutely, but under the influence of that woman, our mother, he’d become more and more estranged from us, we could feel how with the years and everything that happened in all those years, happenings in Altensam always brought about by his wife, our mother, nothing really but pathological processes resulting from that woman’s constitutional predisposition, she was simply a disaster for Altensam, how in time we grew away from our father, just as he grew away from us. That woman also exercised a most harmful influence on our father, but he had soon succumbed, after an initial resistance, to her superior willpower and came to be totally controlled by this willpower of hers, everything in Altensam came to be ruled by that woman’s willpower, because of our mother, the daughter of a butcher in Eferding, everything in Altensam was suddenly sickly, ailing, though it had never been ailing before, not even during the period of my father’s first wife, whom I often visit, and who has never forgiven my father, never could forgive him for more or less ruining her life by seeing her only as a potential breeder of his children, so that she ceased to mean anything to him once my father’s first child was stillborn, changing her beyond recognition, which caused my father to remove this wife entirely from Altensam, under the influence of my mother whom my father quite openly and even to her own face called a makeshift solution, because he thought that he must secure the first available woman, so my father, so Roithamer, under the influence of that woman as a makeshift, that makeshift as a woman, so Roithamer, “makeshift as a woman” underlined, who had no sooner turned up than she tried to transfer to Altensam her lower-middle-class mentality, her crudeness, yet pitiableness, her ill-bred and incorrigible ways, and in this she succeeded, my father immediately fell completely under this influence, which soon took its devastating, in fact annihilating toll of Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, it was only at the start that he was able to resist this influence, but afterward, after only a brief period of life with this Eferding woman, when he was about forty, he gave up, he gave himself up, first he gave up Altensam under the influence of this Eferding woman, so my father always said, so Roithamer, then he gave himself up, he was probably overcome with indifference toward everything in Altensam, all at once, from one minute to the next, I had made the crucial mistake of my life, so my father himself said, so Roithamer, I should never have married this Eferding woman, this butcher’s daughter with her butcher’s physiognomy, so my father always said, so Roithamer, with her butcher’s way of life. But it makes no difference in the end, so my father, so Roithamer. Before this so-called mistake my father, born and raised in Altensam, had the usual boarding school experiences, then went through the necessary secondary and university courses at Passau and Salzburg and Vienna, and eventually led the life or the existence which the men of Altensam always led, working at his forestry and his farming on the one hand, comfortloving on the other hand, with all the love possible in so fundamentally monotonous a life reserved for hunting, he’d led this quiet life of such activities and inclinations, a life unremarkable even in spurts, up to the point when he realized that he could not possibly go on alone, as he had been since his parents’, my grandparents’, early death, entirely devoting himself to running Altensam, which left him fully occupied yet not really satisfied, for no matter how much such a splendid and always basically well-functioning, going concern as Altensam, always a healthy, untroubled mix of farming and forestry, including lumbering, brick-making, quarries and cement works, no matter how much so healthy an economic enterprise could keep a man like my father, who had grown up with it and was wholly at home in it, fully occupied, it could not in the long run be enough to satisfy even him. But he had no other source of satisfaction by nature, unless he’d given the whole thing up, which he wasn’t the man to do, so he’d begun thinking, by the time he was forty, of saving himself by cutting down on all that, and then suddenly decided, purely out of cold calculation, to have heirs, to bring children into the world, after the failure with his first wife, who probably was better suited to him, with the second, the most impossible mate imaginable for him, as became quickly apparent, though she did bear him the desired children, whom, however, at the very moment they were suddenly present, he simply no longer wanted, as I now know and as I secretly always felt, he had needed the children in order to let himself go, to relax the intensity with which he’d been forced to live, freed by now having children, even when they were still very young, as though the children had already begun to succeed him, to take over from and for him, as far as he was concerned, long before it could actually be possible for them to do so.

During this period when he let go, when he gave up, and took to devoting himself wholly to nothing but his inclinations, the period after his fortieth year, the effective influence of his second wife, our mother, had naturally been enabled to spread very rapidly, because he was no longer emitting any energies of his own to counteract it, but, as noted, it was all the same to him, “all the same” underlined, he’d made a mistake and he’d also let go, given (himself) up, and from that point on I never saw my father do anything in particular except go out hunting, alone or with friends, often with my brothers, too, but never with me, hunting never even entered into my thoughts, I never understood it at all, while all my father cared about was the forest as forest, not as an economic reality, but just for the game in it, nothing else, till the day he died, and this indifference of his to everything other than his one single interest, hunting, wholly encompassed us, his children. Once he’d realized the aversion he felt for the Eferding woman, his dislike of her that grew from day to day, as he always said, he ended by resigning himself to the presence of this woman in his life as someone unacceptable, whom he couldn’t any longer accept, nor could he get her out of the way, but he could have no relationship with her not conditioned by aversion and hatred. He, our father, was the opposite of that woman in every respect and it had become ever more obvious that theirs was the case of a purely accidental encounter, probably during one of his visits to a friend in Eferding, actually it was only despair over the failure of everything he had hoped for from his first wife, which made him actually, and without a grain of sense, as he put it, take the bait of that Eferding woman, who was an absolute nothing, she was simply old and sloppy, which she simply continued to be at Altensam, only to a greater degree. But to judge the whole case in this biased fashion, putting all the blame on the Eferding woman, is also impossible, “impossible” underlined. The fact is that our father had quite often stopped at the public house in Eferding where our mother came from, to which the butcher shop was attached which is still being run by our mother’s brother today, and one day he stopped there again, and this led to the decline of Altensam, or rather the decline of what was left of Altensam that could still decline, because at that time Altensam was actually already in _ the process of deteriorating, because my father had already given up on everything inwardly, all he still wanted was to make good his decision, once he had taken it, to beget children, regardless with which woman, though deep down he no longer really cared. And from the moment in which he let go of things and finally gave up, Altensam, what was left of it, had been let go and had been basically given up. The appearance of our mother at Altensam was then no more than the outwardly visible sign of his letting-go and giving-up, by the time we children were born this process of letting-go and giving-up had been going on for a long time, and we were already weakened in advance by this very fact alone. Enveloped in this process of letting-go and giving-up, we had naturally been sensitive to this process from the very start of our existence and had then fallen increasingly under its influence, we could never escape from it, we were swept along downward in our father’s tendency to let go and give up. By the time we were born, our father had already turned away from Altensam, turned his back on it, all we ever experienced was this condition, more prevalent from one day to the next, this process of decay hastened on the one hand by my father, who had already turned away from Altensam, and for all sorts of easily understandable reasons such as her different background, lower-middle-class milieu, lower-middle-class mentality in general and throughout, Eferding etcetera, it was also hastened along by my mother in truly despicable fashion. A son in distress, no matter which son, will naturally go to his father for advice, but I never went to my father, no matter how troubled I was, and I never asked my father serious questions, because I knew that none of my questions would receive an answer from him, because he had turned away from us even before we were born, and I also never went to my mother, because I feared my mother. I had no way of reaching my father, although I longed all my life to reach him, because my father was not interested in me, no more than in my siblings, and mother I feared, we feared her, but I feared her more than my siblings did because I was more hated by my mother than my siblings, on the other hand I did have a somewhat better relationship with my father than my siblings did, who leaned toward my mother rather than my father as their parent. Only my sister was loved by my father like no one else, that was evident always and on every occasion, after his death she was the most defenseless creature in the world. She, my sister, was, like myself but perhaps even more demonstrably, her father’s child, akin to him, even more than myself who was akin to father, not to my mother, there was absolutely nothing in me, about me, coming from my mother’s, the Eferding woman’s, side, everything or almost everything came from my father and all this was true in an even higher degree of my sister, while both my brothers take after the Eferding woman in every respect, even though it expresses itself quite differently than with the Eferding woman, my mother, herself. This is also the reason I could never have a closer relationship with my brothers, because I always saw Eferding in them, everything connected with Eferding and the Eferding woman and her origins, while conversely my brothers always saw in me and in my (and their) sister everything connected with my, with our father, they saw more of it in my sister, but they hated me, my sister they always regarded as peculiar, they suspected her of being basically crazy, though it was nothing but my father’s nature in her, it was Altensam, but because they couldn’t openly hate her, a girl, as they hated me, it was Altensam they hated, unconsciously, as my mother did, she always hated everything unconsciously, anyway everything in her and about her took effect unconsciously, though also in the most calculating way, for people like my mother simply aren’t rational beings, they are instinctual beings, and her feelings tend to be, actually, nothing but falsifications, in no matter what direction they move, they’re unconscious falsifications of nature into something unconsciously denatured like themselves. In reality, however, it was a case of my mother at first always trying to win me over, she had soon realized that I, that everything in me, was against her, which is why she left no stone unturned to draw me closer to herself, in every way and by every means, but when she saw, when she understood, that all she did to gain her ends, to bring me over to her side, which in the nature of things simply wasn’t possible, was in vain, a senseless struggle, then she gave her contempt and hatred free rein. I’d not been able to go against my nature and enter into hers, lose myself in hers, as she had probably envisioned. It’s always clear from the first, what a newborn child is made of and where it is tending, it is always a tendency backward, a tendency of return, in my case I was simply cut out of my father’s cloth and it had to be madness to refuse to see this and want to change it. Quite as in my sister’s case, but my mother naturally did not let her feel it in the same harsh manner, not in the case of someone so delicate even from childhood on. Though the child always remained a stranger to her, my mother never treated her roughly, she simply didn’t dare, or she’d have come into quite unimaginable conflict with my father. And so my parents had brought children into the world, quite consciously, I know what their motives were, motives of securing the succession on my father’s side, and motives of securing a lasting establishment and what this meant for her, our mother, namely to get Altensam into her possession, just the same they’d quite consciously committed a crime, that capital crime against nature, to beget and to procreate children out of sheer calculation, “calculation” underlined, children some of whom sided with the father and some of whom sided with the mother, my brothers siding with mother, what I called taking the part of Eferding, so Roithamer, I and my sister with father, what I called taking the part of Altensam, so Roithamer. In this way my parents had seen to it from the start that Altensam had to fall apart into two deadly halves. My father always understood all of this, and the reason why I later let him too go out of my sight and out of my mind and even for a long time let him disappear from my memory was the fact that he, and I suddenly see this again before me as a very definite image, that from the moment we had come into being he basically only turned his back on us and left us behind, that’s how I actually see my father, in his gray loden suit, walking into the woods to hunt or quite simply to escape, always walking away from us, and always walking away from us to make his escape, basically depressed by nothing but a bad conscience over having closed his books and given up his life. For how many years I had tried to win my father over, but he always pushed me away, no answers, nothing but walking away from me, not noticing me. Such years and even decades of rejection and refusal will end in our dropping such a man out of our thoughts from one moment to the next, no matter what we may have felt for him only a minute before, we cease to think of him and it is as if he had never existed, he may turn up in our thoughts now and then, but we immediately turn our minds to something else. Until his fortieth year my father must have been a fairly happy man, from his fortieth year onward, however, he was the opposite, so Roithamer. Attempt at a description of Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone: to be able to concentrate entirely in the evenings, on Tuesdays and Fridays, even beginning with my so-called free afternoons, on my manuscript about Altensam, my room suddenly the ideal place for this work, after having seemed for years to be unsuitable, entirely unsuitable for this purpose, with its view of the stone wall, lately always wet, of the physics institute, a view favorable to my undertaking in any case, a state such as the one that always prevails in Hoeller’s garret, which was always ideal for my purposes, Hoeller’s garret was the only place where it was possible for me to construct the Cone, just as it is now possible for me here, in my room at Cambridge, this room without an actual view, giving only on the damp, wet wall of the institute, to think about my work on the Cone now that the Cone has been finished, now that I’m back here and before I’ve become totally absorbed again in my scientific work, before it claims all of my attention, my chance after my return to devote some time to this work, a writing job, “writing job” underlined, in retreat, “retreat” underlined, to clarify everything that has happened these last six years, since I did need six years to construct and to build the Cone, for one thing the time factor, a short time relative to myself, my origins, relative to Altensam, but basically much too long a time which very often and repeatedly drove me to the edge of madness. The idea and the realization of the idea, the achievement of the realization of the idea of the Cone as the tackling and the realization and the achievement of an aim that has totally dominated me these last years, the problem of making my intention, which has always been described as only a crazy and totally hopeless scheme, clearly understandable not only to myself but to everyone else who was involved with the realization and completion of the Cone. Taking under consideration the fact that I was on the one hand committed to England, to Cambridge, while on the other hand my energies were after all totally committed to my intention to build the Cone in the Kobernausser forest, I was duty-bound to this scene of the site of the Cone, the problem of being always here, in Cambridge, or in the Kobernausser forest, at the right moment, of not neglecting the one for the other, the lowest limit of my responsibility. Actually I should have spent years in Cambridge so as not to neglect Cambridge, while at the same time staying in the Kobernausser forest, meaning in Hoeller’s garret, specifically, so as not to neglect the building of the Cone, now that the Cone is finished and now that I haven’t lost Cambridge, I can see that it was possible for me to muster the necessary energy to build the Cone without neglecting Cambridge, that is, neither my teaching nor my own research, because it was possible for me to do the one under the stimulus of the other, not to neglect Cambridge by means of energies generated by my work on the Cone, not to neglect the Cone by means of energies generated at Cambridge, and to do both always in the highest state of concentration upon each objective as required. The assurance I acquired in the course of changing my scene of operations, staying now in Cambridge for a time, then again in Hoeller’s garret, in England on the one hand, in Austria on the other, always shifting from one to the other at the proper moment, without being aware of this fact, always doing the right thing as a gift, a form of talent, without consciousness, the change of locale, leaving Cambridge for the Kobernausser forest and vice versa, but also moving from one to the other in thought without any transition, for how often I was in Cambridge (in my thoughts) while being in reality in the Kobernausser forest, and how often, conversely, in the Kobernausser forest (in my thoughts) though in reality I was in Cambridge.

That I told myself from time to time, even though I was in Cambridge just now, I’m in the Kobernausser forest now of necessity, conversely, of necessity now in Cambridge, although in reality I’d been in the Kobernausser forest. I could always switch my head from one place to the other, instantly, even as a child I could switch instantly from one thing to another. And the very fact that I could be most effective especially in Cambridge for the Kobernausser forest, most effective in the Kobernausser forest for Cambridge, the fact that my intensity is greater for the one when I’m in the other place, and vice versa, and I could exercise this ability because I had complete control of this mechanism from earliest childhood on, so Roithamer.

To build the Cone without teaching and studying in Cambridge, studying as I teach, studying by teaching, and conversely, to have intensified my achievement in Cambridge as I did without the actual building of the Cone is unimaginable. We very often make headway rapidly and with the greatest assurance in some (most strenuous) work or occupation or passion andsoforth, so Roithamer, because we’ve started or become involved or planned another, similar work or occupation or passion and never abandoned it, so Roithamer. The one work or occupation or passion which very often takes us to the very edge of despair, often solely because we are in fact involved in another such strenuous effort simultaneously. I alone could have conceived such an idea, the idea of building such a cone, planning it and actually building it, everybody said so and they’re right. The need to understand what led to this idea, most likely everything led to this idea.

What led to this idea and the realization of the idea as the effect of its original cause, so Roithamer, a matter of consistency, just as the realization of the idea led to perfecting the idea andsoforth. To build is the most wonderful thing in the world, it’s the supreme gratification, “supreme gratification” underlined. It’s what everyone longs to do, building, but not everyone gets the chance to build, and everyone who does build gets this gratification out of it. Especially in building something no one has ever built before. It’s the supreme gratification, “supreme gratification” underlined, to complete a work of art one has planned and built oneself. To complete a philosophical work, or a literary work, even if it’s the most epoch-making and most important work of its kind, can never give us this supreme gratification, nothing like the gratification that comes with actually accomplishing the erection of an edifice, especially an edifice such as no one ever has erected before. With this one has achieved all that is humanly possible. Even if going all the way in perfecting this work is sure to cost one all he has and has, in fact, destroyed him. The price for such an edifice as a work of art of one’s own, the only one of its kind in the world, cannot be less than everything, “everything” underlined. At first we shy away from even conceiving such an idea, we’re terrified that it may in time take possession of us utterly and end by crushing us altogether, so Roithamer, while on the one hand we rise up against ourselves for the sake of the idea, on the other hand we resist the idea in self-defense, yet in the end it turns out to have been a revolt against ourselves and for the idea. The idea demands fulfillment, it demands realization and never stops demanding to be realized. One always wants to give it up, but one ends by not giving it up because one is by nature disinclined to give it up and in fact one sets about realizing the idea. Suddenly one’s head is full of nothing else, one has become the incarnation of one’s idea. And now one begins to reap the benefit of all one’s suffering, of one’s origins and everything connected with one’s origins, in my case everything connected with Altensam, everything being primarily and to begin with the story of one’s origins, even if it all consists of nothing but martyrdom. It all turns out to be useful, and the worst of the horrors are most useful of all.

There’s a chance of realizing one’s idea, because it is precisely the torments of one’s family history and the torments of the present, which is as much of a torment as one’s history has been, torment and nothing else, it is precisely these past and familial torments, if they are bad enough, the worst possible, which enable one to realize one’s idea to a high and even the highest degree.

The greater the idea and the higher our aim by way of that idea, the greater our historical and our familial torments are required to have been. Suddenly I realized what an enormous capital my idea could draw upon, in the accumulated capital of torments I had suffered from my family origins and my personal history and all the history connected with me in any way, and I was able to put all these resources to work, in full possession of my faculties, once I had them suddenly at my disposal. For what was Altensam to me other than family as a torment, history as a torment, the present as a torment, leaving out of account the few bright spots such as the quite extraordinary natural conditions here, the extraordinary rock formations, animals, plants andsoforth, as the only chance of retreat andsoforth, so Roithamer. Human, natural, and art history as torment, as the possibility of reaching my aim, so Roithamer. At the terminal point of the conditions that have always prevailed here. The basis, Altensam, “basis” underlined, on which I have been able to realize my idea, finish the Cone, hence Altensam and everything connected with Altensam was absolutely necessary, because each thing always derives from all the others, so Roithamer. The Cone, as it is, is unthinkable without Altensam, just as everything is unthinkable without everything else andsoforth, so Roithamer. The terrifying idea, so Roithamer, which, the more terrifying it is, the closer to realization it is. And so everything at the terminal point of my observations made in my childhood and youth in Altensam has been necessary toward the realization and completion of the Cone, everything about (and in) the Cone, everything else andsoforth, so Roithamer. By studying Altensam and my sister and trying to think Altensam and my sister through and by continuing to extend these efforts on and on until they could be extended no further, I enabled myself to build the Cone and realize and complete it. Because I let myself in for the sheer terror of this undertaking to build the Cone, let myself in for the monstrousness, “the monstrousness” underlined, of my life, so Roithamer. As if I had lived, existed, all along, all those years of development, which were nothing else than my development in the direction of the Cone, the direction of this monstrousness. One is called upon to approach and realize and complete the monstrousness, and everyone has some such enormity in his life, or else to be destroyed by this monstrousness even before one has entered into it. In this way people always tend to waver at a certain point in their lives, and always at the particular crucial point in their lives when they must decide whether to tackle the monstrousness of their life or let themselves be destroyed by it before they have tackled it. Most people prefer to let themselves be destroyed by this monstrousness rather than to tackle it, because they aren’t equipped by nature to tackle and realize and fulfill their monstrousness, they’re rather inclined, by nature, to let themselves be destroyed by their monstrousness before they have tackled it. The matured idea is enough in itself to destroy most people, so Roithamer. And such an enormity as a work of art, a lifework of art — regardless of what this monstrousness is, everyone has such a possibility in him, because his nature is in itself such a possibility — can only be tackled and realized and fulfilled with the whole of one’s being. In so tackling such a monstrousness we have entered into pure defenselessness, into being alone with ourselves within ourselves, alone with our idea as an enormity, and everything is against us.

Because we believe that we can’t do otherwise we keep wanting to give up, because we can’t know that we are by nature quite well equipped for such a monstrousness, which we begin to see only after we’ve realized and completed this monstrousness as an idea, just as I hadn’t known whether I was capable of building the Cone before the Cone was completed. But once we’ve reached our aim, we no longer know anything about the way to our aim and we keep finding it impossible to believe, for the rest of our lives our doubt keeps increasing and we can’t believe that we have reached our aim, the realization and completion of our idea as, for example, a Cone, so Roithamer. At the end, when we have reached our aim, no matter what aim, even if this aim is the building of a so-called work of art, we find ourselves frightened by it. Attempt at a description of Hoeller, of Hoeller’s wife and Hoeller’s garret: before I tackled the study of statics I went to Hoeller in order to observe Hoeller, first to observe Hoeller and then I studied his house, the house he built out of his own head and with his own hands, the study of one thing always presupposes the study of something else from which the first is derived. Hoeller had most readily taken me into his house and into his family, I’d felt that it wouldn’t be enough for me to just visit briefly in Hoeller’s house, but that I needed to live in it as long as necessary, free to observe him in person and his building construction and his family, in his house and together with all of them, as long as necessary, in the way in which I thought I would have to live there in order to be able to tackle the realization of my idea of building the Cone. For the idea of building the Cone, even Hoeller hadn’t been able to imagine a cone as a building, and Hoeller also had to consider my idea of building the Cone in the center of the Kobernausser forest as a crazy idea, I’d been able to observe that in him, for the idea to build the Cone could be realized only after I clearly understood Hoeller’s house, I’d said to Hoeller, and that it was necessary for me to use Hoeller’s garret as my base of operations, for Hoeller’s garret had always, from the first moment I saw it, seemed to me to be the ideal place in which to do my thinking. To observe and explore Hoeller’s house as well as Hoeller’s person was the first thing I had to do before I could tackle the realization of my plan to erect the Cone. I tried to make my intentions clear to Hoeller and he understood me immediately. And then Hoeller informed his family of my reasons for staying in his house, he even told the children for what purpose I would be living and staying with them for weeks at a time, quite on my own, to work on my idea. That I would have to explore the Hoeller house, understand it and explore it thoroughly, in order to begin planning my own building. To this end I needed nothing but perceptiveness and the proper application of my perceptiveness to the object under observation, namely, the Hoeller house. So I had brought nothing with me except the absolutely necessary and the will to be able to understand and explore the Hoeller house, to understand and explore the Hoeller house and also Hoeller himself and his state of mind and his family and the garret, which I had entered very early one day in April, because I had left Altensam so early that day in order that no one might see me leave, because I’d wanted to leave Altensam unseen, unnoticed, and I’d succeeded in doing that; when we’re about to do something unusual, something extraordinary, something like my idea of building the Cone, so Roithamer, we must proceed with all secrecy, keep all our activities as unknown as possible. And so, having arrived in Altensam from England the previous afternoon I’d gone down to Hoeller’s house late that same evening to discuss with Hoeller whether it might be possible for me to move into his house the very next morning, Hoeller understood at once, in the downstairs family room where they have their meals, this room too had been constructed and realized by Hoeller in every detail to serve precisely and ideally for the purpose of taking meals there with the whole family, ideally functional like all the rooms in Hoeller’s house, and I asked myself where he acquired his mastery of the art of building, which can be seen in every detail of his house, or which can at least be recognized, at least felt, in every detail, anyway; in the downstairs room where they all sat together at supper, I had entered almost at the same moment I knocked on the door, surprised by the silence in the room considering that all the Hoellers were sitting there, that they hadn’t spoken a word during the entire mealtime and Hoeller had only signed to me to sit down with them, his wife had immediately risen and brought me something to eat from the kitchen, something other than what they’d been eating, I don’t remember what they gave me to eat, all I remember is, it was something else, but without a word spoken the whole time, I’d wanted to say something to the children, but the children made it impossible for me by their silence alone to say anything to them, the same with Hoeller and his wife, so I hadn’t been able to bring up the purpose of my visit at any time during supper, no one asked me anything nor did I feel any need to talk, yet I’d only just come from Altensam and this very evening, fresh from an argument with my mother, which ended up as a violent argument of everybody against everybody in Altensam, as soon as I’d arrived a quarrel had broken out over a just completed paint job on the farm building, quite unnecessary in my opinion, which I noticed the minute I arrived at Altensam and which caused me to ask why the farm building, which I’d remembered as being outwardly in rather good condition, had suddenly had to be freshly painted for no reason at all, whether that had been my mother’s idea, I avoided calling it this crazy idea, this, characteristically for my mother, crazy and senseless and in my opinion really superfluous idea, but naturally my mother had heard, because she’s always lying in wait for it, what I hadn’t even said, as she always hears everything that isn’t said but is being thought against her, and I’ve always thought against her, all my life long I’ve always thought against my mother, though these thoughts were hardly ever spoken aloud, but she always heard it even when it wasn’t said aloud, which always led to quarrels at Altensam, I’d hardly set foot in the place and already there was a quarrel, even on this afternoon, I hadn’t even taken my traveling bag up to my room yet, but while still down in the hall, I couldn’t restrain myself and I asked my mother whose idea it was to put a fresh coat of color on the farm building, I said there was no need for a new color on the farm building, that the somewhat older, but not too old color, a reddish tint I believed, had suited the farm building much better, it had suited the whole character of the farm building on its east side, against the sunrise, it’s important to consider the situation of such a building when one has to decide on its color, now I could take no pleasure at all in the sight of the farm building, I’d said to my mother, whereas I’d always taken pleasure in seeing it when it was still that old reddish color, especially in the evening, but now it gave me no pleasure at all, I said, that it could only have been her idea, my mother’s idea, to touch up the farm building with this hideous green color and at such a huge needless expense for the paint job too, I’d been accusing my mother only in thought, but she, with her uncanny ear for everything I was thinking, had heard what I was only thinking as if I’d uttered it, although I’d never have said aloud what I was thinking because I was fully aware how it would affect her, nor had I meant to start an argument with my mother the minute I arrived at Altensam, after all I didn’t come to Altensam that often from England, that I could have afforded to start an argument with my mother, always on my way to Altensam, the closer I came to Altensam, the more I determined not to argue with my mother, on any account, to do all in my power to prevent an argument with my mother, but I’d hardly set foot in Altensam when, presto, I’d be having an argument with my mother, most of the time I’d hardly sat down before I found myself already deep in some argument or other with my mother, and her reproaches, which came fast and often very loud, to draw the rest of the family, soon there was no damming them up, and all that mutual dislike and all that mutual hatred, barely held back for a moment or for only a few brief moments, have now again broken out into the open, darkening the scene. I never feared anything so much in all my life as these arguments with my mother, but these arguments inevitably broke out, and they broke out within the first few moments we met, and there was no damming them up. On that afternoon, when I’d hoped to rest up in Altensam, after so many strenuous months, a whole long six months which seemed even longer in that dreadful English climate and seemed even more strenuous and really terrible, I’d hoped to relax in Altensam for longer than usual this time, as I’d planned to spend some time in Altensam, a place after all more conducive to relaxation than any other place, though it had never yet been really at my disposal for such a purpose, but instead, because of the fact that I’d seen the new color job on the farm building, that I’d seen it at once on arrival, and seen instantly what a tasteless color job it was, what a brainless color job, which had, as I instantly suspected, cost a heap of money besides, it was after all my money too, so then and there I had this argument with my mother, we were hurling all sorts of accusations at each other’s heads while at the same time saying over and over again, now I to her, then again she to me, saying calm down, will you, why don’t you calm down, we’d keep saying this almost perverse do calm down, do calm down, tossed back and forth between us, probably resulting only in our getting deeper and deeper into our argument until, in the end, we’d argued ourselves as always into a state of exhaustion, these arguments always ended with both of us in a state of total exhaustion, it was an effort and took the utmost willpower merely to keep upright after one of those battles, then, when mother invited me, at the utmost point of exhaustion from this argument, to have a bite with her in the kitchen, there was no one in it that day, cook was having her Tuesday off, to have a cup of tea, just a snack she had prepared for us with her own hands, a welcome-home snack as it were, so I followed mother into the kitchen and silently drank a cup of tea with her, naturally I ate nothing, I was simply in no condition to eat. Then, as we sat in the kitchen after our argument, so Roithamer, it was always basically the same thing, I arrive, we have our argument, we go in to drink tea, sitting in silence, totally exhausted, simply no longer capable of hating each other, we simply let go, sitting face to face, we let it go as it comes, as it is, nothing can be changed, suddenly she demands a description of my trip, how was my journey, was the weather in London good or bad, what had I been doing, my friends, my colleagues, she touched all these bases, but even the way she pronounced Cambridge, the way she said London, instantly aroused my anger against her again, the way she said Dover, the way she said Brussels, Cologne, all the time with her eyes on me, she’d question me with these cue-words that were always the same cue-words, every time I came home from England, she wanted to know everything, every detail, but I remained closemouthed, I was silence itself, as always. She couldn’t get a word out of me. I tried a bite of bread, choking on it, with her eyes on me, taking possession of me, as she thought. As always, my siblings were in their rooms, and I thought they were waiting in their rooms for our inevitable argument to be over, for us to have calmed down, as they thought, then they’d come down, to put in an appearance for their brother, who had withdrawn from all of them by going off to England.

Without a word, “without a word” underlined, I’d got up and left my mother alone in the kitchen, and I went away from Altensam, down to the Aurach, into Hoeller’s house. Away from the argument with my mother, into the silence of the Hoellers. Sitting at the table in Hoeller’s family room, having supper with the Hoellers, eating something different from what they were eating, underlined, still affected by my argument with my mother and so I was in a debilitated condition as the Hoellers watched me, after I’d previously been watched by my mother, but watched differently by the Hoellers than by my mother, how differently, “how” underlined, that’s indescribable, but it was an entirely different kind of look, because it was an entirely different perceptiveness, because the Hoellers are different from the Altensam people, I thought, but it’s not a greater simplicity, the so-called simple folk are not really simple, I was on the one hand still affected by the argument with my mother, about the new color job on the farm building, and also affected by the silence between mother and me in the Altensam kitchen, that condition of silence between me and my mother, realizing that again we’d had the argument both of us, I as well as my mother, always dreaded, once I’d announced my homecoming to Altensam, and which had of course broken out again this time, whether it’s the new color job on the farm building, or some purchase, or a sale, some real estate speculation on which I or my mother can’t agree, or as it might be father, by this time totally withdrawn and hardly noticeable any longer, who serves to trigger it off, then on the other hand the silence in Hoeller’s room, under the effect of which I was now condemned to the same speechlessness as the Hoellers sitting at table with me. The whole time not a single word at the Hoellers’ table, when supper was over the Hoellers stood up, including Hoeller himself, his wife cleared the table, in silence, they all walked out of the room, in silence, the children following their mother into the kitchen to do the washing up, Hoeller went to the hall, I followed him and it was only then, after I had thanked him for my supper, that I was able to come out with my reason for coming down to the Hoeller house this very evening of my arrival, I told him I wanted to lodge at his house for a while, could he, as a favor, let me room in his garret for a while, I found myself able, as I had not expected to be, to explain my wish, which I had simply reeled off to Hoeller, who was totally unprepared to hear it, I said to him that to look at this house, to study it, explore it, as well as yourself and everything connected with you and your house, will be the best preparation for my plan to build the Cone. Hoeller agreed to my proposal, he said I could move in tomorrow morning, I said I’d bring only the barest necessities with me, he told me I could stay in the garret as long as I liked, as long as I needed, it would be a pleasure for him to have my company for a time, the mere idea was a pleasure, so Roithamer. We’d spent only a few minutes in the hall, then Hoeller had to go to his workshop, so I said good-bye, it was a relief to know, even if only briefly, that I no longer had to fear having to stay in Altensam, where I’d hoped to relax and restore myself a little, for quite a while as I’d thought, under these, “these,” underlined, terrible circumstances, a groundless fear now, and so I took a detour, past a hazel hedge I’d loved as a child, back up to Altensam, and withdrew to my room after showing myself briefly to my brothers, my sister was visiting a friend in town. After a sleepless night, like my nights in England for quite a while now, I’d gone quite early, I think it was five in the morning, to Hoeller’s house, Hoeller was already up and at work in his workshop at that hour, in order to study it scientifically from the first moment, I was all set to look and study and explore the Hoeller house most thoroughly and with the greatest pleasure from the first. To begin with I immediately had the chance to make comparisons, looking at Hoeller and looking at his house, studying Hoeller and studying his house, what was characteristic of Hoeller was also characteristic of his house, the house inside was like Hoeller inside, by studying the Hoeller house I had a sudden insight into Hoeller and, conversely, by studying Hoeller, I had insight into the house, one served as a simultaneous illumination of the other. I could have said without hesitation, so Roithamer, Hoeller’s inside is the same as the inside of his house. I could have said that the strength (or weakness) of Hoeller’s character clearly manifests itself in (and by) his house. And just as Hoeller’s wife submits to Hoeller, and the children submit to their father, without ever for a moment giving themselves up, as I thought, they subordinate themselves to the house, without giving themselves up. The Hoeller house corresponds to Hoeller, and he and all its other inhabitants conduct themselves in it, in his house, accordingly. And where, I asked myself, did Hoeller get the idea for this house of his, because I am fully aware that I got my idea, to build the Cone for my sister, from Hoeller and his house at the Aurach gorge. But I haven’t asked him to this day where he got the idea for building his house, though he naturally must have gotten the idea from a house that another man built for himself (or for someone else) before, probably a house standing nearby, for Hoeller hasn’t gotten around too much. Possibly Hoeller doesn’t even know where he got the idea for building his house and for building it as he ended up building it, a house so much in accordance with himself, so visibly in accordance with himself, as I’ve never seen another. I’ll ask him where he got the idea, I thought, and I asked Hoeller where he’d gotten his idea, because I simply had to know, while I looked over and studied and explored his house, it was indispensable to me to know. But Hoeller can’t remember where he got the idea to build his house. The chances are that the house that gave Hoeller the idea to build his own house is standing quite close by, I thought, as close as can be to the Hoeller house.

Yet there’s no other house to compare with it, I thought, so Roithamer. It’s also possible that Hoeller never saw the model for his house in reality, for in reality there isn’t any model for Hoeller’s house in the vicinity, I thought, so Roithamer, it must have come to him in a dream. In that case it’s quite likely, I thought, that Hoeller didn’t see a model for his house in a dream, but that he dreamed the house itself. All he had to do was trust his dream and accurately copy the house he saw in his dream, so Roithamer. Since he’s a master of the craft and in addition drew on all sorts of books, as I know, including the kind of books I myself got hold of for my own purposes, for the rest of building knowledge he needed, it was only a question of willpower and endurance for Hoeller to be able to build his house. That he chose, of all places, the Aurach gorge for the site wasn’t a matter of low cost, on the contrary, the costs of the site here at the Aurach gorge were, as I know, exceptionally high, it just happens to be characteristic of Hoeller. Just as it’s characteristic of me to build the Cone for my sister in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. The monstrousness of realizing my plan is clear to me, I said to myself, after the monstrousness of Hoeller’s plan to build his house had become clear to me, but the actual monstrousness of it then turned out to be much more monstrous than I could ever have imagined. But it’s the same monstrousness for me to build and to realize and to complete the Cone as it is for Hoeller to build and realize and complete the Hoeller house, so Roithamer, everything regarding his house, the Hoeller house, I thought, so Roithamer, is as much in accordance with his nature as everything regarding the Cone for my sister is in accordance with mine. And because I always felt at home with Hoeller, I also felt at home with the house he had built (for himself and his family), everything in this house is home to me, I thought, and I went on the one hand from top to bottom in the house, and on the other hand from bottom to top, closely examining everything in my scientific way and checking out everything, but I could see that the inside of the house as well as the outside of the house at the Aurach gorge, that, in short, the entire Hoeller house was already familiar to me, one hundred percent familiar, I said to myself. And so I thought that everything in the Cone that was to be built and to be realized must also be familiar to me, one hundred percent familiar or at least almost one hundred percent familiar, because my sister, for whom I wanted to build the Cone, wanted to at first, but then most decidedly and most determinedly had to build for her, “had to” underlined, one hundred percent familiar. Once I have fully grasped my sister’s nature with my intelligence, on the one hand, and on the other hand with my emotional awareness, then I can begin building the Cone, so Roithamer. As for me, I wonder why Hoeller has lodged me in this garret which, as I now see, really belonged so entirely to Roithamer, surely not only because I was Roithamer’s closest intimate and because I told Hoeller that I was now going to work on Roithamer’s literary legacy, but only in Hoeller’s garret, probably because it seemed the most natural thing in the world to him, Hoeller, that I wanted to domicile myself in Hoeller’s garret in order to sift and sort Roithamer’s papers there. I told Hoeller that his garret was so full of Roithamer’s living spirit that there could be no better place for working on Roithamer’s papers than Hoeller’s garret which is simply one hundred percent conducive to working on Roithamer’s legacy, besides which it also afforded me the opportunity to study the contents of the books and articles Roithamer had accumulated in Hoeller’s garret, primarily for his cone-building project, all of which had a bearing on Roithamer’s legacy, what he had read must be integrated with what he had ultimately written, the one must be brought into relationship with the other and everything put together had to be brought into relationship with Roithamer, by me. Everything in Hoeller’s garret belonging to Roithamer and left by Roithamer for my work on Roithamer’s papers, was in exactly the state in which Roithamer had left it just before his suicide, Hoeller told me, nothing had been touched by anyone else since Roithamer left Hoeller’s garret, he, Hoeller, was the only person who ever set foot in the garret, he allowed no one inside, not even his wife or his kids, who were always asking, out of curiosity, to be allowed in Hoeller’s garret, which had basically already become Roithamer’s garret, but their father, Hoeller, had always forbidden them to enter it. The Cone, I’d said to Hoeller on my arrival, was unique not only in Europe, it was unique in all the world, never before had any man yet built such a cone, in the course of centuries, in the course of the entire history of building, frequent attempts had been made to build a cone as a habitation, a pure conical shape as a live-in object, I’d said to Hoeller, but no one ever succeeded, not in France, not in Russia, as Roithamer wrote, “not in France, not in Russia” underlined. He, Roithamer, had had to move into Hoeller’s garret in order to be able to build the Cone, he had made Hoeller’s garret his construction studio for building the Cone, “‘construction studio for building the Cone” underlined, because a splendid thing can come only out of another splendid thing, in this case, the Cone out of Hoeller’s house. Basically, “basically” underlined, there had never been any problem for Roithamer and Hoeller in understanding each other. Must try to describe mother, the Eferding woman, so Roithamer, compared with my sister: First, personal characteristics. Actual y I tried several times to be with my mother in Altensam, just as she probably tried being with me, but these efforts were always doomed at the outset, they never got beyond being mere useless tries equally destructive to the sanity of either of us, they only turned against us and ended by destroying and finally annihilating everything inside us. Actually she always loathed being with me and vice versa; as far as I was concerned, obsessed as I was with my work and my passion for my work only, nothing else, for in fact everything always was my work, “everything” underlined, mother simply always tried, simply because she is my mother, not that she went out of her way for me, but she did try, just as I didn’t exactly go out of my way for her, but I did try, but these efforts were always instantly recognizable as mere damnable efforts for the sake of doing the right thing, “doing the right thing” underlined, because what she instinctively hated was never hateful to me, what pleased her displeased me, what pricked her interest had never pricked mine, where she was sensitive I was never sensitive, andsoforth, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman was instinctively the kind who’d repel me and who was bound to destroy Altensam, or at least she was instinctively the kind who was bound to hasten the process whereby Altensam must be destroyed and annihilated, such persons or characters suddenly turn up, like my mother, that Eferding woman from Eferding, they suddenly spring from their family origins into the world of others to destroy it and to annihilate it, no matter whether they realize this or not, the Eferding woman realized it perfectly. This attempt as a description or this description as an attempt, with all the imperfection, uncertainty, which characterizes all of these attempts or descriptions or descriptive efforts, fragmentary stabs at deviations in Altensam andsoforth, such as I’ve always made in order to understand Altensam, this particular attempt made only because I’ve heard about that so-called Mother’s Day, that’s a cue-word, Mother’s Day, started me off on this note. How, from my point of view, she was always bound to fail even in the most trifling of trifles, so-called irrelevancies, the disciplines and arrangements that had always been the disciplines and arrangements at Altensam, anyway she had no access whatsoever to the so called intellectual sphere, nor did she ever try to understand something she was bound to disdain, to hate, even just something, no matter what, of those things that concerned me and for which I dared to exist all my life, the things that had to be the actual meaning of my life and my existence, she pretended to understand but she understood nothing, though of course I too very often pretended to understand, in conversation with her, her concerns, without feeling in the least inclined to such an understanding or even able to understand, because I didn’t even want to have such an inclination to understand her, she understood, she often said, and understood nothing, when she said she did she was putting on an act, just as I was always putting on an act about all of her concerns, if only to endure long stretches of Altensam at all in her presence, for it was extremely hard for me even to exist side by side with the Eferding woman, even if I didn’t see her, as long as I knew for a fact she was there, she went so against my grain, all these efforts always because I still went on regarding Altensam as my home, even throughout all my time in England, but home is always and in every case a mistake, so Roithamer, “in every case” underlined. When the Eferding woman said that she understood she was putting on an act and this act was instantly recognizable as such, she was all emotion, and since I never wanted to have anything to do with people who exist and act only on an emotional basis, the so-called world of the emotions had always been suspect and always hateful to me, people like the Eferding woman, my mother, constantly pretended to understand but they only have a certain feeling without intelligence, which is repulsive to the other kind, my kind, of person, and even this unintelligent feeling of theirs is a fake, not a reality, this type of female has only a dim perception of emotion, and not even a dim perception of intelligence, so that actually they have neither intelligence nor feeling, and the act they put on of having feeling and intelligence is nothing more than sexual hypocrisy, “sexual hypocrisy” underlined.

Although she tried, in the beginning, to draw me into her emotional world, to push me out of my own world which was in opposition to this emotional world of hers, kept trying to urge me out of my own world into hers, she no longer tried to do that later on, because I gave her no opportunity to try it, but her effort in that direction had lasted a long time, her effort to drive me out of my own world into hers, while my effort to acquaint her with my interests, I don’t say familiarize her, that would have been a totally hopeless undertaking, her tricks with which she worked at alienating me from myself and eventually also from my father were so complicated, so cunning, she kept on trying it with every possible and impossible kind of finesse, she thought she could deceive me with her simple, yet common, blunt, Eferding household intelligence which in any case always lapsed into rudeness, and had nothing to do with real intelligence, she thought she could manipulate me to suit her purposes, suggesting that it would be better, smarter for me to obey her, not my father, I’d see that soon enough andsoforth, but she always had to recognize that her efforts had been in vain, so Roithamer. Her vulgarity, in no way differentiated from the vulgarity of all her gender, became in her later years an open disgust with everything connected with me, so Roithamer. It was never in all her life possible for her to change, she simply lacked the will and the instinct and the taste required, and for me to meet her halfway, “her” underlined, would have meant the sacrifice of everything I am, so Roithamer. While in England I’d always expected to recover in Altensam, so during my first hours in Altensam, situated as it is in such peculiar and basically unfavorable climatic conditions, requiring all by themselves the supreme effort of willpower just to survive, in those first hours and days, which should have served for my recovery and relaxation after the long strain in England, I’d usually offered her virtually no resistance, I always started by sucking in Altensam just as it was, exposing myself to it willingly, but my resistance soon became most adamant, because she’d actually been irritating me without respite, after only two or three days I had to admit to myself that I could not recover and relax in Altensam, that I had merely fallen victim once again to the delusion that I could recover and relax in Altensam even though I had fallen victim to this delusion hundreds and thousands of times before, a delusion in which I lived in England, at Cambridge, that I could safely strain myself there to the utmost in my mental labors, because I’d be able to recover and relax in Altensam from these mental labors, so I kept going back to Altensam, probably only from sheer habit by this time, no longer with the least expectation of being understood, only from habit, not in the certainty that Altensam would fulfill my wish and my need, namely, to recover and relax, quite the contrary, my visits in Altensam, those terrible visits-from-habit, were clearly from the first destined not to bring me recovery and relaxation in Altensam, they could only upset me and make me sick and drive me crazy owing to those conditions basically the fault of my mother, the Eferding woman, so that as soon as I got there I was immediately entangled in all these quarrels and socalled power struggles in Altensam, things I basically wanted to have nothing to do with, actually it was always the Eferding woman, my mother, who’d been the cause of that sense of impending complications, as soon as I’d arrived, which immediately turned into intimations of catastrophe, but very often, though in fact this too emanated from her, I myself was, as for instance in the case of the color job on the farm building, the one who instigated or sparked off such quarrels and catastrophic moods, which always and in every case turned out to be pointless. Although for the first few moments, I must say, we were most considerate toward one another, after the first few moments we were again totally ruthless against each other, it was only a matter of time as to when we would separate, how soon I’d leave Altensam where I’d only just arrived, our mutual consideration had always lasted only through the first few minutes, then our real feelings, nothing but real dislike, even hatred, ran free again. Yet our efforts at restraint during those first few moments were interesting even so, because both of us had made them again and again, and so often, despite our awareness that they were doomed to failure in no time at all, even before I’d had a chance to hang up my coat, to take my bag to my room, even before I’d had a look around Altensam, I hadn’t even got beyond the outer hall, because it was clear to both of us that we stay the same and have stayed the same between times, that we haven’t changed, that she, the Eferding woman, hasn’t changed in Altensam nor I in England, and the mere idea or any conceivable attempt based on such an idea that we must try to change for each other’s sake was nothing but madness, presumption, megalomania, where change was so impossible there was nothing for us to change, because we simply had no way to do it, neither of us was born with the capacity to change ourselves, on the contrary, when we’d tried to change, despite our full awareness that we couldn’t change, and when we’d failed again, as we both felt in our bones we would after the first few minutes, after the first words of greeting had been exchanged, though even those had already been uttered in that tone which indicated that we were losing again, because we’d already lost at the moment we’d come face to face, our effort to change had simply made matters worse. At first we’d always look at each other as if we’d changed, because we thought the interim might have changed us, but the interim all by itself had never changed us, I remained myself, she remained herself, we made believe that the interim had transformed us into people other than those we were before the interim, I’d persuaded myself that I’d turned from an unbearable (to her) man into a bearable (to her) man, just as she’d persuaded herself that in the interim she’d become bearable (to me), though she’d always previously been unbearable (to me), we’d also imagined that we’d made certain efforts to improve, though we could no longer think what efforts, we’d only, as we remembered it, considered making efforts in our minds, but in reality we’d made no efforts at all, we’d never translated our thoughts about efforts into any real efforts, we never could, because if we could have we’d at least have made an acceptable person out of ourselves (for the other one) in the interim, which was, after all, a most eventful interim for the most part, an interim certainly full of the most enormous changes in Altensam (owing to her) as in England (owing to me), but these changes had occurred only outside of ourselves, not within us, we had remained as and what we were prior to each interim, our characters, as we could clearly determine at our very first contact, had not only not changed, they had, on the contrary, only hardened, which made our pretense of mutual understanding only all the more ridiculous. She didn’t stand a chance of winning me over, any more than I stood a chance of winning her over, because she was always predisposed against all I was, and owing to this predisposition her character had kept pathologically hardening in the mold of her own tendencies, whether we wished it or not, it no longer mattered, we were going to be for the rest of our lives against each other, she against me and I against her, I’d be focused entirely on myself, she entirely on herself, concerned with our own interests and totally monopolized by these interests, we’d just play a polite charade with each other for hours, for days, for weeks, until all our differences, all the barriers between us, had come again quite visibly into the open between us, until Altensam, whatever it had become through the Eferding woman, however this mechanism of destruction came into motion again because of our mutual dislike, repudiation, this mutual hatred of ours, moving always not only to disturb us but to destroy us, so Roithamer, where everything repelled me as far as she was concerned and repelled her as far as I was concerned. Nevertheless both of us were always incapable of simply giving up seeing each other ever again, she’d write, inviting me home, to England, and I came from England to Altensam, as if something had changed, each time we’d said good-bye we did it in the expectation of never seeing each other again, of parting forever, because there was simply absolutely nothing uniting us, we had not a scintilla in common, except for disgust and dislike, nothing, yet we were not only unable to stick to our decision never to see one another again, but the intervals between trips from England to Austria, to Altensam, had actually become increasingly shorter in the last few years. And the ordeals to which we subjected each other, once I was back in Altensam, kept getting worse, in fact they were getting to be terrible ordeals because we had reached a high degree of natural ease in the art of tormenting ourselves, our mutual hatred went even deeper than that, and everything indicated the possibility of an even greater deepening of that hatred, our methods became more sophisticated with every one of my visits to Altensam. Still, it’s unimaginable, so Roithamer, with what a degree of mindlessness persons like the Eferding woman seem to be capable of existing, with what emotional callousness, considering that emotion and nothing else is all she has, her entire being set against everything, and takes the most antagonistic action every time. At first it was still possible for me to think that a certain shyness with regard to the life of the mind, to what is regarded as, after all, male intellectuality, had turned, in her, to outright disgust with everything intellectual, so Roithamer, but as time went on, and time had indeed accelerated the process once she indubitably had the upper hand in Altensam, her hatred had grown to the point that she had to hate not only paper covered with my script but every piece of paper, every kind of paper, she regarded paper as a foundation for mental activity, instantly aroused her hatred, it was as though her hatred of paper alone was enough to reduce her to total exhaustion every day, I often thought, pencils, pens, aroused an unimaginable hatred in her, not even to mention books, pamphlets, periodicals, she even hated newspapers, because newspapers were also printed papers which made them supremely dangerous and they were above all, as she thought, aimed at her, she’d hated papers all her life and had turned this hatred of papers, of all the papers in the world, into an actually boundless hatred of everything around her which was connected with these papers, and she’d been driven by this hatred all her life as by a mortal disease, or rather by her own, “her” underlined, mortal disease, on the other hand, as regards myself, I always had the feeling that I was lying in ambush for her, that I was setting her a trap, that I’d often given her cause to remember her hatred as a mortal disease and to show this hatred openly, that I set her so-called paper traps to catch her out in her hatred of paper, so that I could watch her open outburst of hatred, paper hatred, with malicious satisfaction, because there can be no doubt, so Roithamer, that I did take a malicious satisfaction in her hatred and all her extreme carryings-on, because her hatred was so extreme, her ways in general were so extreme, actually I’d let less than a couple of minutes pass before I started to criticize her, or at least looked her over critically, in other words, the moment I turned up in Altensam, and I always turned up abruptly, I’d already set her a trap, and when she fell into my trap, I criticized her for falling into my trap, I always lay in ambush to catch her in one or another of her repulsively feminine ways and then took her to task, not even two minutes went by after I’d arrived at Altensam before I’d picked on some trifle to criticize her for, because basically I disliked everything about her, or rather, because everything about her was nothing but repugnant to me, no matter what she basically did or didn’t do, whatever it was, I found it repugnant, no matter what she wore, for instance, I found it repugnant, whatever she said, whatever she thought, it was never anything but repugnant, that’s the truth, so Roithamer, to keep such facts to myself wouldn’t make sense, so I won’t keep these facts to myself, because these are facts that certainly characterize the Eferding woman and me, “certainly the Eferding woman and me” underlined. So I naturally always wondered how it could be possible for two people, who were in addition mother and son, not mother’s son but father’s son, leaving this out of account, however, how is it possible that these two people, who keep on tormenting each other constantly, with a truly unexampled ruthlessness, who feel compelled to torment each other to the very edge of madness, who do it every time and always do it again, and who keep hating each other more deeply and more ruthlessly, nevertheless go on seeing each other again and again? But the chances are that it was precisely these possibilities of mutual tormentings, this mutual hatred, this mutual readiness to be tormented, that kept drawing me again and again from England to Altensam, so Roithamer. Probably, so Roithamer, because I needed everything my mother, the Eferding woman, had in these last years turned into a horrible Altensam. And I did after all leave Altensam again at once each time, and took refuge, as I had every chance to do, in Hoeller’s garret, which began by being a books-refuge, a socalled books-and-papers refuge, for I had squirreled away in Hoeller’s garret every conceivable book and paper I could lay hands on and that could be of use to me, as well as all the books and papers I could do without, and I’d torn the pages I most valued out of these essential books and papers and tacked them on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, pages of Pascal, for instance, again and again, much of Montaigne, very many pages of Pushkin and Schopenhauer, of Novalis and Dostoyevsky, I’d tacked almost all the pages of Valéry’s M. Teste on the walls before I’d covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with my plans and sketches for building the Cone; to gain perspective I’ve always pasted or tacked all the papers important to me on my walls, even as a child I’d covered the walls of my room in Altensam with other people’s most important (to me) ideas, pasted or tacked on, so I’d first covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with the most important sayings of Pascal and Novalis and Montaigne, before I’d tacked them up and pasted them up with my sketches and anyway all kinds of ideas for building the Cone, and so I always could immediately clear out of Altensam and move into Hoeller’s garret and find refuge in Hoeller’s garret in those thoughts on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, the fact that it is possible for me to go to Hoeller’s garret where I always found everything I needed for my thoughts and reflections, all those thoughts of other men and through them, also all my own thoughts, every time, made it possible for me to leave Altensam without going to pieces, so Roithamer, the minute I’d arrived in Altensam I thought of nothing else but getting away from Altensam, because being with the Eferding woman was unbearable to me from the first moment, and so I went to Hoeller’s garret, quite often taking the detour over Stocket into Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer. Little by little I had stowed away all the books and papers I’d had in Altensam up in Hoeller’s garret, where they’d really be safe, for they were no longer safe in Altensam, all these exceptionally useful books and papers, not to say that they were probably indispensable to my life, I lived in constant fear that mother, the Eferding woman, would one day use all these books of mine as firewood, that she would stage a great bonfire of all my papers before all eyes, that is, before the eyes of my father and my brothers and my sister, one day, this was what I’d always feared, after all, but she had never done it, though my fear was justified, or else she hadn’t got around to it before I’d moved all my books and papers to safety in Hoeller’s garret, there, in Hoeller’s garret, I always thought in England, those books and papers are safe, now I needn’t worry from one minute to the next that they might be destroyed by my mother, the Eferding woman, Hoeller’s garret is where all these books and papers of mine belong, not in Altensam, where the atmosphere is antagonistic to them. And so the thought that I’d carried these books and papers of mine, not many but all the most important of them, to safety in Hoeller’s garret from my room in Altensam, while I was in England or wherever I was far away from Altensam, was always a good, reassuring thought. That my mother is capable of burning or otherwise destroying my books and papers, which I’d read and studied and worked through afresh again and again, that she is capable of suddenly destroying them, or of simply withholding them from me, specifically during my absence in England or elsewhere, has always been clear to me. While my mother and I had always tried, so Roithamer, during the first few minutes of my arrival in Altensam, to get along with each other, and had done all we could, even though it went against the grain, to make it work, we soon ended up doing it all only as. proof that we simply could not get along with each other, and so we had a chaotic situation, a situation no one could be expected to stand, we simply made existence a torment for each other, perhaps this had simply become a habit because by now we’d been together against our will too often, so the habit of mutual torture came to play the largest role in our encounters, but it was always, as I thought, she who took the initiative in tormenting me, even though I was the one who kept coming back to Altensam because I couldn’t stand it in England after a while of trying to adjust to it, and so I always showed up at home again, just as if it were somehow possible for me, as it simply no longer was or never had been, to spend any time at all with my mother. As regards any kind of intellectual interests, she could only pretend to them, in which respect she differed in no way from the rest of her sex, in fact I’d say that everything in and about her was nothing but pretense, but then our whole era is antiintellectual at heart, it only pretends to be interested in intellectual matters, these days the trend is all against intellect and for hypocrisy, it’s all an era of hypocritical pretense, hypocrisy everywhere, nothing real left, it’s all hypocrisy. She hated my sister, so the Eferding woman hated what she called my doting talk about my sister, in fact I was always instinctively moved to speak of the sister I loved more than anything in the world, it’s true that I was almost constantly intent upon studying my sister’s personality, while at the same time I kept loving her and having to show my love for her quite openly and in fact I did show it at all times, most of all probably because I hated my mother, the Eferding woman, I compulsively made her witness my love and tender concern for my sister, the studied care which I lavished on he even in my thoughts, especially the care and delicacy with which I made every effort to treat her when we met, without actually having to make an effort because care and timidity came quite naturally to me with regard to my sister, all this was naturally hateful to the Eferding woman, everything I had noticed about my sister in the course of my life that had made her more and more the peculiarly lovable person that my sister always was for me, more and more endeared her to me and ended by making her a sort of second and superior self, in the way I saw her and felt about her, it all acutely distressed the Eferding woman, at first she had always tried to draw me over to her side by means of her so-called pretended sympathy for my sister, whom she knew to be no more her partisan than I was, my sister naturally was of my father’s party all her life, and like myself, though most of the time secretly she was happy in her loyalty to him, but the Eferding woman tried to win me over by her so-called hypocritical sympathy for my sister, but precisely because the sympathy she offered, which always turned out to be hypocritical anyway, was repellent to me, her efforts always ended up by repelling me. My sister always had innate good taste, good taste inherited from my father, while my mother, that is to say, her mother and mine, was totally deficient in taste or tact, she had never known how to please people in a friendly and natural way, while my sister always had the gift of pleasing through her friendliness and naturalness, so Roithamer, our mother suffered from this defect and whenever she’d suffered from it for any length of time she’d always go to Eferding, to her father’s house, the butcher’s house, for sanctuary, but of course she’d only come back, after some days or weeks, back to Altensam, with even less sympathetic understanding for Altensam than before, and even less understanding for us. But my brothers never sensed any of this, since they were of the same mind as the Eferding woman, who had been able to endure life in Altensam at all only because her own children, our brothers that is, I am safe in saying that my sister and I did not consider ourselves her children but only our father’s children, but our brothers were on her side, they felt deeply akin to her family, our brothers had often gone with her to Eferding and felt at home there as nowhere else, while for me Eferding had always been an imposition, mentally and emotionally, and I’d gone there only a few times, when I was forced to go, on quite ordinary occasions, weddings of my mother’s relatives, their funerals, or perhaps to stock my mother’s larder with meat out of her father’s butcher shop during the war, but that always involved sending the Altensam cattle down to Eferding, where they’d be butchered in my maternal grandfather’s butcher shop, then dressed, and then we brought back the meat butchered and dressed in Eferding, up to Altensam. Our mother hadn’t wanted to adapt herself to Altensam, which would have been the most natural thing, but she had tried to adapt us to Eferding, “us” underlined, in which she of course did not succeed, under all the prevailing conditions at Altensam, the fact being that our father was always a quite original character, just as Altensam was altogether original by nature, though I must admit that this entire situation must be considered an extraordinary one. I can only say that she hated everything as she hated herself, because, once she was in Altensam, she had to hate everything and therefore also herself. But it would be overhasty to describe her only as an unhappy person, “overhasty” underlined. She hated everything and everyone and in this pathological process she was as if arrested by an incurable paroxysm against everything, of course she was an unhappy person, she was not alone in this unhappiness but rather in the company of almost all human beings who’ve never for a moment tried to understand the causes of their unhappiness, who constantly blame particularly the people closest to them for their own unhappiness, and never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves, she had never worked on herself, even though she was always full of doubts about herself, but not in a way that would have forced her to dig for causes, she had buried herself steadily deeper into her eventually hopeless life against Altensam, just as my brothers buried themselves in their hopeless life against Altensam, isolated themselves, for undoubtedly my brothers, siding with the Eferding woman, had also isolated themselves, they’d actually in time worked their way entirely out of Altensam, because they’d basically always worked with my mother against Altensam. In Altensam, ever more deeply buried in isolation in Altensam, while at the same time working their way out of Altensam, so Roithamer, “at the same time. out of Altensam” underlined. It’s a logical consequence that now, after they’d always worked against Altensam, after their mother’s death, after the death of the Eferding woman, they will have to leave Altensam; by my selling Altensam this process is rounding itself off, so Roithamer. My brothers were also Eferding people, so Roithamer, and there have always been two parties living against each other and existing ever more intensively because of their mutual opposition while always trying to liquidate this in the opposing party, the Eferding party on the one hand, viz. my mother and my brothers, and on the other hand the Altensam party, that is my father, my sister, and me. Because of her ultimately misanthropic nature and her environment- and self-destructive spirit, which was an Eferding spirit, her face had in time become a misanthropic and self-destructive face and every morning upon awakening she already entered, almost in panic, into her misanthropy and self-destruction as facial destruction, as if into an incurable malignant disease, and with all these malignant, pathologically malignant facial features she encountered us early in the morning over breakfast. Mistrustfully or at least with a most insulting reserve she met each and all of those whom she associated with Altensam, all persons who came to Altensam and had been instantly classified by her as belonging to Altensam; she thought she had a right to hate people because she thought everybody hated her, so Roithamer. Not one, not one single hour of my life have I spent in harmony alone with my mother, “in harmony” underlined, so Roithamer. And so it wasn’t easy, either, to go out and meet people with her, because she could meet all these people only with mistrust and rejection, because these people all tended to belong to Altensam, and Eferding was far away, so Roithamer. As a child I’d hardly met people with her, no matter whether in Stocket or in another of the villages below Altensam, when these people, no matter what they were like, were irritated by her, they’d instantly noticed that something was going on here against them, whether they were conscious of this peculiarity or not, they usually took their leave of us at once. She mastered the art of separating me from people I valued, it wasn’t long before hardly anyone came up to Altensam to see me, and I soon had very few friends left, so-called playmates, in my childhood, friends from Stocket for instance, once she noticed a spiritual kinship to Altensam in them, she was against them, so Roithamer. Because she had determined to exploit Altensam for her own purposes, such as, for instance, to take possession of me, simply to take possession of Altensam, she naturally always ran into opposition at Altensam, just as my brothers, the Eferdingers, had always run into opposition. Whenever I showed my sister an article that was bound to interest her, so Roithamer, my sister was always most charmingly, “most charmingly” underlined, ready to discuss the contents of that article with me, to try to understand the contents of the article and then the reasons for the article, along with me, precisely what I’d found stimulating in that article was what she’d also found stimulating, I had told her what it was that particularly interested me in that article, what particularly attracted me, for instance, what was true or false in it, and we’d always noted a particularly deep accord in our shared view of the various subjects of whatever kind, my sister was always interested in hearing my opinion, just as she’d always been able to listen, unlike our mother, who could never listen, just as I was always interested in hearing my sister’s opinion (on this or that subject). But my (and my sister’s) mother had always shown a lack of interest in everything that interested and concerned us, no matter in what sense. All her life she had always reacted to us with a total lack of interest, so Roithamer, “total lack of interest” underlined. Just as my sister always took an interest in my own scientific work, any of my intellectual work, it was more than an interest, actually, in what I was thinking and writing, my inventions and fantasies, so I took more than an interest in all of my sister’s artistic inventions, and in everything she thought, but most of all in her miniature painting, in which she quickly achieved great mastery, her miniatures, painted on enamel and porcelain, are the most beautiful imaginable, between me and my sister there’s always been the greatest and most loving sympathy, she, my sister, had always entered wholly into anything concerning me, as I always wholly entered into whatever concerned her. For days on end we’d amuse ourselves talking about a book we’d read one after the other, exchanging ideas about this book until we could sum up all these ideas in a single idea which precisely characterized that book, or else a work of art, a painting, for days on end we could discuss and debate a certain formulation we had read somewhere, for the two of us our reading was always the most important subject, without reading neither my sister nor I could have stood life for any length of time, not that we had been brought up to read, quite the opposite was the case, as already described, but in the course of time we had managed to acquire our passion for reading, our delight in books, the pleasures of experience by way of reading, the intellectual discipline connected with reading, while pacing the floor together in my room or in hers, we could talk about every kind of thing we’d read or heard or observed or about every kind of discovery we’d made, each on his own, we talked it all out, quite in contrast to our mother, the Eferding woman, with whom all of that would never have been possible.

Undisturbed we spent entire nights together up in the attic, considering and concerning ourselves with books we’d just been reading, studying, without noticing that daylight had broken already, because our discussions had always been full of the greatest intensity, yet also the greatest possible serenity. Our favorite place for these talks, critical reflections, suppositions, andsoforth, was always the attic, though very often, in summer, also the area behind the farm building from which you could see down country all the way to Stocket. Very often, too, we’d walk through the park, quite casually in every way, finding its neglected state more and more of a stimulus to conversation, because the park at Altensam was all the more beautiful for having been left to run wild, overgrown with weeds, and hence all the more conducive to our rambles back and forth. From a certain, no longer exactly identifiable point on, what I most enjoyed was to withdraw into my reading, my scientific, natural science, a kind of reading which my mother most particularly loathed my doing, just as she, the Eferding woman, also secretly hated my sister’s work, her miniature painting, though she didn’t dare hate it openly, for what and how my sister painted could not but please even my mother, and in contrast to my scribbling it wasn’t dangerous, either, but she could not quite suppress her dislike of everything that’s Altensam even in this respect. Actually I asked myself over and over again why I didn’t break off contact with my mother, simply stopped going to see her, but then I’d have had to stop going to see Altensam and after all I was attached to Altensam, just as I kept on feeling attached to my childhood, be it how it may have been, Altensam was my childhood and childhood is in every case an obstacle to making a final break, “final break” underlined. That woman, I keep thinking, so Roithamer, who hated my sister because I loved her and vice versa and who basically also hated our father because he couldn’t hate us, so Roithamer. How those two could keep on living together, I asked myself, my father and mother, I don’t know, I can only suppose that they’ve always lived with extremest difficulty. The question is, however, how these two could have joined together, married each other, when they had absolutely nothing in common, never anything in common, the whole thing goes back only to the unlucky circumstance that my father stayed the night in the Eferding hostelry, which happened to be my mother’s home, so Roithamer. My father simply must have totally lost his head, “lost his head” underlined. There was absolutely nothing to justify such a union at all. We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they’re actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it’s a matter of human nature, that it’s very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years or for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look, so Roithamer. People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people, so Roithamer, enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this, so Roithamer, why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of that bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be? that this highly intelligent, extraordinary, exceptional man could attract and marry this utterly common and ordinary, even thoroughly vulgar person and could even go on to make children with this person, it’s nature, we say, it’s always nature, every time, that nature which remains incomprehensible to us and unknowable as long as we live, that nature in which everything is rational and yet reason has nothing whatever to do with it, so Roithamer. At first we hear nothing unusual from all these people, if we do hear something about them, and then we hear only revolting things, only revolting things, so Roithamer, “only revolting things” underlined, just as, in our own case, we see nothing unusual in our parents at first, but later we see only revolting things. Nature is that incomprehensible force that brings people together, forcibly pushes them together, by every means, so that these people will destroy themselves, annihilate, kill, ruin, extinguish themselves, so Roithamer. Then they throw themselves down a rock cleft, or off a bridge railing, or they shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle, so Roithamer. We ourselves are the most suicide prone, so Roithamer, “prone” underlined. And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems, a marriage that simply couldn’t have worked out, so Roithamer, that handsome man, so Roithamer, “handsome man” underlined, who threw himself into a cleft in the rock in the Tennen Mountains, over a thousand meters down into a dark cleft in the rock. Because I wanted to see how deep that cleft in the rock was, I once made a detour on my way home from England to Altensam to this rock cleft in the Tennen Mountains, I went climbing up those high mountains in a constant and worsening state of vertiginous nausea, putting the utmost strain on my physical resources as I’m not cut out by nature for climbing high mountains, and I actually made it to that cleft in the rock and I looked down into that cleft because I couldn’t believe that so deep a cleft in the rock could exist, but that cleft is even much deeper; so it was here, into this very cleft in the rock that my cousin threw himself, I thought, standing at its rim and looking down into its depths and for a moment I was tempted to throw myself into that cleft too, but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there. I know how much I hate the high mountain country, but my curiosity to see that deep cleft in the rock, of which I’d only heard up to that point and the depth of which I couldn’t believe, drove me to climb up all the way to that cleft. But it takes a great sense of life, in fact it takes the greatest will to live and to exist, not to throw oneself down such a cleft when one is actually standing at its rim. But I didn’t throw myself down that cleft. He, my cousin, had thrown himself down into it, why into this particular cleft I don’t know, I certainly don’t, so Roithamer, “I certainly don’t” underlined. They’d found his shoes at the rim, his jacket too, six months after they noticed that he was gone, his young wife hadn’t missed him until then, from the fact that his shoes and his jacket were found on the rim of that cleft in the rock they deduced that he had thrown himself down the cleft, but there’s no real proof, these clues, yes, but no proof at all, because nobody can get down into the bottom of that cleft. Many people had supposed he’d gone abroad, but then some mountain climbers found his shoes and his jacket at the rim of the cleft, so he must have, I suppose, taken off his shoes and his jacket before he threw himself down into that rock cleft, he didn’t want to throw himself into that rock cleft in his jacket and shoes, so Roithamer. Another of those lonely men, underlined, acquiring a wife at the unhappiest time of his life, a wife who brought him to the point where he threw himself down that rock cleft. The inclination to suicide as a character trait as in the character of my cousin who finally threw himself into that rock cleft, a specific kind of suicide, first climbing up those high mountains, just to throw himself into the depths of that rock cleft, so Roithamer. Because he spoke of it so often and with such passion and such scientific precision at the same time, they no longer believed that he would actually commit suicide, for anyone who talks about it as much as our cousin did, as incidentally the others did too, his father for instance always talked about suicide and kept bringing it up and every time in a better organized frame of mind, such a man, they think, won’t really commit suicide, on the contrary, such a man keeps clarifying the idea of suicide in his head and as a result he doesn’t commit suicide, having this clarification in his head and being constantly capable of analyzing this clarification, he simply can’t commit suicide anymore, because he has this constant clear understanding of suicide, so Roithamer, to act out in reality something he’d always been talking about and which must basically always be repellent to him, he simply couldn’t do it, every possible argument, every possible reason, every possible negation could lead to anything, usually to a mortal disease, but not to suicide, so Roithamer, because ultimately everything inside such a head is against self-destruction, and ‘ yet it’s remarkable how regularly such a man will talk about suicide and about self-destruction, the subject gave him no peace, it tended to warp his reason, which he then proceeded to restore again, and yet one couldn’t help being struck, so Roithamer, by the way our cousin kept talking almost incessantly about suicide after his marriage to the doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf, but nobody took him seriously, so Roithamer, nobody had the slightest apprehension that he would actually commit suicide, because he was constantly talking about suicide as if he were talking about a subject he entirely understood, though it did remain fascinating to him, just as though he were talking about some work of art, with the most scientific detachment. And anyone who talks so scientifically about suicide, as though it were a work of art, talks about it with a clear precision that humbles the rest of us, why, such a person simply doesn’t commit suicide. Not until he nevertheless did commit suicide, of course, throwing himself down that fissure in the rock, so Roithamer. But to return to my subject, I was speaking of human unions, of living together, of marriage, so Roithamer. People are forever denying the proven fact, so Roithamer, the simple fact of nature’s workings, that the female sex, because it is female, nobody dares to say it in so many words nowadays, that the female sex is anti-intellectual and emotionally predisposed to champion emotion, that it is in fact against intellect in all its possible aspects just as it is emotionally predisposed to emotion in all its possible aspects, so Roithamer. The current fashion is one thing, nature is something else. But then, our times are given over to nonsense and to warping all ideas and all the facts and turning them topsy turvy. I personally know from experience, so Roithamer, that the female human being, “female human being” underlined, that the female sex is incapable of going beyond the first impulse in the direction of the life of the mind. In our case, that of my mother and me, she was only interested in winning me over even if in the process she had to destroy everything I am, my personality, my character, my mind, she had to try it, again and again, in her perverse determination that it must be possible eventually to turn so stubborn a mind as mine, a mind so crazily intent on its own inventions, from its single-track obsession with itself, my self that is, and push it into a crude, Eferding-type domesticity, so Roithamer. She had to cut me down to her own Eferding size, her own existential minimum, and with me she meant to achieve this fully, not only partially as with my father, whom she certainly managed to alienate from himself to at least a high degree, she did alienate my father from himself to a very high, to an ominous degree, as she knew, to her lifelong (Eferdingian) satisfaction. To be fascinated by a man who is different from his observer, viewer, antagonist, yet pitting everything against this man and against the fascination he exerts, to be bent on taking from him everything that makes him fascinating. That woman from Eferding basically hated everything I did or didn’t do and everything my sister did or didn’t do and everything my father did and didn’t do, the victims of her hatred were primarily all those with whom I had intellectual intercourse, beginning with all natural scientists, writers, even poets, philosophers named in my books, in whom she thought she recognized me, and she thought she recognized me in all the books I had in my room, in the most widely differing books belonging to me and used by me all the time. In each one of these books she was bound to recognize me and she hated these books as she hated me, but she didn’t dare to destroy the books, to do away’ with them, she didn’t have the nerve to do that even though her thoughts and everything in her tended in that direction. If I merely think of all the things we came to quarrel about on our socalled walks, with such regularity and occasional obsessiveness, we’d taken our nature walks only to quarrel, always, we walked through the woods, and quarreled, over the meadows, and quarreled, through our gardens, and quarreled, even on the grassy riverbanks, always outwardly exemplars of the greatest serenity at the outset, we quarreled and transformed those grasslands in no time into a noisy, suddenly malignant landscape, where our attacking voices, shouting nothing but insults, could be heard, so Roithamer, all up and down the river. And it always began with trivia, but all these trivia had soon triggered off enormities against our fellow beings, against everything. Even in company the Eferding woman was incapable of controlling herself, of restraining herself, and so our father never took her out socially, after his first efforts along those lines had failed lamentably. Because the good name of all Altensam was always at stake, he had never taken his wife, our mother, the Eferding woman, to any social gathering, though she craved going out socially, but because of my father’s adamant refusal to take her out she soon found it possible to go out only to her own kind of social gathering, the so-called Eferding social gatherings and no longer to the Altensam social gatherings, but her own kind didn’t interest her, what she wanted was to get into Altensam society, which my father, however, denied her; I barred her way, so my father often said, so Roithamer, otherwise she’d have robbed Altensam, which had already lost most of its good name in her time, the Eferding woman’s time that is, she’d have robbed Altensam of all that was left of its good name, so my father, so Roithamer, “all that was left” underlined, but the consequence of this, that my father, after those first failed tries, simply no longer took her along into society but left her sitting at home, was that our mother, the Eferding woman, suddenly hated Altensam more than anything in the world, “more than anything in the world” underlined. My father had fallen prey to the error that he could turn a person like the Eferding woman, an Eferding person that is, into an Altensam person, one kind of person can never be made into another kind of person, so Roithamer, “never” underlined, most especially not an Eferding person into an Altensam person, it was probably because of this error that he took her home and married her, because he understood too late that you can never make an Altensam person out of an Eferding person, never change one species into another. Now and then she tried reading a book, it was all a hypocritical pretense, “hypocritical pretense” underlined, a book of which I had a very high opinion, a book about which I might have said something in her presence showing my great esteem for it, but these efforts of hers were from the first a transparent pretense, of course the Eferding woman’s position in Altensam was always untenable, she should never have come to Altensam in the first place, for if such a person, who isn’t an Altensamer, goes to Altensam, so Roithamer, that person will be destroyed, everything will be done to destroy such a person, to remove the person from Altensam because this is a person who doesn’t belong in Altensam, because this person is different by nature, “different by nature” underlined, the Eferding woman should never have committed the crime of coming to Altensam, our father should never have brought her to Altensam, he should have explained to her, but he brought her up to Altensam out of embarrassment and weakmindedness and exposed her from the first to a situation she simply wasn’t equal to handling, even if she never realized it, she, the Eferding woman, simply never had been equal to Altensam, though most of the time she might have thought she was equal to Altensam, even that she dominated Altensam, most of the time, she was not equal to Altensam, though she actually came to dominate Altensam, so Roithamer, as I know, actually did dominate Altensam, but she was never really equal to it, so Roithamer, our father had to pay dearly for the crime of marrying an Eferding woman, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman had to pay for her crime of coming up to Altensam with lifelong unhappiness, for it was by the fact of coming to Altensam that the Eferding woman became an unhappy person, prior to that, in Eferding, in her father’s house, as the daughter of a butcher and an innkeeper, she’d never been unhappy, or she wasn’t likely, during those years, to be considered an unhappy person, not until she came to Altensam. The photographs I’ve seen that show her as the butcher’s daughter, innkeeper’s daughter from Eferding, don’t show an unhappy person, they show a young, though already old person, but’ not an unhappy person, the pictures of her in Altensam that I’ve seen, and my own experience are of an unhappy and always old person who is constantly ailing.

We children naturally showed no consideration whatever toward our mother, “no” and “whatever” underlined, we, my sister and I, so Roithamer, we Altensamers in contrast to the Eferdingers, our brothers. In the early days when I returned from England, for instance, the Eferding woman had often said she’d like to walk down to Stocket with me, because she knew that I always liked walking down to Stocket, but once she’d walked down to Stocket with me, it was soon obvious to me that she’d really had no desire whatever to walk down to Stocket with me, because basically she hated this walking-down-to-Stocket with me and hated Stocket and hated the people down in Stocket. Or else she affected to be interested in a scientific article because she knew that I was interested in this article, but it was all pretense, “pretense” underlined, so Roithamer. On such occasions I always countered with some malevolent remark that exposed her utter impudence, and our mutual hatred was reestablished. But it’s not true that we didn’t want to be in agreement. But if I happened to say, I hold so-and-so in contempt, for such-and-such a reason, she always instantly agreed with my verdict and so with my remark, without thinking, and this was bound to repel me. If I happened to show a liking for a certain play and praised this play, she felt obliged to praise the play though she hadn’t seen it, not for my sake, as I know, but for her own sake, even though she didn’t know the play, she nevertheless thought she could praise it too, and I was repelled by that. For instance I’d always said, time and time again, that I loved Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities, but I knew that she hated Elective Affinities, basically there was no book in the world she hated as intensely as she hated Elective Affinities, yet she claimed that she shared my love for Elective Affinities, this was simply bound to repel me, so Roithamer. Then she claimed to have read Novalis, though she had never read as much as a line by Novalis, but every time it wasn’t really an effort to come closer to me, to try and bring about a real accord between her and me, between us, but rather an attempt to set a trap, but I never went into this trap, at least not in later years, for at first, in my childhood and youth, I did indeed and very often walk into her traps, the Eferding woman had always set traps in Altensam and all of us had always walked into her traps. Elective Affinities as a trap set for me, so Roithamer.

She had often given me to understand that she was intellectually engaged upon the same subject at the same time I was, but I’d soon found out that it was nothing more than one of her pretenses, that again she’d set me a trap that I was supposed to walk into. All these notes to be utilized one day for a description of my mother, in comparison with my sister and in contrast with my father and brothers, so Roithamer. We must always utilize, work up, everything. When we’re occupied with a so-called intellectual subject, and this subject is so great that we’re totally fascinated by it, we must be absolutely alone in our room (Hoeller’s garret) or wherever we happen to be, even if we’re not (in reality) in Hoeller’s garret, nevertheless in Hoeller’s garret, the place where we happen to find ourselves occupied with such a subject must become Hoeller’s garret for us, we mustn’t tolerate the slightest distraction, even if it came from the person closest to us (sister), we must forestall everything that interferes or could interfere with our concentration on that subject, and therefore could destroy, annihilate, extinguish this subject, which fascinates us, for such a subject is too easily destroyed and annihilated and extinguished and it always is the only subject for us, “only” underlined. This intellectual subject matter must be held fast, until we have mastered it, so Roithamer, “mastered” underlined. Attempts to comprehend Altensam, to understand it, and little by little to comprehend and understand everything connected with Altensam, especially everything relating to my father, to keep on trying to find the causes and from these causes arrive at the effects of these causes, nothing can be fully grasped and explained by means of mental and emotional acuity on the one hand, nor by mental and emotional hypocrisy on the other hand, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s all from my point of view, not from the others’ point of view, always only from my point of view, from the others’ point of view it’s something entirely different, probably the opposite. But the opposite is not my task. I’m getting closer to Altensam, but I’m not getting closer to Altensam in order to solve its mystery; for others to explain it to myself is why I am getting closer to Altensam, to my Altensam, the one that I see. While she lived I never asked my mother, never asked her all these unanswered questions, never once asked her a single crucial question, because I never could formulate such a question, I was afraid I might put such a question wrong somehow, and so I never posed it, and so I got no answer. Now the Eferding woman is dead, I can’t ask her, she can’t answer. But would it be any different now, if I could ask her, and she could answer? We don’t ask those we love, just as we don’t ask those we hate, so Roithamer. Actually I’m shocked by everything I’ve just written, what if it was all quite different, I wonder, but I will not correct now what I’ve written, I’ll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I’ll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections andsoforth, so Roithamer. We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could make, by the time they no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves, like my cousin, like his father, my uncle, like all the others whom we knew, as we thought, whom we knew so thoroughly, yet we didn’t really know all these peoples’ characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn’t have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide. It’s only a thought which keeps turning up, but we don’t take steps to correct ourselves. We sit here for hours on this chair and think about it, we may even be sitting here for days on this same chair, or stand at the window (as for instance in Hoeller’s garret), we may pace the floor in our room, lie on the bed, locked up in Hoeller’s garret or in my room in Altensam, which has always seemed to me my actual correction cell, “correction cell” underlined, but I kept putting off my correction, kept delaying it, though I never gave up the idea of correcting myself, we do it suddenly, quite suddenly we walk out, go away, break off everything, one step off the road, away, gone, so Roithamer, because we’ve lost our mind, so Roithamer, or because we suddenly are everything extreme, so Roithamer. We’re in a state of extreme concentration, we don’t even permit ourselves to change a piece of clothing, we permit ourselves nothing beyond this concentration, but we still don’t do it. We’re always quite close to correcting ourselves, to correcting everything by killing ourselves, but we don’t do it. Ready to correct our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature, so Roithamer, but we don’t do it. While this thought keeps sinking in deeper, we’re at its mercy and we yield to it in every respect because we have become totally concentrated on this thought, but we don’t do it. Then we forget this theme, make no corrections, go on existing, until we’re back with this thought, addicted to it, so Roithamer. But one day, from one minute to the next, we’ll do what we have to do, and then there’ll be no difference between us and those who’ve already made their correction, killed themselves. To write to someone, for instance, because we can no longer bear our loneliness, we’ve borne our solitude to the limit, but we can bear it no longer, we write in order to be no longer alone but to be two of us, to my sister for instance, that I’d be glad if she’d come to England, soon, now, we write, to the person we love, the one we know most intimately, I write and telegraph simultaneously, my most intense idea now is that my sister must come to me, from Altensam to England, as quickly as possible, to put an end to this condition of solitude into which I’ve maneuvered myself, so Roithamer, she must come if I’m to be saved, I’m thinking, though I don’t write it, but I think she must come, to save me, because I’ve exhausted all my means of distracting myself, all my tricks of distracting myself, because I can think only this one thing, that I must come to an end in my room, unless this familiar, beloved person comes, I’ve no chances left. For days I wait for an answer, then my sister suddenly sends a telegram, she can’t come, so then I somehow keep going, I don’t put an end to it. It’s back to my work again, total immersion. Suddenly I no longer have any reason to kill myself, to make that correction. The message that my sister isn’t coming because she can’t come is enough to prevent me from doing it. But would I have done it? I ask myself, so Roithamer. Instead of committing suicide, people go to work. All their lives long, as long as their existence allows for this constantly recurring process, so Roithamer. The death of my uncle, so Roithamer, surprised even Hoeller, for Hoeller, like myself, had always been of the opinion that a man like my uncle, who kept coming back to the subject of suicide in conversation, because of the very fact that he keeps coming back to it and talks of it almost constantly, will not commit suicide, but he did commit suicide, the atmosphere in Hoeller’s house at the time was totally conditioned by the surprise of my uncle’s suicide, he’d thrown himself down the cheese-factory’s air shaft in Stocket; the whole Hoeller house, even Hoeller’s garret, I think, so Roithamer, this whole simple house with its complicated conditions, or vice versa, complicated house with its simple conditions, so Roithamer, lay as if under the pall of my uncle’s suicide. The moment I set foot in Hoeller’s house, that’s to say, the moment I clapped eyes on the huge black stuffed bird hanging on the wall of the vestibule, it was clear to me that the whole Hoeller house was under the pall of my uncle’s suicide. Then I remembered my last meeting with my uncle from Stocket, so Roithamer, and I asked myself whether there was anything about the man, on that last encounter, that might have given me a hint of his subsequent suicide, observing him first at the forest’s edge, with his rubber boots, short, frayed old jacket, so Roithamer, the hazel walking stick he’d whittled himself, the black hat on his head, and probably, considering his immobility, he’d had a wooden leg for years, also in view of my sudden presence, he was preoccupied with a so-called philosophical subject, I said to myself as I walked toward him, time had fashioned him into a so-called nature man, because everything in him and about him was predisposed that way, not a comic figure such as we see very often, everything about him said: I can no longer escape from nature; as I walked toward him, probably he didn’t even notice that I was coming toward him because everything seemed to indicate that he never noticed me, he was so preoccupied with his philosophical subject, that philosophical subject which had to do with nature.

When he spoke, it was only by indirection, he’d always been my philosopher, it was on his account that I always came down to Stocket from Altensam, the idea of thinking came to me in my first hesitant, then determined encounters with this man who’d always been my highest authority, my philosopher who had taught me to think, most unobtrusively, at first, but from the first with a decided firmness that endured. I’m no philosopher, he’d always said. He had a preference for old clothes, early rising, and washing in cold water. He placed Novalis above everything. Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising. A minimal breakfast, thick socks his sister had knitted from raw, untreated wool, and one of Novalis’s ideas. Time was to him only a means toward the constant study of time. Must I be with another person? he always answered: no, I need be with no other person. This question and this answer of his do more to explain his character than mine, so Roithamer. We admire a man like my uncle, who killed himself because he could no longer endure the unhappiness of mankind, as he wrote on the slip of paper they found in his coat pocket, dated by him on the day he threw himself down the air shaft of the cheese factory, because he’s ahead of us in having the capacity to commit suicide, not only to talk about committing suicide but to commit suicide in fact, so Roithamer. It’s always those upon whom we’d hung our hopes, so Roithamer, who kill themselves, those whose talent and personality we loved and whose presence was the most pleasing and most familiar to us, so Roithamer. Then: I often woke up in the night and asked myself, how high are the costs of building, actually? what if the costs of building the Cone exceed my means, on the one hand exceeding my financial means, on the other hand exceeding my intellectual means? How often I came unrecognized to Austria and to Altensam and stayed in the Kobernausser forest, in the wooden shack I put up myself on the spot I’d picked out as the site for the Cone, in the precise center of the Kobernausser forest, so Roithamer. And very often I came from England to Altensam, unrecognized, and into the Kobernausser forest and stayed there, at its very center, for days and once even for weeks, totally concentrated on the Cone and then went back just as unrecognized to England, to Cambridge. Several times, “several times” underlined, I started to write a letter to my sister, but I never finished writing those letters because I had to keep the Cone a secret from my sister, of course, and if I did drop a hint to her, and I had in fact dropped a hint several times, she’d think I was crazy, even my beloved sister thought I was crazy, so Roithamer, which is why I had to keep silent always about the Cone, even toward my sister. The edifice that was to bring me deep gratification but to my sister the highest, the supreme happiness, so Roithamer. Such a letter about the Cone would have been sure to have frightened her. What a lot of ideas go into the making of the Cone, all adding up to the idea of the Cone. He, Roithamer, I can see that now, lived in fear that he might go mad deep inside the Kobernausher forest, on precisely the geometrical centerpoint in the middle of the Kobernausser forest he had himself determined, because he had a bent in that direction, “bent” underlined. Like his sister, he inclined to sudden madness, from sudden overstrain of his whole being, he feared that from overstraining his head he’d suddenly go mad. He’d decided at once on the size of the Cone and on the character of the interior, but he could no longer recall the exact point in time, to pinpoint that moment now, after so many years, “after so many years” underlined, he found impossible. We must remember the onlookers who note our moment of weakness, mental weakness, in so enormous an effort, and use it to kill us, so Roithamer. We must never let up in intensity. Time is realization, idea, despair, and vice versa, so Roithamer. But I mustn’t act exclusively in accordance with my plan and a dead geometry, so Roithamer.

It’s all right to hesitate, but never out of even the slightest weakness.

Everything is equally important, whether it’s the idea (as a whole) or its smallest constituent. Actually always the simultaneous contemplation of the idea, I must contemplate everything at the same time and train myself in this simultaneity of contemplation in such a way that I come to see everything ever more clearly, nothing less sharply focused than anything else, so that the edifice exists (in my head) and then I must move it out of my head onto the geometric point. The question is, will I achieve my aim in my own way by talking, or not, or will it turn out to be only resignation as a fact, so Roithamer. Resignation, weakness, emptiness, the failure to make it real. It’s all a matter of schooling oneself, a school in which I am both the teacher and the pupil, and in the intensity between the two there’s one’s logical consistency, there’s the Cone. My lucidity peaks at night, an exceptional condition of my head, so Roithamer, then in the morning the Cone falls apart in my head. Always assuming that my idea of the Cone corresponds precisely to my sister’s needs, her character, her nature.

Novalis: the Cone is not what she is at this point, it is rather everything about her, corresponding to her eyes and ears, her hearing, feeling, intelligence, alertness, attention. Corresponding. It is the fact itself which dumbfounds and benumbs, not the rest of it, so Roithamer. And so I’ve never talked with a soul in Altensam (including father) about the Cone, though they all know that I’m building the Cone, they’ve all heard of it. Such a building changes the man who is building it, by the ways in which he speeds the work along and completes it. I used to be open to everything before I had the idea (of building the Cone), but now I’m nothing but the victim of the man who is building the Cone. If my head had known, so Roithamer. It seems that one’s head keeps being draw irresistibly to the most impossible problems, every time, to prove itself, so ‘ Roithamer. If we don’t, every time, involve ourselves in the most problematic undertakings, we’re lost, there’s nothing left, so Roithamer. What then follows is the catastrophe of breakdown, whatever our idea was about deserts us when we sleepwalkers awaken in the middle of what we were doing, so Roithamer.

Once we recognize the process, it’s already broken off, nothing’s left but a man who’s been destroyed, killed. We retreat to an idea, possibly the only idea we know nothing about, so Roithamer. We try to grasp the things we experience mentally. If I don’t work hard enough, ‘m destructive, if I work too hard, I’m destructive, so Roit amer. The question always arises, whether it’s the right moment. We see everything ridiculously interrelated, from England, from Altensam, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. e have an idea, in the end it’s nothing, so Roithamer. Once he actually went as far as his sister’s door, in order to admit everything about the Cone to her, three o’clock in the morning, so Roithamer, I’ll wake her up and explain. But at four o’clock I laughed out loud and went back to my room. And if another man should faithfully follow my notes, my plans, everything I’ve got in my head, in executing the Cone, it still wouldn’t be the same Cone, so Roithamer. But if I had neglected my scientific work, genetic mutations, I’d also have neglected building the Cone, as it is, by not neglecting my scientific teaching and studies, I also did not neglect the building of the Cone. For I was actually (most intensely) occupied with building the Cone in the Kobernausser forest while I was working my hardest on genetic mutations in Cambridge, and vice versa (March 3). The cause of work for and intensification of the one, the cause of work for and intensification of the other, so Roithamer, I never asked myself whether I am neglecting my scientific work by pushing on with building the Cone, and vice versa, it was a question I dared not ask myself, so Roithamer. The time was as favorable to my Cone building as it was for my scientific work, I achieved all I could, so Roithamer. Now I’ve left science and the Cone to nature, so Roithamer. Just as no one will ever set foot inside the Cone again, so no one will enter into my scientific work. That it’s possible to consider and act simultaneously upon two (seemingly) contradictory opposites, so Roithamer. To make full use of one’s mental state in every case and at every moment and never weaken in that direction, so Roithamer. We may not question our actions, so Roithamer.

Juxtapose my lack of sympathy to my mother’s, my parents’, my brothers’ lack of sympathy, so Roithamer. The Cone cost more to build than any other edifice in Austria, as I hear, I’ve obtained the figures on it, so Roithamer.

Total isolation in Cambridge alternated with total isolation in the Kobernausser forest, where I fixed up a room for myself in the builder’s work hut, for the times when it’s impossible for me to stay in Hoeller’s garret, because I have to be at the building site (March 7), so Roithamer. The secrecy with which I pursued building the Cone in Cambridge, the same secrecy in Altensam, the same secrecy at the Hoeller house, so Roithamer.

But at night I worked on genetic mutations, in the builder’s hut as well as in Hoeller’s garret, even though I was wholly occupied with the Cone, so Roithamer, there was no outward indication by which an onlooker could have recognized that I was working on genetic mutations while overseeing the building of the Cone in the Kobernausser forest, and on the Cone in Cambridge, while I was teaching and studying, so Roithamer. Every day one idea connected neither with building the Cone nor with my natural science, so Roithamer. The highest demands made of the one discipline applied to the other discipline, so Roithamer. To build, and realize, and complete such an edifice means always to hear and see everything connected with the edifice, meaning of course to hear and see everything and to act on one’s experience of all this hearing and seeing, so Roithamer. What if I’d suddenly informed my sister about my building the Cone? which I didn’t do, so saving myself and my plan. We keep silent about what we know, and make good progress, so Roithamer. At night he’d always heard the woodworm in Altensam, the voracity of the woodworms would keep him awake all night, everywhere and naturally most of all at night, because of his keen hearing and that oversensitive head of his, he heard the woodworm, the deathwatch beetle, at work, in the floor planks and under the floor planks, in the wardrobes and chests, in all the chest drawers most of all, so Roithamer, in the doors and in the window frames, even in the clocks and the chairs and overstuffed armchairs, he’d always been able to distinguish exactly where and in which object, which piece of furniture, a woodworm was at work, the woodworm had actually already gnawed its way into his own bed, while lying awake in bed all night long, so Roithamer, he’d watched the woodworm’s progress, had to watch it, with most concentrated attention, he’d breathed in the sweetish smell of the fresh wood meal and felt depressed at the thought that through all the years thousands, possibly tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of woodworms had infiltrated into Altensam in order to devour Altensam, to keep gnawing away at Altensam and devouring it until it collapsed in one moment, a moment that would quite possibly not be too long in coming. There wasn’t a single object in Altensam, so Roithamer, with out the woodworm in it, and even if it happened to be a new object, something recently acquired, the woodworm would have invaded this new object in no time at all, so Roithamer. When I take a piece of underwear out of a drawer, so Roithamer, I have to shake it out, because it’s full of wood meal, overnight my fresh laundry is full of wood meal, so Roithamer, when I take a handkerchief out of the drawer, I have to blow the wood meal off of it, even the dishes in daily use have to be blown and wiped off, so Roithamer, because they’re covered with wood meal, and actually everybody in Altensam is always full of wood meal, their faces are covered with wood meal, their heads and bodies covered with wood meal, so Roithamer. They were all constantly afraid they might break through the floor planks, because the floor planks were already ominously giving way here and there, because Altensam was constantly changing under the influence of the woodworm’s work (and the dry rot, of course!) they lived in chronic anxiety, because in fact the most noticeable and frightening manifestation in Altensam has been the work of the woodworms, so Roithamer. At first everything was tried against the woodworms, but in the end we had to admit that nothing can be done against woodworms, and we stopped trying. All our lives long in Altensam we were confronted with millions of woodworms, without a chance of defending ourselves against these millions of woodworms. Helpless against the woodworms, so my mother, so Roithamer, we fought the woodworms all our lives, but had to give up the struggle in the end, so my mother, so Roithamer. Each generation in turn, so Roithamer, had pitted itself against the woodworm in Altensam, each feared it would be the one over whose heads Altensam would suddenly collapse, because Altensam is totally riddled by the woodworm, so Roithamer. Once my father sent for a so-called pest control man from Linz, who came up to Altensam and spent weeks there, in vain of course, so Roithamer. And so everyone in Altensam had become accustomed to walking around there in an oddly circumspect manner, because of the woodworms and their centuries-long work of undermining Altensam to the point of having almost worked their way through all of it, everyone adapted his walk most carefully to the floor planks and the wooden ceilings, with an eye to the furniture as well, such an oddly careful manner of walking, simply being considerate of Altensam, and when we had a general conversation, so Roithamer, which happened at most once a year in all these years, then it was the woodworm we talked about. No matter how quiet it is in Altensam, so quiet at times that not a sound seems to be heard, one nevertheless hears the woodworm at Altensam, so Roithamer. The wardrobes, the tables, all stand at a slant, the chests of drawers, the chairs, so Roithamer, the floors are subsiding, the windows no longer fit into their framework, so Roithamer, the struggle against the woodworm had been totally given up (March 9), so Roithamer. Suddenly, after weeks of concentrated mental work, so Roithamer, I went to Marks & Spencer to buy a pullover because my old one, which I’ve worn incessantly all year long, suddenly looked too shabby to me. Walking down Oxford Street to Marks & Spencer I felt supremely happy, so Roithamer, and back to my room with the new pullover (March 11). He locks himself into his room and tries to start his work on the allopolyploids, an inescapable task, already far advanced, so Roithamer, so that he couldn’t shake off his obsession with this task, but after he had made all his preparations for this work, checked the window, checked the door, so Roithamer, checked his chair as well as t e door, all these important steps prior to beginning his work taken and checked out, including checking out the precisely geometric arrangement of all objects he had personally placed on his table and around his table, in his working area, ever, thing had its place and the slightest deviation would have made it impossible for him to begin his work, so Roithamer, he always had to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time putting all these objects into the position favorable to the starting off of his work process, his own person being also subjected to this drive for order, this absolute discipline of order, physical condition, clothing, everything; for instance, the top shirt-buttons had to be undone, sleeves rolled up andsoforth, so Roithamer, “rolled up” underlined, but first and foremost, the door to his workroom must be locked, the key turned twice in the lock, this dual turning of the key always was of the utmost importance, for the mere chance of someone suddenly opening the door and walking in, someone who was bound to disturb him, whoever it was, this was totally incapacitating, so it often happened that he’d already begun on his work, he’d be all set mentally and had sat down at his worktable, but had forgotten to lock the door, so he had to jump up again and lock the door, but by then it was too late, this short interruption, when he’d already sat down at the table, jumping up, that is, in order to lock the door, was all it took to make further work impossible for him, or else something was wrong with the curtains and he’d have to jump up and put whatever it was with the curtains in order, or some noise made him jump up and forced him to look out the window, or else it was something fallen to the floor, a piece of paper or a crumb of food or a thread or even a dead fly he’d overlooked and which suddenly constituted an unbearable irritation, in total contrast to Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer, where everything was always simply ideal for him, but if he worked anywhere else, as for instance in his room in Cambridge, under the circumstances sketched above, circumstances which were always invariably awful, time-consuming and nerve-wracking, he was always wishing only that he might be in Hoeller’s garret instead, whenever he couldn’t be there, so Roithamer, even if he was disturbed only by the sudden thought of such a possible form of disorder. It wasn’t the actual object itself, all it took was the thought of such an object possibly lying about in disorder, so Roithamer, to make him rise from his desk at once, to find out for certain, whether his supposition was correct andsoforth, so Roithamer, he might happen to be deeply absorbed in his work and the work might be going rather well and then suddenly he’d discover something out of order in his surroundings, even if it were only a shadow cast by an object which was itself in order, but was brought into disorder by its shadow, the kind of shadow that might be cast on the windowsill or the floor or even on the desk as a worktable, so Roithamer, which suddenly disturbs everything to the point of destroying everything, and he’d have to get up from his desk and first straighten out this particular object, because he couldn’t stand the disorder, at the very least he had to see what exactly the disturbing element was, so he actually found it impossible, most of the time, to work (in Cambridge), only every third or fourth day, because there was always some obstacle or other, or else because, after he’d begun to work and had possibly become deeply immersed in work, possibly very deeply immersed, suddenly some irritant presented itself, an irritating sound or an irritating object, which he possibly hadn’t seen or hadn’t heard before he began his work, he often had to get up or jump up only because a book on his desk was not positioned at the correct right angle, or because a so-called bookmark in a book or pamphlet suddenly annoyed him, one of the many hundreds of bits of paper he tore off the daily newspaper to use as bookmarks, which he used to mark his page in all the books and periodicals lying around all over the place, for when such strips of newsprint used as bookmarks stick out of the books beyond the bearable length of six or seven or eight centimeters, when he’d suddenly noticed it and couldn’t stand it, or else he’d noticed a fingerprint that had escaped him up to that point, the kind of fingerprints on the books and papers, on his desk or even on the door, on the window frames andsoforth, so Roithamer, which other people naturally don’t notice, can’t notice, or suppose it’s a whole handprint, so Roithamer, “whole handprint” underlined, even if he only imagined that there might be such a fingerprint or a whole handprint on the door, he had to jump up and check the door or the windows, and once he was disturbed in his work, no matter how deeply he had already immersed himself in it, at first not to a degree that would interfere with his work, but then suddenly he did turn out to be most ruthlessly disturbed, from an observer’s point of view, in his work to a degree that indeed interfered and in fact brought his work to a sudden stop, he’d have to break off his work because he suspected there was a fingerprint (his own or that of another person) on the door or the window frame andsoforth, and he’d get up and rush to the door, “rush” underlined, and examine it, and actually he’d always find what he’d suspected would be there, even if it was the most senseless suspicion, he’d find it confirmed, everything suspected always turned out to be a fact, if for instance he suspected that something wasn’t quite in order under his desk, though he couldn’t see it, since the tabletop naturally prevented him from seeing beneath it, and if he proceeded to act on his suspicion without regard to the disturbing effect such an interruption would have on the work he had just begun, if his suspicion turned out to be founded in fact, he’d break off his work, crawl under the table, find the disorderly or disturbing object andsoforth, so Roithamer, he always found something wrong, something disturbing, once he crawled under the table, such a suspicion had never turned out to be unwarranted, so Roithamer, anyway he found it and straightened it out, though it jeopardized his work, the concentration required for his brain work which he had started but had to break off because of the disorder, but he had to straighten out the disorder under his desk or on the window or wherever it might occur in his study, and I tried, so Roithamer, after once more making sure that I really was locked into my room, by turning the key twice in the lock, so Roithamer, I was in control, and having taken control I felt reassured that I was indeed locked into my room, and I tried to make some progress in my work on the allopolyploids (March 17), so Roithamer, “tried” underlined. I recall a little essay on the thorn apple, the so-called datura stramonium, that he did after his sister’s death, on coming back from Altensam to Cambridge, to regain his peace of mind, while I went to the Tate Gallery, so Roithamer, alone, because I always had to visit this museum alone, it’s my favorite museum, the only museum in the world which I not only could endure but could actually love, during this visit to the Tate, so Roithamer, I was able to gain a little peace of mind by working on the thorn apple, the so-called datura stramonium, because I was working most intently, while at the Tate Gallery, on this little paper which I believe turned out rather well, I was working on William Blake for one thing, and for the other on the thorn apple, it was good for me in the condition in which I was left by the death of my sister, in that mentally dull, mind-disturbing and mind- de stroying condition, so Roithamer, which suddenly inspired me to write something about the thorn apple, for my own distraction, to distract my head from the death of my sister, so Roithamer.