Correction

Hoeller’s Garret

After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled

“About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.” The atmosphere in Hoeller’s house was still heavy, most of all with the circumstances of Roithamer’s suicide, and seemed from the moment of my arrival favorable to my plan of working on Roithamer’s papers there, specifically in Hoeller’s garret, sifting and sorting Roithamer’s papers and even, as I suddenly decided, simultaneously writing my own account of my work on these papers, as I have here begun to do, aided by having been able to move straight into Hoeller s garret without any reservations on Hoeller’s part, even though the house had other suitable accommodations, I deliberately moved into that four-by-five-meter garret Roithamer was always so fond of, which was so ideal, especially in his last years, for his purposes, where I could stay as long as I liked, it was all the same to Hoeller, in this house built by the headstrong Hoeller in defiance of every rule of reason and architecture right here in the Aurach gorge, in the garret which Hoeller had designed and built as if for Roithamer’s purposes, where Roithamer, after sixteen years in England with me, had spent the final years of his life almost continuously, and even prior to that he had found it convenient to spend at least his nights in the garret, especially while h: was building the Cone for his sister in the Kobernausser forest, all the time the Cone was under construction he no longer slept at home in Altensam but always and only in Hoeller’s garret, it was simply in every respect the ideal place for him during those last years when he, Roithamer, never went straight home to Altensam from England, but instead went every time to Hoeller’s garret, to fortify himself in its simplicity (Hoeller house) for the complexity ahead (Cone), it would not do to go straight to Altensam from England, where each of us, working separately in his own scientific field, had been living in Cambridge all those years, he had to go straight to Hoeller’s garret, if he did not follow this rule which had become a cherished habit, the visit to Altensam was a disaster from the start, so he simply could not let himself go directly from England to Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, whenever he had not made the detour via Hoeller’s house, to save time, as he himself admitted, it had been a mistake, so he no longer made the experiment of going to Altensam without first stopping at Hoeller’s house, in those last years, he never again went home without first visiting Hoeller and Hoeller’s family and Hoeller’s house, without first moving into Hoeller’s garret, to devote himself for two or three days to such reading as he could do only in Hoeller s garret, of subject matter that was not harmful but helpful o him, books and articles he could read neither in Altensam or in England, and to thinking and writing what he found possible to think and write neither in England nor in Altensam, here I discovered Hegel, he always said, over and over again, it was here that I really delved into Schopenhauer for the first time, here that I could read, for the first time, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and The Sentimental journey, without distraction and with a clear head, it was here, in Hoeller’s garret, that I suddenly gained access to ideas to which my mind had been sealed for decades before I came to this garret, access, he wrote, to the most essential ideas, the most important for me, the most necessary to my life, here in Hoeller’s garret, he wrote, everything became possible for me, everything that had always been impossible for me outside Hoeller’s garret, such as letting myself be guided by my intellectual inclinations and to develop my natural aptitudes accordingly, and to get on with my work, everywhere else I had always been hindered in developing my aptitudes but in Hoeller’s garret I could always develop them most consistently, here everything was congenial to my way of thinking, here I could always indulge myself in exploring all my intellectual possibilities, here in Hoeller’s garret my head, my mind, my whole constitution were suddenly relieved from all the outside world’s oppression, the most incredible things were suddenly no longer incredible, the most impossible (thinking!) no longer impossible. It was in Hoeller’s garret that he found the conditions necessary and most favorable to thought, for getting the mechanism of his thought going in the most natural, most undistracted way, all he had to do was to come to Hoeller’s garret from wherever he might be, and the mechanism worked. Whenever I was in England, he wrote, no matter how I felt, I was always thinking, if only I could be in Hoeller’s garret now, always when he had reached a dead end in his thinking and in his feelings, if only I could be in Hoeller’s garret now, but on the other hand he realized that settling for good in Hoeller’s garret was not synonymous with always being able to think freely and without distraction, and that, if he could stay forever in Hoeller’s garret, it would mean nothing less than his own total destruction, if I stay in Hoeller’s garret longer than need be, he wrote, I’ll be done for in no time at all, that’s the end of me, he thought, which is why he had always stayed in Hoeller’s garret for only a definite period of time, how long exactly he could never foresee, but it had to be strictly limited, he must have considered a stay of fourteen to fifteen days in the Hoeller garret ideal, as his notes imply, always just fourteen or fifteen days, every time, on the fourteenth or fifteenth day, according to Hoeller, Roithamer always packed up in a flash and went off to Altensam, though he did not necessarily stay in Altensam for any length of time very often, but only for the shortest possible time, as little time as he could manage, the absolute, inescapable minimum, no more, he had even been known to take up residence in Hoeller’s house with every intention of going on to Altensam after fourteen days or so, but instead of going on to Altensam where he was expected, where his arrival had already been announced, after fourteen or fifteen days, he went from Hoeller’s place in the Aurach gorge straight back to England, because his stay at Hoeller’s place, in the Hoeller ambience, had not only given him enough, but had actually advanced his thinking so much that he did not need to stop at Altensam but could go straight back to England, specifically Cambridge, where he was always both studying and teaching simultaneously and, as he always kept saying, he never exactly knew at any particular moment whether he was studying or teaching because, as he said, when I was teaching, I was in fact basically studying, and when I was studying, I was basically teaching.

Actually I too found the atmosphere in Hoeller’s house ideal, I immediately made myself at home in the garret which had been Roithamer’s garret and will always remain Roithamer’s garret, from the very start I had always intended to take notes on my work with Roithamer’s papers and on the entire process involved, and I soon understood how perfect for Roithamer’s purposes Hoeller’s garret was, how he had settled into Hoeller’s garret with its view to westward, pitch-dark it was over the raging Aurach, and to northward, also pitch dark, the water steadily and always noisily slapping and crashing against the wet, glistening rock-face, “rehearsing for Altensam in Hoeller’s house” as he called those stays in Hoeller’s house, specifically Hoeller’s garret, stays that quickly succeeded one another in those last years, especially the last three years, when he went five or six times, for four or five months at a time, from England to Altensam, but actually only to Hoeller’s garret, obviously attracted to it by Hoeller’s work, those meticulous preservations of animals, and in general by all the curious conditions of the place, so intimately bound up with the play of light in the Aurach valley, where every day ran its course simply enough, but nature was always making itself so powerfully felt, a nature mostly in pain, and all the people there, Hoeller’s parents and in-laws and his wife and his still school-age children, for whom everything turned on what game had been shot and gutted, what wildfowl shot and gutted, and all the related chores, all the circumstances of life were bound up with their natural surroundings, it became clear to me that Roithamer had found here in the Aurach gorge as he had nowhere else the inspiration for pressing on with his main task, the building of the Cone, that edifice as a work of art, which he had designed for his sister in three years of incessant mental concentration and which he had built in the following three years with the greatest effort, with what he called almost inhuman energy, built it in the very center of the Kobernausser forest. It was in Hoeller’s garret, where I had now moved with Roithamer’s papers, most of them relating to the building of the Cone, and I regard my work on Roithamer’s papers as the ideal occupational therapy for myself after my long illness and also feel it is ideal, it was here that Roithamer had conceived the idea of the Cone and drawn up the basic plans for it, and the fact that even now, some months after Roithamer’s death and half a year after his sister’s death, his sister for whom he had built the Cone which is already abandoned to natural decay, Hoeller’s garret still contains all the plans, all the books and articles, most of them never used but all of them collected by Roithamer in his last years with a view to building the Cone, all those books and articles in every possible language, including languages unknown to him but translated for him by his brother Johann who spoke many languages and in fact had a gift for languages like no other man I ever knew, the translations were also here in Hoeller’s garret, and I could see at once that there had to be hundreds of them, stacks of translations from Spanish and Portuguese, as I noticed when I entered the garret, hundreds if not thousands of laborious decipherments of probably important considerations for the construction and completion of the Cone by experts unknown to me but probably familiar to him, he hated the word architect, or architecture, he never said architect, or architecture, and when I or someone else said architect, or architecture, he instantly countered by saying that he could not stand hearing the word architect, or architecture, that these two words were nothing but malformations, verbal monstrosities which no thinking man would stoop to, and I never used the words architect, or architecture, in his presence, nor have I used them since, even Hoeller got accustomed to avoiding the words architect or architecture, like Roithamer we resorted to words such as master builder or building or the art of building; that the word B U I L D is one of the most beautiful in the language, we knew ever since Roithamer had spoken about it, in that same garret where I have now installed myself, one dismal rainy evening when we again, as so often, dreaded the onset of another one of those torrential floods that come tearing down the gorge to devastate the whole area sometimes, though this one receded unexpectedly, those floods in the Aurach gorge would do the most extensive damage but they always spared Hoeller’s house, all up and down the Aurach they did the most extensive damage but Hoeller’s house, which was built right into the cleft, was spared always, because Hoeller had known exactly what he was doing, everyone was amazed to see the whole Aurach valley buried in mud, ravaged and destroyed while Hoeller’s house alone stood unscathed, incredibly, it was on this dismal rainy evening, with all of us living in fear of another such flood about to bemire and ravage everything in its path, though this time it did not happen, when Roithamer revealed to us the beauty of the word building and the beauty of the word build and the beauty of the phrase builder’s masterwork. From time to time he would pick out a word like that, a word that had suddenly become luminous with meaning for him, pick out one word from among all those others, any word at all, and elucidate it to anyone, but usually to those of us who often came in the evening to Hoeller’s house and always regularly on those weekends when Roithamer returned from England.

Once, as I recall, he spent a whole night analyzing for us the word circumstance, the word condition, and the word consistent. It was touching to find all of Roithamer’s books and articles and plans and his writing utensils and thinking aids still right there in Hoeller’s garret, just as he had left them.

Hoeller’s garret was where all the ideas and designs for building the Cone had come into being, here all the ideas had originated, all the plans were sketched, all the necessary decisions for building the Cone had been made here, it was from here Roithamer had directed everything. Those pinewood shelves, common planks of pinewood, along the whitewashed walls, crammed with hundreds of thousands of books and articles about buildings and the art of building and everything connected with building, about nature and natural history, particularly the nature and natural history of the rock formations involved in the building of the Cone, about statics above all, and about the possible ways of building such a cone-shaped habitation within a natural environment such as the Kobernausser forest, these cheap pinewood boards nailed together with three-inch-steel spikes, and instantly, as I entered Hoeller’s garret where I had never been alone before, but always in Roithamer’s company or Hoeller’s company, or both their company, I suddenly felt that it was possible for me, from the first moments after I had stepped inside, to let myself go in Hoeller’s garret, to think freely about Hoeller’s garret, to give myself over entirely to all these suddenly available thoughts, relating of course to my plans regarding my work on Roithamer’s papers and especially to arriving at an understanding of his chief project, the building of the Cone, to sort it all out, to think it through, possibly even to pull it together where it did not really belong together, to reconstitute its original coherence as envisioned by Roithamer, because I had seen clearly from the very first time I went through Roithamer’s basic manuscript that the circumstances that interrupted his work, the death of his sister and the consequent irregularities in his methodical work-process, his work interrupted suddenly where it never should have been interrupted, on his basic manuscript about the Cone and consequently about Altensam and about Hoeller’s garret, about the course of the Aurach and about the Aurach gorge in particular, about building materials and, again, everything connected with the building of the Cone, but as it related to Hoeller’s garret, though basically the building was researched and planned and put up and actually completed out of veneration for her, is sister, I had seen clearly that because of all these circumstances the manuscript on which he had been working most energetically, as I happen to know, for the last half year of is life in England, in a room he had rented specifically for that purpose in Cambridge, as he told me, his purpose being to write at all costs a justification and analysis of his work on the Cone, even though he basically had no right to take the time off from his professional scientific work, but he couldn’t be bothered about that because he must have clearly understood that he simply had to complete his manuscript about the Cone and its attendant circumstances and everything in involved with it, now, immediately after his sister’s death, if he as going to complete it at all, he probably felt that he had no time to spare, that his life was doomed to end soon, that day by day it was increasingly self-doomed, so that he had to proceed with incredible ruthlessness, mostly against himself and his own highly vulnerable mental state, as I happen to know it was, he had to fulfill his intention and complete his manuscript about the building of the Cone, he had in fact begun by making a most energetic effort to plan and construct and put up and complete the Cone, then followed this up by making a similar if not even greater effort to explain the building of the Cone in an even greater, as I now see, a most extensive manuscript, and above all to justify what he had done, because he had been reprimanded on all sides for having had such an idea at all in a time opposed to such ideas, a time predisposed against such ideas and their realization, for having realized such an idea, given it embodiment and even brought it to completion, he was reprimanded for being, in a time generally predisposed against such men, such heads, such characters, such minds as Roithamer’s (and others!), precisely such a man and head and character and mind, so contradictory a character and mind and man as that, who used his unexpected inheritance in the service of an idea everyone considered crazy, an idea that had suddenly entered his crazy head and never again left it, the idea to use his sudden windfall for building his sister a cone, a cone-shaped habitation, and not only that, but most incredible of all, to erect this giant cone not where such a house might normally be located, but to design it and put it up and complete it way out in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, they had all thought at first that he would never go through with it, but little by little he made it happen, suddenly it was no longer only inside his head or clearly evident only in the intensity of his preparatory studies, but all at once the road through the Kobernausser forest was actually being built, a road that would go to the exact center of the forest at an angle he had calculated for months, working nights, because he meant to build that cone in the exact center of the Kobernausser forest, and he did build it in the exact center of the Kobernausser forest, the calculations all had to be made by him personally because, now I have to come out with it, he hated all architects and he hated all professional builders with the exception of the manual workers, he kept at it relentlessly until he had all his figures as to the exact center of the Kobernausser forest just right so that he could begin with the digging of the foundations, it was a rude shock to all the people who had until this moment refused to believe that Roithamer’s crazy scheme would actually be executed, when the road to the center of the Kobernausser forest was actually built and he had started digging the foundations, he had come back from England, once he had done his calculations, and installed himself in Hoeller’s garret and had, by supervising every detail personally, so expedited the building of the road and the digging of the foundations that the experts were mystified that one man could so speed up a project that the road was finished in half the normal time and the foundations dug in a third of the time normally required for such a job. The foundation was the deepest ever dug and the road was the best-laid road, everything had to be the best. Nobody, in fact, had even believed that Roithamer could possibly succeed in acquiring the plot of land for the Cone in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, and certainly not for such a crazy purpos e, everyone and the experts especially thought it was completely crazy to build such a structure as the Cone and they still do and always will think it completely crazy, anyway the land on which Roithamer built the Cone had become government property after the aristocrat who previously owned it, a Habsburg, had been dispossessed, and the very idea of getting such a piece of state property in the middle of the Kobernausser forest back from the government into private hands, no matter whose, was in itself an absurd and actually an utterly crazy idea, to say nothing of getting back all the land for the road leading to the Cone, buying it all back from the government to be privately held, by whomever, yet Roithamer had managed to reacquire from the government, in the shortest possible time and in absolute, prearranged secrecy, all the land needed for the road he wanted to build and also, immediately thereafter, the large plot of land in the middle of the Kobernausser forest on which he wanted to build the Cone for his sister, then, shortly after acquiring the land and not without having completely settled all the formalities, he began laying out the road and building the road and building the Cone,. at which point everyone was horrified, to begin with it was a rude shock especially to Roithamer’s brothers who had never dreamt that their brother’s crazy scheme could become a reality, made into a reality by the crazy Roithamer, but they had to accept the fact of the valid deeds of purchase, and take note that the road was beginning to be built and, finally, that the Cone was under construction, even at this late date, they had tried to have Roithamer declared incompetent, they instituted a proceeding to have him placed under guardianship, but he was declared completely sane by a team of doctors, in any case the experts who testified against Roithamer’s mental condition and who had been hired and paid by Roithamer’s brothers remained in the minority against the experts who testified that Roithamer was sane. That a man who lets such an idea as that of building the Cone develop in his head, then uses his inherited fortune, for which he had no other use, to turn this idea into a reality, and actually goes ahead, with great energy and enthusiasm, with his project to build the Cone, still does not quite prove, after all, that the man is crazy, even though the majority of bystanders and relatives believe that such a man is crazy, that he simply must be crazy, because no sane man could possibly spend such an enormous amount of inherited money, an amount that goes into the millions, the hundreds of millions, on so crazy an idea as the idea of building such a cone, a cone the likes of which has never been built before, and Roithamer actually did sink all of his inheritance into the building of that Cone, except for a sum in seven or eight figures, I don’t know exactly how much, which Roithamer had set aside to be at his sister’s disposal for the rest of her life, precisely the amount now at issue between the Roithamer brothers living in Altensam, because that amount of money reverted to Roithamer after his sister’s death, and to his brothers after Roithamer’s own death. At this point let me state that the Cone itself and all the land and property pertaining to it, purchased at such vast expense but in accordance with all due process from the state, has reverted to the state, with the proviso that the Cone is to be left to decay, never again to be touched by anyone, and is to be abandoned entirely to nature where Roithamer had placed it. But I won’t go into it at this point.

Where the pinewood shelves crammed with books and articles ended in the Hoeller garret, the walls were covered with hundreds of thousands of plans, all concerning the building of the Cone, millions of lines and numbers and figures covered these walls, so that at first I thought I’d go mad or at least get sick from looking at all these millions of lines and numbers and figures, but then I got accustomed to the sight of these lines and numbers and figures, and once I had reached a certain degree of equanimity, beyond the point of losing my mind from looking at all those cone calculations, I could begin my study of those notations, beginning with all the calculations and sketches on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, then going through the books and articles on the shelves, and finally all the material in the file drawers; I did, after all, have to familiarize myself with the fact that here in Hoeller’s garret I was confronted with all the intellectual data, hitherto unknown to me, out of which Roithamer had designed and then built the Cone and everything connected with it. And so it was out of the question to start on my actual studies of all these papers immediately, at least not in the first few hours after my arrival, instead I began by making myself comfortable in Hoeller’s garret, unpacked my bag, put away my few indispensable belongings, examined my bed, which had just been made and, like all freshly made beds in the country, smelled deliciously of the surrounding outdoors. It was a good bed, as I could tell by sitting on it; then, I hung my coat in the wardrobe; I am all alone in what I may certainly call Roithamer’s garret, Hoeller’s garret is Roithamer’s garret, even Hoeller referred to this garret as Roithamer’s garret, I had the immediate impression of being inside a thought-chamber, everything in this chamber had to do with thought, once a man was inside it he had to think, being in this chamber presupposed incessant thinking, no one could have endured it for a minute without thinking incessantly, whoever enters Hoeller’s garret, enters into thinking, specifically into thinking about Hoeller’s garret, and at the same time into Roithamer’s thinking, and must continue to think these thoughts as long as he remains in the garret, if he breaks off these thoughts he is instantly crazy or dead, I think. Whoever enters here has to give up everything he ever thought prior to entering Hoeller’s garret, he must make a clean break with all of his past thinking and start completely afresh, at once, thinking only Hoeller-garret thoughts, to stay alive even for a moment in Hoeller’s garret it’s not enough merely to keep on thinking, it must be Hoeller-garret-thoughts, thinking solely about everything to do with Hoeller’s garret and Roithamer and the Cone. As I stood there looking around Hoeller’s garret it was instantly clear to me that my thinking would now have to conform to Hoeller’s garret, to think other than Hoeller-garret-thoughts in Hoeller’s garret was simply impossible, and so I decided to familiarize myself gradually with the prescribed mode of thinking in this place, to study it so as to learn to think along these lines, entering Hoeller’s garret unprepared and learning to adjust, to entrust and subject oneself to these mandatory lines of .thought and make some progress in them is not easy. Everything inside Hoeller’s garret came from Roithamer and I even went so far as to state that this garret is Roithamer, even though one’s head should beware of such judgments, I yielded up my entire existence to this judgment the moment I set foot in Hoeller’s garret.

Hoeller himself had not touched a thing in this garret since Roithamer’s last visit here, immediately after his sister’s funeral in Altensam, as I’ve since learned from Hoeller, Roithamer had attended the funeral most reluctantly, as I’ve also learned, not of course on account of his sister but because of his brothers, Roithamer wore black, Hoeller said, which he’d never worn before, no matter who was being buried, Roithamer wore black only this one time in his life, it was only for his sister’s funeral that he dressed in black, he looked extremely well dressed in those black clothes, Hoeller says, and so there he was in his elegant black clothes in Hoeller’s parlor and sat there in silence, in total silence, as Hoeller says, without eating or drinking anything, Hoeller had the impression that Roithamer, with his sister now dead and buried, had come to an end himself, except that he was still alive, but though he was still alive he actually felt that he was already dead, because his sister, for whom he had built the Cone, had meant everything to him, next to his work, his natural science, which he taught at Cambridge, as I have said, he simultaneously taught and studied at Cambridge, but now, Hoeller said, you know how an educated man can suddenly look as though he had been mortally wounded, and Hoeller described Roithamer as looking not only completely exhausted after his sister’s funeral, but looking as if he were already dead, Roithamer had entered Hoeller’s house a dead man, not merely an exhausted or totally exhausted man, and there he sat in Hoeller’s family room for two hours, and would not let Hoeller’s wife give him anything to eat or drink, though he had never refused her before, except that after three hours he took a glass of water which he drank down in one long gulp, and nothing else, then he kept on sitting there in the downstairs family room deep into the night, in silence, Hoeller himself didn’t dare to say anything, not in this situation, said Hoeller, who could describe the situation very well, though he couldn’t explain it, in fact every time Hoeller talked about Roithamer he could describe everything very well though he couldn’t explain it, but Hoeller didn’t need words to make himself understood and to explain whatever and wherever something needed explaining, Hoeller’s method of elucidation always worked best when he operated in silence, and so Roithamer sat in the parlor all night long and did not wish to retire to the garret, Hoeller said, he probably didn’t want to return ever again to the world of the garret, which stood for everything. Around midnight Hoeller’s wife wrapped a coverlet around Roithamer’s legs because of the sudden cold, and Roithamer had let her do so without offering any resistance, Hoeller said, then, at about four in the morning, Roithamer stood up and went upstairs without a word, to the garret, where he stood stock-still for a few moments.

He made no changes at all in the garret, Hoeller said, never again touched anything in it. The garret is still exactly as it was when he left it. Nor have I changed anything in the garret, Hoeller said. Then Roithamer went away and they never heard from him again. The news of Roithamer’s death came as no surprise, so Hoeller said, everything about Roithamer on that last evening and that last night had pointed to his death, Hoeller could see clearly during that night, during all of that last encounter with Roithamer that he, Roithamer, didn’t have much longer to live. I no longer exist, was the last thing Roithamer is supposed to have said to Hoeller. I personally saw Roithamer one last time in London, after he’d sent me a telegram and I’d gone to meet him at Victoria Station and had accompanied him to his apartment, where he told me about his sister’s funeral, in those brief sentences of his that brooked no contradiction. Now in the garret Roithamer was present to my mind’s eye, because he had in fact been present here, I saw him distinctly and I heard what he said when I saw him, even though he was not present in reality, so conscious was I of his presence as I gazed at his things, breathed the air he had breathed those last years in the garret, thought the thoughts he had always thought here, sensed the Hoeller atmosphere which had become second nature to him in the years when he’d been disengaging himself from Altensam and had, gradually at first and then altogether, given himself up to his project, the Cone, for Roithamer had often told me that the Hoeller atmosphere and the circumstances of the Hoeller atmosphere, the line of thought directly bound up with the Hoeller atmosphere and the circumstances bound up with the Hoeller atmosphere had become his one necessity, the only compelling necessity of his life, no matter where he happened to be in those final years, whether in England, where he had to teach at the university in Cambridge, or in the Kobernausser forest, where he had decided to build the Cone, wherever he had stayed in those final years, whether in England or in Austria, whether in the English place, which called for great decisiveness and presence of mind, or in the Austrian place, with great attachment and love, though also with equally great contempt and dislike, with a mixture of distrust and disappointment felt so keenly as to border on hatred for his homeland, a borderline he was often sharply aware of crossing, in fact, because he realized that while on the one hand he loved Austria as the land of his origin, he also hated it because it had rudely affronted him all his life long, it had always repulsed him when he needed it, it had never let a man like Roithamer come close, basically men, people, characters like Roithamer have no business in a country like his homeland and mine, where they have no chance of developing and are continually aware of their inability to develop, such a country needs people who are not angered to the point of rebellion against the insolence of such a country, against the irresponsibility of such a country and such a state, such a totally decrepit, public menace of a state, as Roithamer said again and again, a state in which only chaotic conditions, if not the most chaotic conditions, prevailed; this state has countless men like Roithamer on its conscience, it has a most sordid and shabby history on its conscience, it is no better than a permanent condition of perversity and prostitution in the form of a state, as Roithamer said again and again, quite impassively, with his innate firmness of judgment based on solid experience, indeed Roithamer had never accepted any criterion other than that of experience, as he said again and again, when his limit of tolerance toward this country and this state had been reached, and he said that he could not give a full account of this state’s sordidness and shabbiness and dangerousness in just a few quick words, nor could he take the time for a full analysis in a scholarly work on the subject, intent as he was on his professional duties and on his building of the Cone, nor did he have the head for exhausting himself in political argument, he had never been able to pour himself out in political—the common kind of political argument—he had to leave this sort of thing to other kinds of heads, foreheads, occiputs, more suited to it than his own, he merely felt driven now and then to bring his judgment to bear on the country of his origin, the country where he belonged, Austria, this most misunderstood country in the world, this country more problematical than any other in all world history, so from time to time he had to risk expressing himself on the subject of Austria and the Austrians, this state that was economically more decrepit than any other, which had nothing left, apart from its congenital imbecility, but its hypocrisy, hypocrisy in every conceivable area of administration and policy, this country, once the very center of Europe, was, according to Roithamer, no longer anything more than a rummage sale of intellectual and cultural history, an unsold remainder of government merchandise, on which the citizen is granted only a second or a third or a fourth but in any case only the last bid, only the leftovers, Roithamer had known from the beginning, as I did too, how impossible it was to grow up and develop in this country, under this government, no matter what the auspices, as Roithamer said, this country and this government do not favor the development of a man of intellect, here every sign of intellectual energy becomes immediately transformed into a sign of intellectual weakness, every effort to get ahead, to move up, to move on, is made in vain, wherever you turn your eyes, your mind, your efforts, you see nothing but the failure of all efforts to make one’s way, to rise, to get on, to develop, every Austrian is born to failure and has to realize that he must give up the struggle if he is to remain in this country and in this state, under whatever auspices, he has to decide whether to stay and go under, to grow old in misery and without ever achieving anything in his own country and his own state, watching his own mind and body die a horrible slow death, whether to accept this lifelong process of decline while remaining in this country, under this government, or else whether to get up and out as soon as possible, and by so doing save himself, save his mind, save his personality, his nature, because if he doesn’t get out, Roithamer’s words, then he is sure to be destroyed in this country, if he isn’t yet contemptible, he is sure to become contemptible in this country, and under this system, and if he’s not a vicious or an infamous type, he’s sure to become a vicious or an infamous character, and a vicious and infamous creature in this country and under this system, so a man has to save himself from the first, from the very first moments he begins to think, by escaping from this country and this system and the sooner a man of intellect turns his back on this country and this system the better, he has to make up his mind to leave behind everything that constitutes this state and this country, to go no matter where, to the ends of the earth if necessary, but not to stay where there is nothing for him, or else if there is something, it’s sure to be only the most miserable, the most mind-destroying, the most head-wrecking kind of thing, sure to drive him to every kind of pettiness and meanness, here everything exists only to crush him, to vilify and disown him at all times, he must realize that here in his Austrian homeland he is chronically exposed to vulgar misunderstanding and vulgar vilification, sure to drive him to his destruction and to his death and to the annihilation of his existence. Surely it is clear that Roithamer had no alternative but to leave his homeland, which doesn’t even deserve that honorable title, since it still is an honorable title, because his so-called homeland is actually, for him as for so many others, nothing but a horrible lifelong punishment for existing, for the blameless act of having been born in the first place, a man like Roithamer never ceases to feel punished by his homeland for what is not his fault, because no man can be blamed for his birth, but Roithamer had to understand very early in his life, in his earliest childhood, in fact, which he spent with his three siblings in Altensam, that he would have to get away, as fast as possible and without any ifs or buts, if he was not to go under, as his siblings have gone under, in the last analysis, because there is not the slightest doubt that Austria has been the ruin of his siblings, his older brother certainly went downhill in Altensam, because of the circumstances characteristic of Altensam, the conditions that prevail in Altensam and always did prevail in Altensam, Roithamer’s older brother never once made any attempt to leave Altensam, his development took the course characteristic for Altensam, from the first he had given himself up without a murmur to that process of dying a slow death in Altensam, the place is nothing but a process of slow death, he never tried to break away from Altensam, to give up Altensam, he simply could not muster the minimum of necessary energy, qualities such as courage, decisiveness, adding up to a spiritual power of decision, were altogether lacking in this elder brother, whom I knew from early childhood, as I knew Roithamer’s younger brother, he simply accepted this order-in-the-guise-of-disorder which always prevailed in Altensam, quietly put up with the inexorable processes of the dying-off of a huge country estate, because this was what his parents expected of him, and he grew up in Altensam as they all grew up in Altensam, and what became of him is what became of them all, a typical Altensamer is what he became, a man who basically knows nothing else and also accepts nothing else than Altensam, who has awakened with Altensam and who, having lived through Altensam, is going to die with Altensam. And Roithamer’s younger brother was always the older brother’s willing slave, he was even weaker and feebler than the older brother and both of them together actually formed a lifelong death club in Altensam, nothing else, even though they did outlive Roithamer, their middle brother, and their sister too, who died in the Cone, of course, they did out-exist, out-vegetate their sister and their middle brother, Roithamer; if I were to go to Altensam, which I have no desire to do, I could see for myself how they keep on vegetating there, I could see them, the two remaining Altensamers, being exactly what they have always been and nothing else, being Altensam through-and-through, and it was precisely this Altensam through-and-through that Roithamer always resisted, as he said, his whole life, his whole existence, his whole effort to survive had basically been nothing more than resistance to Altensam, anything but surrender to Altensam, anything but getting stuck in Altensam is what he must have been thinking always and in every way, I think that this reflection must have been part of every slightest thought, every least idea in his head: anything but becoming Altensam, becoming Altensam through-and-through like my brothers, because actually Roithamer would never have been capable of accomplishing his intellectually demanding work otherwise, work such as he has left us as his legacy, all these papers of his, even the least significant of them, testify to Roithamer’s lifelong concern with not getting stuck in Altensam, throughout all of his life, all of his difficult existence, there was nothing of greater urgency in his head than he need to loosen his ties to Altensam, because to disengage himself from Altensam, consciously and radically, meant the freedom to think, to be freed of Altensam to do his own thinking, because he had finally freed his thinking from Altensam even though it would not have been possible without Altensam, because actually Altensam and his coming from Altensam and the constant connection between his person and his personality and his scientific work and Altensam were necessary, to enable him to think as he had thought and worked, away from Altensam, beyond Altensam, never again back to Altensam. His brothers had been destined from the first to remain in Altensam, to accommodate themselves in Altensam to their fated decline in Altensam, no one expected anything else from them, in fact, and no one noticed that these two men, by staying in Altensam, were gradually and with increasing intensity being annihilated by Altensam, even though they still exist, they have long since been annihilated by Altensam as Roithamer was never annihilated by Altensam, although he was always debilitated by Altensam, by all but his sister, who was an exception. To her Roithamer clung with all the love of which such a man is capable and as the highest expression of this love he had envisioned and undertaken and accomplished and completed the building of the Cone. But that a person like Roithamer’s sister cannot endure so climactic a condition has proved true, in that she is no longer alive today. But more of this later. That he must get out of Altensam, Roithamer had understood even as a child, clearly understood as though he had an adult’s head on his shoulders, and he had always kept apart from the others in Altensam as if in preparation for his removal from Altensam, from earliest childhood on everything about him had pointed to his eventual departure from Altensam, to his actually leaving Altensam completely behind him, because his kind of thinking was incompatible with Altensam and impossible without a separation from Altensam. It will have to be a radical separation, he had decided quite early in his life, and when he decided subsequently to give up not only Altensam but Austria, he actually achieved the most radical separation possible from Altensam and Austria.

Because if I ever do go back again—and the temptation to go back again could not be greater—I shall be destroying everything I have achieved, he noted, it would mean yielding to a weakness, nothing less than a deadly weakness, it would mean succumbing in a moment to the imbecility which I have so far managed to escape. He had always perceived Altensam as a state of imbecility, and those who lived in Altensam, his relatives, as the imbeciles in this imbecility, and there was nothing he feared more than a return to this imbecility and to these imbeciles. Even if the torment of absence and of pursuing, of advancing one’s objective, one’s intended continuous improvement of one’s intellectual condition, is the greatest torment, and even if the hardship of taking root so far from home, in a socalled foreign country, is the greatest and most depressing of hardships, I shall not return to this state of imbecility and to the imbeciles of Altensam and Austria, he noted. Many of his notes of that period had attracted my attention during the first hours after my arrival at Hoeller’s garret, but I deliberately avoided concentrating on Roithamer’s mental state just yet. To penetrate Roithamer’s mental state prematurely was dangerous, it had to be done warily, with great care, and above all while keeping watch over my own mental state, which is, after all, also and always a precarious state of debility, as I was thinking during those first moments and hours of contact.

And so I approached that mass of papers from Roithamer’s hand and mind, and which I had brought with me to Hoeller’s garret, timidly and with restraint, because I fully realized the dangers of a possibly precipitate and careless involvement with Roithamer’s papers, with his entire literary estate that had fallen to me by a court decision, fully aware that I had to guard myself against this involvement, because it was clear to me that my mental state and my entire constitution were extremely vulnerable to every kind of injury from Roithamer’s papers. But I had seized the opportunity of my pulmonary infection, meaning simply these months of reflective illness, to concern myself at once, without postponement, with this legacy of Roithamer’s, afraid as I was originally to plunge into Roithamer’s papers, because I knew how vulnerable I was, in my uncertain state of health involving not only my body, I was too weak to confront Roithamer’s mental world head on, knowing that I had never been a match for Roithamer’s ideas and what he did with them, but had, in fact, sometimes succumbed entirely to these ideas and actions of Roithamer’s, whatever Roithamer thought I also thought, whatever he practiced, I believed I also had to practice, at times I had been wholly preoccupied with his ideas and all his thinking and had given up my own thinking even though it had been, after all, like every line of thought, an independent, autonomous, self-propelled line of thought, I had become quite incapable of thinking my own thoughts for long periods of my life, especially in England where I had probably gone only because Roithamer was there, all I could think was Roithamer’s thoughts, as Roithamer himself had frequently noticed and found inexplicable, and consequently also unbearable, he said, to have to see me so subjected to his thinking, if not entirely at the mercy of his thinking, that I tended to follow his every thought wherever it might lead, that I was always to be found in my thinking wherever he was in his thinking, and he warned me to take care, not to give in to this tendency, because a man who no longer thinks his own thoughts but instead finds himself dominated by the thoughts of another man whom he admires or even if he doesn’t admire him but is only dominated by his thoughts, compulsively, such a man is in constant danger of doing himself in by his continual thinking of the other man’s thoughts, in danger of deadening himself out of existence. For the longest time I could not manage to think my own thoughts in England, all I could do was to think Roithamer’s thoughts, so that during all that long time in England I had, in effect, given myself up.

Since my thinking had actually been Roithamer’s thinking, during all that time I simply had not been in existence, I’d been nothing, extinguished by Roithamer’s thinking into which I’d suddenly been absorbed for such a long time that Roithamer himself lost track. My extinction by Roithamer’s thinking probably lasted until Roithamer’s death, I am only just now beginning to perceive that I am once more capable of doing my own thinking, owing to my having come into Hoeller’s garret, I think. Now, after such a long time, I think that I am once more in a position to form my own image of the meaning of the objects I look at, instead of Roithamer’s image of the scenes at which he and I were looking. think that when I stepped into Hoeller’s garret, I suddenly stepped out of my long years of captivity, if not incarceration, within Roithamer’s thought-prison—or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon. For the first time in years I am now looking at Roithamer with my own eyes, and at the same time I have to think hat I have probably never seen Roithamer with my own eyes until now. Such a man, such a character, such an existential genius as Roithamer was bound to end, I think, at a certain Point in his development, at its extreme point, in fact, where he would end explosively, be torn apart. When I concern m self with Roithamer, with what order of magnitude am I dealing? I ask myself, clearly I am dealing with a head that is willing and compelled to go to extremes in everything he does and capable, in this reciprocity of intellectual interaction, of peak record performances, a man who takes his own development, the development of his character and of his inborn intellectual gifts to its utmost peak, its utmost limits, its highest degree of realization, and also takes his science to its utmost limits and to its utmost peak and its highest degree, and n addition also takes his idea of building the Cone for his sister equally to its highest point and its highest measure and to its utmost limit, and is even willing to provide an explanation of all this in the most concentrated form and in the greatest measure and to the utmost limit of his intellectual capacity, a man who must force everything he is, in the final analysis, to coalesce in one extreme point, force it all to the utmost limits of his intellectual capacity and his nervous tension until, at the highest degree of such expansion and contraction and the total concentration he has repeatedly achieved, he must actually be torn apart. He had freed himself and his head from Altensam and Austria so that he could achieve this highest degree of concentration, and he had always had the will to achieve this height of concentration, in every aspect of his being, he had this will to concentration, the will to reach the absolute limit which was his most salient characteristic, he had given up practically everything he had ever been in order to achieve what he had not been and what he ultimately became by dint of superhuman excessive effort.

We rarely meet a man like Roithamer, I must admit, and probably never again in our lifetime, a man who, having recognized his capacity for it, does all he can to achieve the record performance of his being and who, once he has embarked on his scientific discipline, intensifies this discipline every day and every moment until he brings it to the utmost point of concentration within himself and must go on concentrating it to the utmost possible intensity, having suddenly no longer any alternative to perfecting his possibilities, anything else has become impossible for him, he must keep his eye fixed undeviatingly on his highest possibilities, unable to see anything apart from these, where such an extraordinary talent for life and therefore for science as Roithamer’s is involved, such an enduring and lifelong concentration means an enduring and lifelong incarceration within that extraordinary talent for life and for science, because from a certain moment onward, such a man can no longer live for anything other than his genius for reaching his aim which, once he has clearly perceived it, suddenly outweighs everything else and becomes his only motive, all at once such a man’s entire being is concentrated in his resistance to everything that might stand in the way or even merely distract him from the gradual achievement and ultimate fulfillment of his aim; resisting everything, concerning himself with nothing except whatever will advance his aim, such a man goes his increasingly lonely and painful way, a way such a man must invariably go alone and without help from anyone, as Roithamer realized quite early in life, suddenly he had left behind everything, especially everything to do with Altensam and its surroundings, consequently all his relatives, physical and spiritual, in whom he had suddenly recognized the greatest impediment to his aim, he had given up what the others, siblings and other relatives, either were not ready to give up or incapable of giving up, the habit of the habit of Altensam, the habit of the Austrian habit-mechanism, the habit of the familiar, of all one is born to, he gave it all up, everything the others did not give up, all he had to do was to think of giving up, leaving behind, everything the others did not give up and leave behind, all he had to do was to observe what the others did or did not do in order to do it or not do it himself, their omissions were his activities, his activities were their omissions, a simple trick in which he had been able to achieve great facility from earliest childhood, by constantly observing everything around him, by a persistent testing and receiving and rejecting of everything other than himself, his character, his mind, because he had always been different from everything else and everybody else and so, by his constant observation of everything else and everyone else he had arrived at an even higher degree of lucidity, he could see that he had to take a different direction from all the others, travel a different road, lead a different life, a different existence from theirs and all others, as a result of which, in fact, quite different possibilities had opened up for him from those of the others and from those otherwise constituted, under whose dominance he had come with time, more and more, in a very special quite idiosyncratic innate rhythm of his own in which he had schooled himself, Roithamer had understood early in life what the others had not understood until much later or had never understood at all, the most salient feature of his relationship to the others is always their total failure to understand and the resulting non-stop incomprehension on their part, they always understood each other among themselves, but they never had understood him, and they still do not understand him even now, after his death. Basically they had never really noticed his development at all, for what they had perceived as his development was something other than his actual development, he had always gone some different way, just as he had always pursued other ideas than they had assumed, they had never had any insight into Roithamer’s nature, which differed fundamentally from the nature of all the others, their view of him was conditioned by their heads, their feelings, their limited perceptions, but Roithamer’s development was something else, they saw their brother (or son) only as they were able to see him but not as he was, since they saw him as they wanted, not as he truly was, and even his sister, whom he loved as he loved no other human being, did not face the truth and the reality of this extraordinary man, whenever she was involved or in touch with him. Their vision was beclouded when they should have been looking at Roithamer with unprejudiced eyes able to perceive the truth and the reality and so, all his life, they confronted a man other than he was, they saw him as they wanted to see him, as someone they could control, even if he sometimes seemed weird to them, or not weird but basically not in the least like one of themselves, had they seen him as one of themselves, they would have felt they were seeing clearly. They would have liked nothing better than to eliminate him altogether from their world, but now he has become the chief heir of his parents, the others being paid off, because his father chose him to be the heir of Altensam instead of his elder brother, whom the father perversely wished to humiliate, as I now know, the father had quite deliberately wanted to involve his middle son in a catastrophe called Altensam, such was the father’s idea, to choose as his heir the son who was absolutely wrong for Altensam, as the father knew he was, the son who not only was all wrong for Altensam but who quite simply hated Altensam with all the fervor of his head, about Roithamer’s being chosen to take over Altensam and pay off his siblings a special dissertation could be written, but it is not for me to do this, the father’s stipulation that Roithamer was to take over Altensam and pay off the others, who were attached to Altensam with every fiber of their being, their father had not even reserved to them the right to be domiciled in Altensam, they were to be paid off, nothing else, the chances are, it seems to me, that Roithamer’s father intended solely to destroy Roithamer by leaving Altensam to him and not to the others who loved the place, by leaving it to the one who hated it and so to destroy Altensam as well, such an idea and so destructive a decision is just what you would expect of Roithamer’s father, it perfectly suited his character, his life, his circumstances, by leaving Altensam to my middle son after my death, the old man might have thought, I s all destroy not only my middle son, whose destruction I have had in mind all my life, but destroy Altensam as well, which is after all what I mean to do, and in addition I shall destroy the lives of my other children, nothing could have been more in character for this man than to destroy his progeny and is origins at the same time, his children and Altensam together an effect guaranteed by his stipulation that Altensam was to be inherited by his middle son, and sure enough Roithamer’s brothers had used up the moneys paid out to them in the shortest possible time and were now quite destitute, dependent on the magnanimity and the unscrupulousness of their brother, whose own sense of truth, justice, and consistency as supposed to have led him to destroy them by driving them o t of Altensam, to which they were attached with every fiber

* f their being, yet he let them go on taking refuge and shelter at Altensam, he made it possible for them to live there, to have their existence there, all the income from the Altensam agricultural enterprises went into their pockets, a not inconsiderable income in view of the vastness of the estate and its high productivity, there was no equally profitable agricultural property to be found within a large radius from Altensam, not for hundreds of miles, Roithamer waived his claims to the income and even put up with a cousin as manager whom Roithamer knew to be in league with his brothers, not with him, though wondering himself whether such generosity did not border on stupidity, as I see by a note he made, but Roithamer’s conduct and decisions were always in character. The brothers had nothing of their own, they were using their brother’s land, and his sister reported from time to time on their activities, which were always directed against their brother who was busy teaching or studying or obsessed with some idea in England. While the Cone was under construction, the brothers are supposed to have done their brother out of several million, but Roithamer would not admit that he knew what they were doing, he just let things take their course without lifting a finger, Altensam and the fate of his brothers in Altensam had long ago ceased to matter to him. Between my brothers and me, he wrote, there’s always been a total lack of sympathy, nothing but mutual dislike, I have left Altensam and my origins behind me like a foul smell. Here, in Hoeller’s garret, Roithamer realized even during the most strenuous periods of preparation for building the Cone for his sister, which had long since become identical with his purely scientific pursuits, that just a few miles away his own brothers, occupied with nothing but squandering moneys which in fact belonged to their middle brother, brothers who hated everything intellectual, automatically despised everything that had to do with thought, and far from making a secret of their attitude took every occasion to make it public, these handsome, as Roithamer writes, but thoroughly degenerate men who are my brothers, with nothing in their heads but the exploitation of my land and everything else they can get their hands on, who lead a life of nothing but stupid externals, as mindlessly as life has always been led at Altensam, while I, buried here in my scientific studies, don’t even indulge myself in the barest necessities, a new pair of pants, for instance, because I simply cannot take the time for shopping, Roithamer wrote, my brothers keep piling up heaps of new, fashionable clothes, ordering a new car every minute, and in every way doing absurd things that run entirely counter to my views, but I have given up making them see their conduct in the right light, much less reproaching them with it, while it is true that I indulge myself only in the barest necessities, I don’t, after all, need anything but the barest necessities, all my happiness rests precisely on making do with the strictly necessary, all I do, I do in the interests of my studies, which happen to be my deepest concern, all I do, all my plans and finished projects, whatever I may consider and propose and carry out, serves only my research, which is my happiness, so Roithamer wrote, so I have no right whatsoever to judge my brothers, to judge them is to inject myself into their being, which I have no business doing, I must remind myself again and again that their nature is quite different from mine, when I do, it always cuts off thinking about my brothers or anybody else and resolves the momentary problem as it arises. While it is a fact that Roithamer had millions and a vast fortune at his disposal, yet was content with the barest necessities for his own person, the absurdity of this naturally caused a persistent misunderstanding, but Roithamer knew why he was content with the barest necessities, even though he was possessed of a so-called vast fortune, the sudden windfall of which he was using for his own aims, for his research, which happened to be in natural science, and which had come to, a climax with the building of the Cone. Nothing could make him happier than to have at his disposal precisely the amount of money necessary to realize his plan of building the Cone in the Kobernausser forest, it was for this he needed those millions which came to be at his disposal after his father’s death, once he had paid off his siblings. He used his inheritance, which came to a so-called enormous figure, for his experiment, ultimately his cone-building, never before possible, because no one who might possibly have had such an idea before him, to build a cone as a human habitation, such a cone, that is, as he had planned, no one had ever had at his disposal the necessary enormous sums for executing such a plan, his conscience was clear, considering the billions being squandered daily by politicians in this world in the course of their totally useless machinations, the vast national resources being destroyed day after day by the politicians for their useless and senseless purposes, he could certainly claim no less than this: that it isn’t often, and probably only this once that the chance comes along to use such a sum, so suddenly made available, for actually constructing such an edifice as I have done, the only one of its kind in the world and in any case the only one in the so-called world of architecture, and he could say to himself: I have built the Cone, I was the first to build the Cone, no one did it before me, I alone took all the steps and subordinated my entire existence and all my other possibilities single-mindedly to designing, building, and completing the Cone. Not only did I design this Cone, he could say to himself, a thought which enabled him time and again to surmount the many setbacks, the sheer impossibilities that rose every year to obstruct his work, his research on the Cone, not only did I design the Cone, and I know that no one else in the world has to this day even designed such a cone, such a cone has never yet existed even in the form of a sketch, so enormous a cone, a cone of such monstrous size and so habitable, in so unique a natural setting as this natural setting in the midst of the Kobernausser forest; not only did I design such a cone, I’ve actually built this Cone and everyone can see that I’ve built this Cone, so Roithamer wrote. Yet he didn’t care in the least whether anyone else saw his Cone, his masterwork, especially not the socalled professionals, the professional building experts, from the so-called world of architecture, who had naturally turned up soon after the Cone was finished and even before its completion, he did not feel the need to prove to anyone that such a cone could be designed and built, specifically even in the midst of the Kobernausser forest, not to anyone but himself, that is, and he had certainly proved it to himself once the Cone was completed, for six years he’d thought of nothing else than proving to himself that such a cone could be built, built specifically in the Kobernausser forest, and in accordance with all the specifications he, Roithamer, had set down for himself in regard to this Cone, and the Cone met his conditions in every respect, it had turned out exactly in accordance with all his specifications and was completely functional, the highest accolade a building could be awarded. Before supper, which I was to take with the Hoellers, I’d been busy putting my things in order, I’d unpacked them and laid them on the table and the two chairs and the bed and I’d hung my jacket and coat in the wardrobe, the process of unpacking and sorting my few things, I’d taken along only what seemed absolutely necessary for a five- to six-day stay in the Hoeller house, I’d taken over two hours, all the time thinking about Roithamer, of how he had lived, under such constant great difficulty, leading a life of such great self-discipline for such long periods of time, always with a view to his scientific work; and under what conditions he did it while also subject to such chance occurrences, and how he lived in England and in Altensam, and how he finally ended up. These thoughts were constantly stimulated by the presence of Roithamer’s belongings in Hoeller’s garret which, from the first moment I had set foot in it, held the same incomprehensible and really indescribable fascination for me as it had for Roithamer, judging from his description of the place, and Roithamer had described Hoeller’s garret very often, as the germ cell of his scientific work, as the wellspring for the last third of his life, once he actually told me that without Hoeller’s garret, without the possibility of going there at any time to live, to use it, even to exploit it, he could not have gone on living from a certain moment on, from that moment when he had devoted himself exclusively to his scientific work, that moment had come as a sudden turning point, one day when Roithamer had just returned from Altensam to England and had spoken to me about the Hoeller garret’s fascination for him, we’d met in Roithamer’s lodgings in Cambridge, probably to discuss some scientific or philosophical or scientific-philosophical topic with which he was then preoccupied, some problem that had most likely just arisen as it so often did in the course of a confrontation with his students or his professors, and Roithamer was not the man to take up a topic that has suddenly arisen, in whatever way it has arisen, only to drop it again at a certain point, as is usual in conversation; a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end, everything involved in it had to be gone over point for point before he could be satisfied, to take up a topic means to think it through to the end, no aspect of it must be left unclarified or at least unclarified to the highest degree possible, but in this instance, I now recall, he was suddenly speaking not of our topic but about Hoeller’s garret, for the first time with such an intensity, I was quite taken aback to hear Roithamer, who never spoke of such things as lodgings beyond what was absolutely necessary, go on for over an hour about Roithamer’s garret, trying to describe Hoeller’s garret to me in every detail, making me visualize it little by little, not all at once, which could only result in something hazy, unclear, not graspable in its entirety, but little by little, with a scientist’s carefulness, object by object, peculiarity by peculiarity, until the entire Hoeller garret with all its objects and peculiarities stood clearly before my eyes, fascinated by his description and explanation of Hoeller’s garret, as an entity I could understand exactly as he understood it, I could see it distinctly, and could see how its significance and importance for his scientific work and for his future existence was suddenly to be understood as an unconditional significance and importance. As I now stood looking at the inside walls of Hoeller’s garret, I compared what I now saw with Roithamer’s description of many years ago, to see whether what I was looking at and noticing coincided with what Roithamer had described to me, whether the concepts I had formed on the basis of Roithamer’s description coincided with the reality, which I now had the opportunity to check out point by point, and with Roithamer’s descriptions, I was listening to Roithamer’s voice in my ear, on the one hand, while at the same time looking around and noticing and checking out Roithamer’s description of Hoeller’s garret, all the walls and finally the ceiling of Hoeller’s garret and the floor made of irregular, rather wide planks of larch wood, their grain forming the strangest patterns that instantly brought to mind earth formations as seen from the air, surface formations in some non-European regions, in Asia or South America, I heard what Roithamer said at the time as though he were saying it now, his voice exactly, with its rising and falling inflections, his characteristic pauses, the way he would slow down as he spoke and then speed up again, and in addition there was, that time in England, the impact of his discovery of Hoeller’s garret as the ideal place for him, everything about Hoeller’s garret was new to him then, and so Roithamer described Hoeller’s garret to me in that tone of voice in which one imparts an incredible piece of news, as incredible as it is staggering, stressing again and again that Hoeller’s garret was perhaps, and probably, his greatest and most important find, probably the most important for his survival, as he insisted, in the second half of his life, his existence, which he had basically been done with long since, he kept on and on about nothing but Hoeller’s garret which we both knew about, of course, because we had often watched Hoeller’s house going up in the Aurach gorge while it was still under construction, but at the time it was being built in the Aurach gorge we could not possibly have had any inkling of its now suddenly manifest significance, a significance and importance Hoeller’s garret could only have achieved. through Roithamer, for whom it suddenly became, during his first stay in it, that first night, when he frequently got up from his bed to walk over to the desk which then as now stood by the window, that writing table which had never been intended as a desk in the first place, not even as a student’s desk, it was an heirloom that somehow came into Hoeller’s possession from the Gmunden widow of an engineer involved in the damming up of the mountain stream, Hoeller didn’t know what to do with it and so he put it in the garret after it had simply been in the way for a long time inside the house, as is so often the case with so many heirlooms that fall into one’s hands, it was always in the way, so Hoeller suddenly hit upon the idea of putting the desk, a simple desk with a maple top, into Hoeller’s garret, the desk was of absolutely no significance until the moment Roithamer got up out of bed that first night he spent in Hoeller’s garret and walked over and sat down at it, and Roithamer had told me that the idea of building the Cone had come to him at this desk, at the moment when he first sat down at this desk, suddenly, as I sat down at the desk, I had the idea of building my sister the Cone, to give her the greatest happiness, as he immediately felt it would, and from that moment on the idea of making his sister supremely happy, by building her a cone to live in, had given him no peace and right there, sitting at that desk where I had never sat before, so said Roithamer, I made a vow to carry out this idea of building the Cone, to build it entirely on my own, out of my own head, to make it into an actuality, and that same night I started to make notes and draw sketches, on that very desk, sketches of the Cone and even the idea for the site of the Cone, namely, the dead center of the Kobernausser forest, came to me in those first moments while I was making notes and drawing sketches, the Cone must be situated in the dead center of the Kobernausser forest, I said to myself over and over, while I was already at work on the first sketches, the first notes, concerning the size and the height and the depth and the width of the Cone, the statics involved, since the building of the Cone is primarily a problem of statics, I thought, and I then spent all night sitting at that desk drafting sketches and notes, it was four in the morning before it dawned on me that I was actually exhausted, those sketches and notes, he told me that time in England, while he was describing Hoeller’s garret, were the basic sketches and notes for the Cone which I subsequently drew on repeatedly during the six years I worked on the Cone, those first sketches and notes were the most important, during all the time spent on planning and building they turned out to be the most important of all, time and again, upon the foundation of these sketches and notes, and their spontaneity, I then built the Cone during those long six years, years intensified by being aimed at this single objective, so Roithamer. And now here I was myself, settled in Hoeller’s garret just as Roithamer had described it, trying to get a clear idea of its interior, and as I sat on the bed or at the table or at the desk or on the corner chair, or paced back and forth, I had been pacing back and forth almost the entire time, because I believed I could gain an even greater intensity of concentration on everything I was considering, looking at, observing, and checking out as well, and I was not disappointed in my aim of gaining such great concentration on Hoeller’s garret, the object of my observation and examination, as I suddenly found myself pacing back and forth quite rapidly, I could hear even better, more intently, what Roithamer had said that time in England, and so I could understand it better and more intently, while at the same time my observation of the Hoeller garret’s interior had become even keener, little by little and under the spell of Roithamer’s characteristic cadences, I finally caught all the meanings in everything Roithamer had said, I remembered, as I heard him again in Hoeller’s garret saying all he had said that time in England, suddenly it all came back to me with all its full significance, and so I had the ideal opportunity for making comparisons and was more and more struck by how exact Roithamer’s description had been, while describing Hoeller’s garret to me in England as if he were inside it, he must have been seeing it in his mind, otherwise so precise a description would have been impossible, but I know how precise Roithamer’s descriptions always were, without being in the least distracted by any sound, the incessant rushing of the Aurach had never distracted me or Roithamer during his sojourns in Hoeller’s garret, a place so totally noiseless apart from the deafening noise of the torrential river, especially torrential at the Aurach gorge, so that it was possible for me to concentrate entirely on Roithamer’s original description then, and on my own present observations of Hoeller’s garret now, I had concentrated totally upon that description and this observation, no noises would have disturbed me in this effort, but luckily the whole Hoeller house suddenly went completely quiet just at this moment of concentration, which was odd because the Hoeller children had just come home from school and I’d just seen a number of the local foresters entering the house to see the taxidermist, I’d seen them from my attic window at the moment I began to concentrate on listening to Roithamer, on his description, my observations, on my own looking and noticing and reexamining of the garret with reference to his description of it, yet at that moment and in fact the whole time I was concentrating on this subject there was perfect quiet. So it was possible for me to check on all the objects in Hoeller’s garret one by one, as one systematically goes over a scientific experiment which must suddenly be checked out for one reason or another, there is always a reason for such testing. Because he was so self-absorbed, always intent upon his scientific work, and because his preoccupation and concentration made him appear to be totally wrapped up in himself and his scientific work to the exclusion of everything else, it was always amazing to find him so well informed, every time, in all fields other than his own, he was, for example, exceptionally knowledgeable about everything that seemed to be of no concern to him at all and need not concern him, such as, for instance, the world of politics, which he must have been following with the utmost attention since he could not, otherwise, have acquired so sophisticated a knowledge of politics and everything connected with politics as he had, the result of regular observations made, again and again I saw with what thoroughness he had kept himself briefed on the latest political events and was prepared to bring into the discussion at any moment such current political events, many of them not those everyone was talking about but those operating under the surface of the world political scene continually and decisively to determine the political realities and to relate them to his own current interests even if these happened to be at the furthest possible remove from the political events, he was always making remarks which gave evidence that he let nothing escape him which brought life or, on the contrary, stagnation into the political world, he was, as an intelligent man of course must be, a daily attentive and critical reader of every newspaper and periodical within reach and in every possible way kept himself informed about the political scene which, as he said, held the greatest fascination for him, once he even said that the art of politics was the highest-ranking of all the arts, a remark indicating that he regarded politics not as a science but an art, were he not, he said, who he was, he would have devoted himself always and with the greatest possible energy to the political art, but he did after all regard natural science and the study of its foundations as the primary task of his life, which is why he had not taken up politics or rather, as he always expressly phrased it, the political art, as I now can see, he was always most excited by politics, especially the always monstrous, even if in so-called peaceful periods quiet politics, he was always excited about the actually always world-shaking and world-changing and consequently world-destroying political events and was generally in a chronic state of excitement about the political factor as such, perhaps to an even greater degree than one might expect of him, occupied as he was with his own scientific work, in natural science; because he was a man who was interested in everything, politics was bound to interest him more than anything, even though his actual intellectual life was entirely concentrated on natural science and on nature, natural science as my actual science, as he once said, he was always at a peak of excitement and readiness-to-explain resulting from his observations of primarily all the political events in the world, observations that sustain me, as he said, in my isolation which enables me to get on with my scientific work. And so it is self-evident that he would be tempted to elucidate his subject when he spoke about it and while he spoke about it, in clear language, in short sentences, using all his skill of phrasing while constantly intent upon simultaneously elucidating and reexamining his theme, always while conquering and reconquering his primary subject matter, natural science, during every moment of his preoccupation with this subject matter, since to think is to regain and recover, moment by moment, everything previously thought, to make it new, and so it is self-evident that he always had to consider politics, always specifically the actual political events of the time together with their political history and at least relate all that to his own thinking, since the thinker must think not only his own special discipline but everything else which is, after all, logically related to his own subject, as conversely everything else is related to his own subject, that is, all his own possibilities or impossibilities and probabilities and im probabilities are always interrelated with all the others. And so it is not at all strange that I have found many notes of a political nature in Hoeller’s garret, I had noticed immediately that many of the notes tacked or pasted on the wall were political notes, just as he had loved covering the walls of his rooms in England, also, with political notes primarily, he felt in his element in this on the one hand scientific, on the other hand decidedly political, interest in the inconspicuous as well as the conspicuous relationship of his thought and his intellectual labors and always, when he spoke of science, he was also speaking of politics and everything else, and when he spoke of politics he was also speaking of science and everything else, because the scientist, or the man we regard as a scientist, or the so-called scientist, who has given himself up to a science because he had to give himself up to a science, has to think not only about his own scientific subject, if he is to be taken seriously as a scientist, but must continually think about all the other fields as well, and then again in the light of all the other fields about his own field and the other way around, and his entire existence is nothing but such incessant testing in which he, the scientist, must incessantly examine what he is thinking at the moment, which should be everything, because unless one is thinking of everything at each moment one is not thinking at all, according to him. Everything that is thought, all thought resulting in action, he said, is political, and we are involved in a totally political world and a totally political society which keeps this world in constant motion. The truth is that a human being is a political creature in every fiber of his being, do what he will, think what he will, deny it if he will, whenever he will. There were also indications of his love for the arts, music most of all, second only to politics as the art to which he was most receptive, as he said, and which he had eventually made his favorite art, indications of which I instantly noticed in Hoeller’s garret, the many notebooks, excerpts of piano scores, et cetera, also musical notations written in his own hand, musical motifs which he, who had perfect pitch, expected to be helpful to him in advancing his scientific work because, as he always used to say, music is the art closest to natural science and the nature of man; music, he said, was basically mathematics made audible, a fact enough in itself to make music indispensable to the scientist as an instrument toward all his objectives and discoveries and the achievement of ever-new knowledge and discoveries, which is why he, Roithamer, concerned himself, in addition to his specialty and natural science in general and all the related disciplines, above all with music as the art medium most useful to him, and I know that he often left Cambridge to spend several days in London in order to hear a particular composition by Purcell or Handel, because he regarded hearing such music as absolutely indispensable to making progress in his own field, what I think about and what I am working on I could never think about and work on without music, as he said, it is always music which enables me to take the next step in my scientific growth, by listening to Purcell or by listening to Handel, as he said, it becomes possible for me to progress more quickly than if I were not listening to Purcell or to Handel, he loved Handel and Purcell more than any other composer, he esteemed these two above Bach, and next to them it was Mozart and, probably because of his Austrian origins, Bruckner, for whom he felt special preference, on one occasion when we were joined by a third man, a musicologist from Oxford, I suddenly had the confirmation that Roithamer’s knowledge of music, which must unhesitatingly be termed a scholarly knowledge of music, was indeed knowledge on the highest level, I still remember the Oxford musicologist’s recurrent outcries of amazement—he had been booted out of Vienna by the Nazis just before the war broke out, a man whose intellectual incorruptibility (an expression of Roithamer’s) instantly convinced me of his superior competence, the most distinguished musicologist in all England at the time—

his amazement every time Roithamer made a remark on musical scholarship and art, and the chances are that Roithamer went to England also to research Purcell’s and Handel’s art of composition, since he’d loved Purcell and Handel and studied them even before he went to England, he had even written a short paper, a so-called comparative study entitled Handel and Purcell, but it is lost, one of many gems Roithamer wrote in his mid-twenties which are lost, probably because he was really unaware of their value and because he was the kind of man who in any case did not appreciate his own written works of art once they were finished, no matter how successfully, and paid no further attention to them, like that essay of his on Anton von Webern which I also remember, which had outlined a quite original theory of music, also lost like the paper on Handel and Purcell mentioned earlier, his studies of Hauer’s and Schönberg’s theories would keep him immured in his turret room in Altensam for weeks at a time, and everyone around him was always amazed at how he had managed to master the art of playing the piano, which had been indispensable to his studies, since the music lessons he and his siblings took in Altensam, from a former professor of the Schottengymnasium in Vienna, the capital’s foremost humanistic school, who had left Vienna because of a serious lung disease and had come to Altensam with the help of a friend of Roithamer’s father, where he also gave lessons in Latin to children and adolescents, his music lessons were nothing beyond the usual, since Roithamer’s parents, and the professor as well, did not attach the greatest importance, in the education of the Roithamer children, to the so-called aesthetic subjects such as music, but rather to mathematics and foreign languages, but Roithamer had always been different, and while his siblings shone in foreign languages, even in the ancient, the so-called dead languages, all of which simply did not interest him, he was the keenest of music students who from the first regarded the indifferent teaching of the Viennese professor, who continued to be sick in Altensam but without infecting the Altensamers with his disease, as basically instruction in the most important, to him, of all the arts, music as a means to making greater strides in the natural sciences which the growing boy had already fastened upon, for even at the age of eleven or twelve Roithamer had instinctively perceived that music and the knowledge of music was a necessary condition for his ability to enter into the natural sciences, and so he had even then seized upon every opportunity to improve his knowledge of music and, with only that basic instruction in musical theory and practice and in piano playing, he had achieved a mastery of his subject all on his own, and had not only retained that mastery all his life but had even managed to expand and intensify it. Listening to music had always meant the same to him as studying music, so listening to music was for him not only a way of raising his spirits but, by the way he combined hearing and studying the music, he became plunged in thought. While others listen to music and, when they hear, they feel, it was possible for Roithamer to hear music and to feel and to think and to study his science. His chief musical interest had been, on the one hand, Purcell and Handel and Mozart and Bruckner, and on the other hand, the newer and newest music such as Hauer, Webern, Schönberg and their successors. The opening bars of the Webern string quartets which he’d hand-copied on the back of a bill, he’d tacked on the wall above his desk in Hoeller’s garret. He loved this opening, it had always meant much to him.

The books that mattered the most to him don’t take long to list, I knew them from his constantly reiterated remarks in which he established a connection with these books, they were always basically the same: Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch, and, because he thought that he recognized himself in them, the writings of Wittgenstein, a native of the same region as Roithamer and always a keen observer of Roithamer’s regional landscape, they were always just the same few books of philosophy and poetry which, with his name inscribed on the flyleaf, he always carried about with him no matter where he had been staying or working, so few that he had always been able to slip them into his traveling bag and take them along, they always had to be within reach. Here in Hoeller’s garret they had been left, after his death, where he himself had placed them, on the shelf above his desk, so now they belonged there forever, in this place that had been Roithamer’s actual study, his idea- and thought-chamber, where in his lifetime no one but myself and Hoeller had ever been permitted to set foot, Roithamer had made sure, in a secret understanding with Hoeller, that no one but himself ever set foot in this room, and in Roithamer’s absence only Hoeller, not even me, no one except for Hoeller, who had to enter the garret if only to air it out regularly, but under strict orders to change nothing in the garret, to leave everything as Roithamer had seen fit to leave it, and always in the best possible order, everything in Hoeller’s garret had its own fixed place, closely corresponding to Roithamer’s character, his peculiarities, and clearly explicable out of his own special view of the world, Roithamer would instantly have noticed the slightest change in Hoeller’s garret the moment he set foot in it after his return from England, or from South Tyrol, where he had often gone directly from England to visit a close friend, a musicologist who was also, as Roithamer always emphasized, a theoretical mathematician at the University of Trent who, when he was not teaching at Trent, had lived and worked on an isolated family estate, over a thousand meters above sea level, near Rovereto, where for many years he had devoted himself entirely to his work, so Roithamer said, having made himself the object of his extremely interesting investigations, or when Roithamer returned from Carinthia, another occasional refuge of his, because he had a beloved cousin there, the daughter of a Klagenfurt lumber merchant, he liked to spend a day or two with her every two or three years, but most times Roithamer came straight back from England to Hoeller’s garret, it would have been unthinkable to let anything be changed in Hoeller’s garret during Roithamer’s absence, Hoeller had always made absolutely certain that nothing was ever changed in Hoeller’s garret and he insured himself against such changes by simply never letting anyone set foot in Hoeller’s garret in Roithamer’s absence, Roithamer had offered Hoeller a regularly payable rental for the use of his garret, but Hoeller had firmly refused to accept anything of the kind, he considered it an honor that Roithamer could use this garret, otherwise completely unused and used by no one, for his own purposes, it was enough for Hoeller that the garret would be used, lived in, by Roithamer, a man known for many years before he ever moved into Hoeller’s garret to be quite extraordinary, a man of rare worth who was superior to at least all known men and, as Hoeller said, a brilliant phenomenon, it was enough for him, Hoeller, that this extraordinary and invaluable man, Hoeller said, this brilliant man, with regard to whom one could safely assume that he would come to be known even more widely as the extraordinary and rare and brilliant man he was, would be using Hoeller’s vacant garret, which otherwise was likely to decay quickly from lack of use, for his scientific purposes, and besides, he, Hoeller, considered it only natural to put this garret at the disposal of a friend, a childhood friend, a school friend, a friend of his youth, for that friend’s scientific and artistic pursuits which he, Hoeller, did not pretend to understand, but which he certainly admired as the continual manifestations of Roithamer’s extraordinariness; as Roithamer always waved away his friend Hoeller’s expressions of admiration, in fact he always was quick to rebuff his admiring friend whenever this friend showed his admiration too explicitly for the sensitive Roithamer’s comfort, he always did all he could to get Hoeller to understand that he, Roithamer, did not deserve admiration of any kind, although he did lay claim, like any man doing his job, to respect, an attitude of mutual respect was the most helpful attitude between friends, the most suitable and appropriate to them and especially to their friendship, people were always admiring where they should simply respect something or someone, the trouble with admiration was, it ought to be nothing but respect for the other person, something of which most people were incapable, apparently respecting the other person was the hardest stance to maintain between individuals, most people are simply incapable of respecting others, but respecting others is most important, people prefer admiring to respecting even though they only irritate the other person with their admiration and destroy with their admiration what is valuable in the other person instead of preserving it by duly respecting it, but that man Hoeller was virtually addicted to admiring Roithamer, and as time went on Roithamer tired of fending off Hoeller’s admiration by rebuffing it. But perhaps Hoeller’s admiration for Roithamer had been nothing more than just his respect, they esteemed each other, in fact, as I know, they held each other in the highest esteem, each in his own way and in accordance with his own capacities. In opening the chest of drawers, which simply does not match the rest of the Hoeller furnishings, it’s a rare eighteenth-century period piece of nutwood, with three drawers, simple ornamentation, so I suppose that it was brought over from Altensam to Hoeller’s garret at Roithamer’s request and perhaps even from among his own personal possessions, it could be one of Roithamer’s favorite pieces, I thought, the aroma also, when I opened the top drawer to put in my toilet articles, this exceptionally well-made chest, not veneered but carpentered out of the whole, evenly grained nutwood, instantly reminded me of Altensam, Altensam where I had gone so often, even in earliest childhood, with my grandfather, who had been a friend of old Roithamer’s, and afterward by myself, almost every day, I must say that when I was at home I was always and constantly drawn to Altensam, that unfailingly mysterious and vast, inexhaustible Altensam with its innumerable, infinitely ancient walls, its hundreds of rooms with their thousands upon thousands of furnishings and pictures that are bound to attract, even to fascinate a young man, especially a child, raised in diametrically opposite, rather restricted circumstances, not to mention the people of Altensam, the most mysterious people in the world to the child I was; in opening that drawer—the chest, I suddenly thought, undoubtedly came from that vast collection of furniture in Altensam—I discovered the yellow paper rose Roithamer won that time at the shooting gallery, the story is as follows: on Roithamer’s twenty-third birthday which he had decided, on an impulse in his rooms at Cambridge, to spend with me in Altensam, and which we actually did spend together in Altensam, after a journey made adventurous by vast inundations of the Dutch coast, from Altensam Roithamer and I went to the annual music festival in Stocket, in early May, we spent the whole evening of his birthday and the night until dawn at this open-air music festival, eating and drinking without restraint, both of us in a mood to let go completely, to go wild, because we’d spent the previous four or five months totally immersed in our studies, he, Roithamer, in his scientific research and I in my mathematical studies, both of us quite consciously and completely isolated within the scientific world of Cambridge. As may be expected this music festival was just the thing to bring us release from our scientific obsession, and we’d instantly and most eagerly seized upon this chance to relax completely at this music festival, to take our minds completely off the subjects of our intellectual obsessiveness upon which we had naturally been concentrating to a really dangerous degree. In itself that music festival was nothing special, these music festivals in our country are all alike, performing a most useful function especially for all those people who are chained to their labors, year in and year out, so naturally everybody comes flocking to the two or three music festivals per year, with their actual and their so-called amusements and distractions, these affairs are called music festivals because unlike the usual so-called country fairs they feature a band, an enormous attraction to the populace, that’s all it is, but the organizers know that they can draw a much larger crowd by calling it a music festival rather than a country fair, so it has become the custom to call these events music festivals even if they are nothing more than country fairs, everybody attends these music festivals which usually begin early on Saturday night and end late on Sunday morning. In Altensam, where nobody had remembered even Roithamer’s birthday and none of Roithamer’s siblings were home, we soon turned the possibility of going to the music festival into an actuality, after dressing suitably for the occasion. We immediately got into the swing of it, drinking several glasses of beer and schnapps in quick succession, we quickly got ourselves into the necessary high spirits for such an occasion, both of us naturally meeting lots of familiar faces of schoolmates and their sisters and wives, with whom we soon got involved in all sorts of conversations, but these conversations mostly consisted of our, Roithamer and me, having to explain why we had gone off to England and what we were doing there and what had become of us in England, and why we hadn’t stayed at home and made something of ourselves here, at home, as they had. At first these conversations, consisting basically of questions addressed to us both, had not bothered us and we readily answered all these questions put to us, such as whether we were now English, no longer Austrians, whether we were living in London or if not, where, whether we had become scientists, known experts, whether we were thinking of returning home and most of all, again and again, how much we were making, in Austrian schillings not in English pounds, it was evidently too much trouble for them to convert English pounds into Austrian schillings, and was it true that it was always raining in England and that everything was always shrouded in fog there, had we ever seen the Queen, had we met her personally, had we ever spoken with her, the questions came at us in an endless stream and a constantly growing number of people had so questioned us and we had to keep on answering more and more, they kept asking and we kept answering questions until we could no longer stand it and finally made our way through these hundreds of people, drunk as they’d been for some time, to a shooting gallery. Both of us were astonished at finding ourselves, suddenly, standing in front of a shooting gallery, since neither I nor Roithamer had ever been to a shooting gallery for any reason whatsoever, we had apparently never in our lives had any business at a shooting gallery, in contrast to Roithamer’s brothers, who did not merely claim to be but actually were excellent proven marksmen who had of course always taken part in all the shooting matches and hunting shoots, and had on display in their rooms hundreds upon hundreds of trophies attesting to their prowess, they were known and respected far and wide as brilliant marksmen, in fact as fanatical hunters and great shots, in contrast to me and my friend Roithamer, who not only couldn’t shoot and had never indulged in any illusions about being able to shoot, and who basically despised hunting and everything related to hunting, in fact, deep down, we hated it, I know that Roithamer hated it as I did, he understood hunting but he hated it, he had often talked to me about his brothers’

passion for hunting and, again and again, talked about how he loathed this passion of theirs, but he knew that it was a Roithamer family passion for hunting, even his father had been a great hunter and marksman, he had been Chief Game Warden and Hunting Commissioner for years, indeed for decades, that to be born in Altensam was synonymous with being born to hunt and to shoot, it was probably the first time in Altensam’s history that someone had actually turned up who not only did not like hunting but in fact despised hunting and most decidedly hated it, so it was quite understandable that the Roithamers regarded their deviant brother, for no reason except that they simply couldn’t understand him, if not with hatred, then with a certain reserve, though they naturally had not dared to show him either contempt or hatred on this point for a long time, since they were dependent on their brother, who suddenly was the sole owner of Altensam, actually they felt they were at his mercy and that he might one day drive them, in all their degenerate state, out of Altensam, something he’d never do, however; but to get back to hunting, what a peculiar situation, that a Roithamer who defied all the rules of Altensam’s history by being absolutely no hunter and absolutely no marksman, had nevertheless turned out to be the man, he and no other, I thought, as we found ourselves, out of the blue and only because we’d been forced to escape from those hundreds, even thousands, of crazy questions which were getting on our nerves and driving us out of our heads, standing in front of that shooting gallery, he and no other is standing here in front of this shooting gallery. To shoot? I asked myself and at the very same moment Roithamer paid for two dozen shells and started to shoot, he was shooting at those paper roses lined up in quite disorderly fashion in their holders opposite him, he was shooting them down one after the other, to the momentary stupefaction of all the bystanders, including even the owner of the shooting gallery, whom I recognized as a woman from the village and who had also recognized us, since of course none of the onlookers had believed that Roithamer would hit even a single one of the roses, yet he had shot down every last one of the roses in the shortest possible time. As the shooting gallery owner bent over to pick up the paper roses in order to place them, all tied up in a bunch, in Roithamer’s hand, I was observing the onlookers who now, like it or not, agreed that Roithamer was the best shot of paper roses they had ever encountered at one of their music festivals.

Roithamer himself looked as though he were asking himself how it could have been possible for him, untrained as he was, in fact he had never held a gun in his hand but once in his life when he was nine years old and with his father’s help had tried shooting at paper roses and had of course made a sad mess of it, how could he possibly have brought down twenty-four roses with twenty-four shots? The onlookers of course challenged Roithamer at once to shoot down another series of paper roses, but of course he did not yield to such a provocation. He just waved his bunch of roses in the air above his head and made his way through the crowd, away from the shooting gallery and toward a table with some seating room left. I followed him there and saw him suddenly presenting all the paper roses he had won which, tied together as they were and held high in the air, looked more beautiful than fresh roses, to some unknown girl passing by who reminded him of his sister.

All the paper roses but one, that is, all except this yellow paper rose I had just rediscovered in the top drawer of the chest when I opened it to put my toilet things inside. So all these years, I thought, Roithamer has kept this yellow paper rose here, it probably reminded him of that music festival on his twenty-third birthday and everything connected with that music festival. I had taken the paper rose out of the drawer and held it against the light, it was unquestionably, the paper rose he shot down at the Stocket music festival along with twenty-three others. That music festival where we stayed till dawn at one of those large plank tables, in company with several of the country boys and coal miners we had known from childhood, has remained a pleasant memory, how Roithamer suddenly told them all about his childhood in Altensam, in that intense way he had, the characteristic narrative style of the country folk around Altensam, actually Roithamer had much in common with the countrymen around Altensam, while he had almost nothing in common with his own Altensam family; how very familiar he was with the ways of the country folk around Altensam, and how very much he loved their ways, I thought, as I stood by the window, with the paper rose in my hand, contemplating Hoeller’s attic from my vantage point at the window, looking toward the door, it was after all among them, these country folk, that he had grown up, as he would say, not in Altensam but among the country people and their families, and it is true that as a child Roithamer had spent more time among the country people in the villages around Altensam than he had in Altensam itself, his own home, he took advantage of every free minute he had to get away from the drill in Altensam, which was little more than a cruel and incomprehensible parental fortress to him, and escape to where he might find actual kinship, in the villages around Altensam, with the people of these villages, the farmers and young fellows and men working in the coal mines of Altensam, he would simply leave Altensam right after supper, without permission and go down to the villages below Altensam, to the people there who understood him, away from those who lived in Altensam and never understood him nor wanted to understand him, because down there, below Altensam, in the farmhouses and in the homes and hovels and huts of the miners down there he was always a welcome sight, and he could always count on having the attention of these simple people whose minds were as clear as they were incorruptible, they listened to me, Roithamer’s words, whenever I said something, and they tried to understand me and they did understand me, and I could count on them to help me whenever I came to them, often in sharp distress, my conscience deeply troubled, they were friendly in their crude manner, always offered me food and drink, I could have stayed with them as long as I wanted and actually I would have preferred to stay with them always, even as a child, but the mere thought was out of the question. While I felt cold in Altensam, within the walls of Altensam, even among my parents and my siblings, going down to the villages always warmed me up, as a child I was always strictly forbidden to go down to the villages, even when they gave permission they didn’t like my going down there because they sensed that I felt good in the villages, that Altensam was a prison to me I had often told them, even as a child I had this idea that Altensam was nothing more than a prison, a prison from which I would one day have to escape, is what I always thought, even if I have been sentenced to life imprisonment in this dungeon of an Altensam, I must get out, get away from Altensam, where even my parents seemed always to have been there to guard or punish me, never to protect me, which is what parents are for, to take care of their children, what they should have been in Altensam is the preservers and protectors of their son and their other children, which is what my parents never were, instead they were inordinately strict and relentless in turning us children, without exception, into people according to their conceptions, their own absolutely and completely horrible conceptions, trying to turn us into physical and mental manikins in their own image, so that their chronic dishonesty and incessant cruelty shadowed, really darkened, all of our childhood and made my brothers what they are today, physical and mental effigies of their parents, and made my sister the unhappiest person I ever knew, everything in Altensam was most hateful to me, so I broke out of Altensam every chance I got, to go down to the villages and visit the farmers and their families and the coal miners and their families, with whom I could be happy as I never was in Altensam, Altensam was to me one continuous darkening of the spirit, Roithamer’s words. But just as Roithamer took every opportunity to get out of Altensam, so I seized every opportunity to get into Altensam, every welcome possibility of going to Altensam and being allowed inside, inside the Absolutely Other, where I could come to life again, for Roithamer it was the other way around, he had to get out of Altensam and down to the villages, where he came to life, most often in our house, my parents’ house; it is here, in your house, he always said, that I come to life again, everything inside me gets choked almost to death in Altensam, but here, near your (my) father and your (my) mother, I can breathe again and think again, the kind of thinking that always helps me to survive, Roithamer’s words, if I had to stay in Altensam all the time I’d be done for in no time at all, Roithamer’s words, while I for my part would tell him from time to time that the chance to go to Altensam, to walk those four miles through the forest that I had walked with my grandfather as soon as I could walk at all, each walking at his own pace, we had an unspoken agreement, he and I, beginning in my fourth or fifth year, each of us deeply absorbed in his own thoughts, wholly lost in his own thoughts, nothing in all my life was dearer and more important to me, as I now realize, nothing was ever of greater consequence for my life than these walks to Altensam with my grandfather, and so, while I staked everything and every day, whenever possible, on getting to Altensam, Roithamer had staked everything on getting out of Altensam, he loved my father and the special ambience of a village doctor’s household, the supreme orderliness of everything, the neatness, on the one hand, and its free-and-easy air on the other, so entirely and benignly different in every degree from the disorder in Altensam, the general negligence in Altensam, and from what Roithamer felt to be the spiritual confinement of Altensam, all the advantages held for me by Altensam were for him to be found in Stocket and in our house, he always used to tell me that he could never find in Altensam the happiness he found in Stocket and in our house, while I for my part told him that Altensam was to me what Stocket and my home were to him, drawing new breath, making progress, firing the imagination, productivity, joy in living, and so both of us strained eagerly, Roithamer in his way from Altensam to Stocket, to our home, our village, landscape, our world of nature, while I conversely was drawn away from our village life, from Stocket, from our home, up to Altensam, inside those walls, the enormousness of those walls which fortified everything inside me, I felt drawn upward to Altensam where everything unattainable to me in Stocket suddenly became attainable because once I was up there in Altensam my mind and my emotions actually opened up in the same way that Roithamer’s did in Stocket, in our home and in its environs, where he found what he never could find in Altensam, refuge and liberation in every way. While Roithamer loved my father, with whom he always spent all the time he could, always interested in my father’s medical work, he was, as I have always known but now can prove, now that I have dipped into the contents of his posthumous papers, Roithamer was always interested in everything relating to diseases, in the constant mutual interrelations of physical and mental diseases, he was most interested in this from childhood on when, at our house, he might encounter the strangest cases of disease every day and he, Roithamer, had always demanded that my father tell him everything about every disease, in fact he was never interested so much in anything, other than his scientific work, all his life, than in human diseases, of which he had come to know and explore, here in his closeness to my father, the greatest variety of the most widespread diseases, especially those of our own region, the diseases native to our province. In Cambridge he had often spent half the night, when he had tired of his own work but wasn’t yet ready to go to bed, not yet relaxed enough to sleep after the mental strain of his day’s work, when he asked me to stay with him, stay the night if necessary, as he frequently did when I had come over just for a minute after I had stopped work myself, to take refuge in his company from going crazy, as soon as we were in England and in Cambridge we had made a habit of breaking off our concentrated mental work and dropping in on each other for a chat because we were afraid of going crazy, even though we only talked about some other mentally demanding subject, but that no longer mattered because once we were together, in each other’s company, we felt safe from going crazy, and so, when we were together in his rooms or in mine, the distance between our digs was only about eight or nine hundred yards, we each had two rooms and a kitchenette, one room was the study and the other the so-called leisure room, then Roithamer used to talk half the night, in Cambridge, of his observations, and the experiences resting on such observations, of the diseases he learned about quite early in life in the company of my father, a respected and probably quite capable general practitioner, since a scientist, no matter what his specialty in science, should begin to concern himself early in life, long before he gives himself up to his (to a) special field, with disease, especially the mental diseases, which arise from the physical diseases. While I myself had hardly any rapport with my father, and my father, conversely, had really never sought any rapport with me, Roithamer had the best rapport with my father, and it was the same with the Roithamers, Roithamer himself had never entered into any rapport with his father and his father, conversely, had never sought any rapport with his son, yet I had an excellent rapport with Roithamer’s father, as Roithamer had with my father, and also with my mother, though I found it very hard to communicate with my own mother, yet I always communicated very well with Roithamer’s mother. What I had never found at home, meaning in our house and in our village down here, I found up there at Altensam, while Roithamer, conversely, never found in Altensam what he had always hoped for, and so we were drawn away from home even as children, I felt drawn up to Altensam, while he felt drawn away from Altensam down to us in Stocket. This tendency for me to feel drawn to them up there while he felt drawn to us down here, which we never understood clearly then, I now understand perfectly as a perfectly natural tendency. Just as I felt attracted, in Altensam, to the outlook of Roithamer’s father, so Roithamer for his part felt attracted by my father’s way of life and his profession, up there in Altensam I heard things I never heard at home, Roithamer heard things at our house he never heard in Altensam, all the time, hence our restlessness based on our dissatisfaction with our own home life, at home we had been seeking and hoping for what could never be found at home because it simply wasn’t there in our own homes, he, Roithamer, had never been able to find in Altensam what he sought there and had a right to expect, though it could never come to pass there, while I, on the other hand, had always sought in Stocket and in my home what simply wasn’t there, I had hoped for the impossible, and so we both always lived in hopes directed toward the other’s home, where we had actually found what we were looking for, consequently we were always the most miserable creatures at home where we could never understand or express what ailed us, all we could do was suffer our condition and be driven by it to nearly total despair in those most difficult years, between nine and eleven and beyond, but we had never gotten over it to this day. We loved everything in the other’s home and really hated everything in our own home from the earliest years in our lives, we liked everything in the other’s home while disliking everything in our own, we felt that our talents and their development were most wonderfully appreciated in the other’s home while they were never appreciated in our own home and as a result never developed, either, because everything in us and about us had met with nothing but rejection in our own home. The lack of sympathy which was always to be expected at our own home gave way, once we had gone to the other’s home, to a sympathetic understanding supportive to us in every respect, here at last we could relax and breathe and think freely. The prey of misunderstandings at home, we were always in a state of extreme irritability, Roithamer in Altensam and I in Stocket, we had to give all our attention to escaping from this state or easing it down to something bearable, and we did find life bearable at home when we were not left entirely to ourselves and our families, when Roithamer had come to me or when I had gone up to Altensam to see him. When we were together we managed to find something, perceive something and make use of it for our own satisfaction, even when we had thought there was nothing, nothing at all, for us; this Roithamer did for me in Stocket and I for him in Altensam. It often happened that our paths crossed, his downward path toward Stocket, my upward path toward Altensam, crossing at the same midpoint, the clearing in the forest.

About this clearing, where we had often met and always stopped at once to talk about the coincidence of our meeting and all sorts of things besides, Roithamer had once written a short essay, which he in fact later published in a local periodical, he was moved to write it by his interest in Adalbert Stifter, the writer, and especially in the local limestone, about which Stifter had written, both only in relation to the clearing which had meant a great deal in our lives and still means much in my life, this piece of prose had been a good example of Roithamer’s logical cast of mind, everything he later became, all he came to be, was already prefigured in this short piece, a description, in measured, clearly articulated terms, of a segment of nature familiar to us in the smallest detail. I’d have been glad to reread this piece about the clearing between our village and Altensam, but I’m afraid that this piece of prose, superscribed with the title The Clearing, is lost, though it ought to be easy to determine in which number of the local periodical it appeared originally, it would be most important to know this now, after Roithamer’s suicide in the clearing. A description of the road from Altensam to us in Stocket and a description of the road from Stocket to Altensam, naturally two entirely different descriptions, was once done by Roithamer in England, during his first stay in London, he was deep in his studies of Purcell and Handel at the time, but these descriptions too, I believe, are lost. He used to go in for writing short prose pieces from time to time, descriptions of nature, as an aid to perfecting his scientific method of thinking, to dwell constantly in thought on nature, its inner workings and outer appearances, and to capture these thoughts by writing them down now and then, had become a lifelong exercise of his, his last exercise of the kind had been a description of Hoeller’s garret, which I suspected I might find in the desk here and which I actually did find in this desk in Hoeller’s garret. The very first lines of this effort, when I reread it, gave me the idea of editing a book-length collection of Roithamer’s short descriptive pieces, in a time such as ours when everything but what is noteworthy, everything but what is truly original as well as most brilliantly scientific is edited and published, when every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most’ repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products, at such a time it is simply one’s duty to bring out a work of art as unassuming and unadorned as the art of Roithamer’s prose, to publish it, even though it would not be likely to make any kind of a stir, I think, but just to make sure that it would never be lost again, once it is printed and preserved forever, because these prose pieces of Roithamer’s are indubitably precious gems and the greatest of rarities anywhere, including our country.

As to the difficulties of bringing out especially such exquisite prose, I am aware of them, just as I am fully aware of the difficulties involved in publishing Roithamer’s posthumous papers, especially his longer study on Altensam, which he began at the instigation of a publisher friend of his, in Cambridge, he’d tackled and finished it in a great burst of energy just after his sister’s fatal illness had manifested itself, but soon afterward, when he was already on his way to his sister’s funeral, crossing the Channel from Dover to the Continent, he destroyed it again by starting to make corrections in it and correcting it over and over again until in the end he destroyed it entirely by his incessant corrections during his stay in Hoeller’s garret after his sister’s death, he felt he had corrected it to death and so destroyed it, but as I know now, as I have ascertained in the shortest possible time of my stay here in Hoeller’s garret, he did not really destroy it by his utterly ruthless, hence utterly perfect corrections, but turned it into an entirely new work, because the destruction of his work by his own hand, by his keen mind which dealt most ruthlessly with his work was, after all, merely synonymous with the creation of an entirely new piece of work, he had gone on correcting his work until his work was not, as he thought, destroyed but rather a wholly new piece of work had been created. This work of his, seen as a description and accordingly a justification of everything in Altensam and everything connected with Altensam meant to him, with special attention to the planning and execution and completion of the Cone for his sister, was not destroyed by him but perfected by him, as I now see clearly, especially by his corrections, he, Roithamer believed that he had destroyed, by totally correcting, this work which I have brought with me and temporarily stowed away in this desk drawer, this work about Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the planning and execution and completion of the Cone for his sister, and it is certain that he intended to burn this work after correcting it out of existence, because I have a note of his stating that he would burn the essay after he had destroyed it by totally correcting it into the exact opposite of what he had started out to say. But he never got around to burning it, probably the essay had suddenly ceased to matter all that much to him, since it is not likely that he had, in the end, forgotten the essay altogether, when he killed himself, because in the end nothing matters all that much, as he also wrote on another slip, and on his last slip he’d written, it’s all the same. His essay on Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, on what Altensam had meant to him, with special attention to the planning and execution and completion of the Cone for his sister, he had completed by totally correcting it, these are his own words, until it meant the opposite of its original meaning. The essay actually became a completed essay only after Roithamer had turned it around to mean the exact opposite, by a monstrous process of total correction, but more of that later. Slowly adjusting to the mood prevailing in Hoeller’s garret, at first the mood of the late afternoon, later the mood of the evening, I had intended to get to work on the Roithamer papers starting early in the morning, the earliest possible time in the morning if I could, not even to go near them before that, but only to get used to Hoeller’s garret, to get everything in readiness for the morning, for the earliest morning, the twilight before dawn, I thought, when I would get going on my task, but first I had to create the right conditions for such an undertaking, far from easy to get going, and so I had to begin with my preparations at once, though moving slowly, considering the nature of my undertaking, and because after my illness I was in just the right condition for working on Roithamer’s literary remains, I had to begin by thoroughly preparing myself for this task, which meant straightening out my place of work, the desk unquestionably in front of the window, I had to find a way to control, if possible to change the light to suit my needs, whether to draw the curtains or not to draw them? I kept wondering, as I stood at the door considering the desk, should I draw the curtains or should I not draw the curtains, and I went to the window and drew them closed and moved back again to consider and stepped forward to open them again, I opened them several times and closed them again several times and so on. First of all I must have everything in order for beginning work tomorrow, everything must be ready, I thought, before I can start to work. But before I did anything at all, I had to let the character of the Hoeller garret, as it was and without changing anything in it, I had to let its ambience have its full effect on me. Time was no problem. This must be done systematically and most resolutely, yet slowly, too, I thought, standing near the door, nothing, absolutely nothing, must be done in haste, I had plenty of time, besides I was not quite over my illness, it was still manifest in every breath I took, the air along the Aurach river was the best, this was the most richly wooded region anywhere and the air here was the best medicine for bronchi affected like mine, considering that I might have spent several more weeks in the hospital if I had listened to the doctors and stayed, but I suddenly stopped paying any attention to the doctors, often enough in my life I suddenly stopped paying any attention to the doctors and this was my salvation every time, I probably wouldn’t be alive this minute had I not always stopped, from one minute to the next, listening to the doctors, at the right moment, the doctors may count at the beginning, when it turns out that medical help is essential right away, when only the application of medical skill can save you, when it happens, as it did in my case, suddenly and to my absolute horror, when I was right in the middle of an unfinished piece of work, a dangerous disease broke out, a really deadly, threatening, so-called fatal disease, since a severe pneumonia is still considered a deadly disease even today, suddenly waking up at night with a high fever and lying there alone, unconscious, for days, could easily lead to a quick death, but they found me and took me to the hospital and the doctors got the fever under control in record time, but even so it was a painful business for weeks, with no cure in sight, at first, all they could do was relieve the pain, help me to endure this dangerous illness, not cure me, there was at first the relief of finding myself safe in such an excellent hospital, then suddenly the need to get out of there, while I was still pinned down and leaving the hospital was out of the question, the disease had been checked but it was not even under control, as yet, it took five or six weeks to get it under control, with infusions, injections, every conceivable natural and chemical antidote applied against the disease, every possible self-applied medication against it, then, while I was still sick, I decided out of the blue to leave the hospital, on my own responsibility because the doctors would accept no responsibility, I decided to defy the doctors, simply to clear out, and I remembered Hoeller’s invitation to me and left the hospital as quickly as possible though actually still a sick man, I went to the Aurach valley, into Hoeller’s house, into Hoeller’s garret, my mind set on putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order, now, as a form of convalescence, to do again what I had always done when in the grip of a fatal illness, to leave the hospital against doctors’

orders and repossess my life by taking up my occupation, and I thought, standing beside the door, that my decision to leave had been equally correct in the case of this pneumonia. It had always been the right moment to leave the hospital against doctors’ orders and cope with such a fatal illness myself.

There had been no indication at all, when he left England, that he would never come back to England, I thought, as I brushed my jacket and hung it in the closet, of course I had expected him back shortly after his sister’s funeral for which he had gone to Altensam, I can still hear him saying, I shall stay only the shortest possible time, what is there now to keep me there, in Altensam, in Upper Austria, in Austria, beyond the necessary minimum, the shortest possible time, one or two days in his opinion, which he did not even intend to spend in Altensam but in Hoeller’s house on the Aurach, he had gone to Austria already intending to spend only the inescapable minimum of time in Altensam, to stay the night in Hoeller’s house and in Hoeller’s garret, there being now, after his sister’s death, no further reason to stay in Altensam, though there is no way to avoid talking over the problems inescapably arising from the death and the funeral of my sister, so I must go to Altensam, but again and again: only the absolute minimum of time necessary, for now, after the death of his beloved sister, there was virtually nothing left to tie him to Altensam, with the death of my sister, he said, my relationship to Altensam has come to an end. Altensam is nothing more than past history, now, in future there will be no reason for me to set foot in the place, and he was thinking of selling Altensam, an extremely valuable property because of its fertile meadow- and farmlands in particular, and because of its easy access, Altensam, isolated as it was, did have the advantage of good roads, and this combination of remoteness and privacy on the one hand, with easy access on the other hand, guaranteed a high price for it, and now after his sister’s death Roithamer was thinking of selling Altensam, he even had an idea of what he wanted to do with the money realized from the sale, an idea characteristic of him, which was to hand over the entire sum to his ex-convicts, without bothering at first to go into details, at one point he had even thought of giving them Altensam as a refuge after their release from prison, he had always wanted to help ex-convicts, those poorest of the poor, men totally excluded from society, with whom actually no one wanted to have anything to do no matter what their hypocritical pretenses, Roithamer had frequently donated sums of money for the benefit of prisoners released from penal institutions, but in the end he dropped the idea of opening Altensam to ex-convicts, it seemed a better idea to sell Altensam and assign the proceeds to the ex-convicts, though he did not quite know how to go about this, there is in fact already some talk that he made provision for the sale of Altensam and assignment of the proceeds to former prisoners of the penitentiaries at Garsten, Stein, and Stuben, entrusting the execution of this plan to his Schwanenstadt notary Süssner, the same notary who had been taking care of all the Altensam affairs for many years, in his will. But of the actual contents of Roithamer’s will I had no knowledge up to this point in time, even though Hoeller told me immediately upon my arrival at his house that Roithamer had, 1) left a will and 2) ordered Altensam sold, the proceeds to go to the ex-convicts of Garsten, Stein, and Stuben, he would not have been Hoeller had he not understood our friend’s last will and testament as I did, as characteristic of Roithamer’s whole being. It had always been the outsiders, especially those pushed to the outermost fringes of society, for whom Roithamer felt sympathies, the criminal elements, with whom no one wanted to have anything to do, were always secure in his affection, for this tendency Roithamer had always been under attack or at least regarded with suspicion, most of all these sympathies of his for the most miserable members of society, the most helpless in the world, had soon earned him the radical dislike of his family and they, his family or what was left of them, whichever, must have been horrified at the reading of his will, suddenly hearing all those provisions in favor of the poorest, the most unwanted, society’s pariahs, openly set forth, now they had suddenly to face it that he not only had what they considered these eccentric ideas about leaving his inheritance to criminals, murderers, no matter what kind of criminals, but that he had actually carried these ideas out in good earnest, this shock suffered by his family and all those involved in a widely ramified conspiracy with his family must have been an experience of primal horror, for while I know that Roithamer was always in earnest about everything in his mind, though the people around him could never quite believe it, his ideas as also his feelings were always most earnest and most serious, his ideas and feelings always had to be in full accord with his existence, otherwise it would have been simply impossible for him to go on, to keep going, they, beginning with his closest kin who, in Altensam, probably never could think or would think so, namely that he would actually carry out his ideas, yet he had carried them out in his will just as in his life, all his life had been a carrying out of his ideas in reality. The sale of Altensam, I thought, would be no easy task for the notary from Schwanenstadt, who could not sell for less than a certain minimum, while being an open target for all sorts of harassment from, first and foremost, Roithamer’s brothers. What would Roithamer’s parents, especially his father, have said of their middle son selling Altensam through a notary, I wondered, looking out the window down at the raging Aurach, and then: but the father in particular must surely have taken into account that to leave Altensam to his middle son meant the end of Altensam, for old Roithamer of course knew full well what manner of man his middle son was, and I firmly believe, I thought, that when old Roithamer left Altensam to his middle son, he knew that he had thereby legalized the end of Altensam, for old Roithamer probably knew or at least felt or must have seen or felt or known that Altensam’s time had come, that these times are no longer right for the likes of Altensam, and he may have thought, I’m leaving Altensam to my middle son, who has the least use of anybody for Altensam, and so I can be sure that he, my middle son, will make an end of Altensam and that, in whatever way he does it, it will be over with. On the other hand, no one can expect a man who inherits something he doesn’t want to inherit, doesn’t want to own, to preserve this inheritance he didn’t want in the first place, the logical thing is for him to get rid of this inheritance and Roithamer did get rid of his Altensam inheritance, he got rid of it in his own characteristic way, namely by ordering that the proceeds from the sale of Altensam should go to aid ex-convicts on their release from prison. Quite possibly, I suddenly thought as I stood at the attic window, he had gone to Austria and to Altensam already determined to kill himself, but there is no evidence for such an assumption, none, the fact is that he meant to go straight back to England immediately after his sister’s funeral, without any detours whatsoever, not by way of South Tyrol, nor France nor Belgium, but straight back to Cambridge, I can still hear him saying by plunging at once back into work I shall save myself from this worst of misfortunes, this is word for word what he said, I believe it was his last spoken statement to me, I’d accompanied him to the station, he traveled as always by rail and ship because he shrank from setting foot in an airplane, loathed it, in fact, for myself I’d intended to spend the brief interval, so I thought, of his absence, on correcting a paper of my own, but was distracted by a peculiar uneasiness which I could find no way of understanding, from doing this, and went instead to Reading to visit a mutual friend, a teacher, who was busy with the construction of some machine, what kind of a machine it was I don’t know to this day, even though I had been briefed on this construction by its constructor for years now, nor did Roithamer know what kind of machine this Reading machine, as we called it, was, anyway I spent two days in Reading waiting for news from Roithamer, we had agreed that he would send me word every second day, what I mainly wanted to hear was when he would be coming back, but there was no word at all for fourteen days, then suddenly there was a message, not from Altensam but from Hoeller, that Roithamer was dead, I left for Austria that same day, at home they told me all about Roithamer’s suicide, he had hanged himself in the aforementioned clearing between my father’s house and Altensam. Meanwhile Roithamer, who had wished to be buried in the village graveyard, not up in Altensam, that is, but in our village graveyard in Stocket, had been buried. My parents gave me a full account of the funeral, and later on I heard about it from Hoeller too. I made a brief visit to Altensam to see Roithamer’s brothers but there was no one in Altensam, at least I thought there was no one home since all the window shutters were closed and nothing stirred, which incidentally suited me very well, because now I would be able to say that I had been to Altensam after my friend’s death to look up his brothers, but nobody was home. Actually Roithamer’s death, his suicide so soon after the death of his and their sister, must have come as a severe shock to those left in Altensam, and I supposed that they had all left Altensam for once, for a long time, at least until things settled down and the problems arising first from the sister’s and then the brother’s death would be solved. When I got there, Altensam actually looked extinct to me, as if everything in Altensam were dead. I had also gone to the cemetery in Stocket, it was a simple grave, a few wreaths, a few flowers. Roithamer had once told me that he wanted only a simple wooden cross. Several days went by as I grew more and more depressed, with absolutely nothing to do, I wandered forlornly about the landscape that suddenly looked all empty and drained of any meaning to me. I had visited various people whom I usually visited every time I came home from England, but none of these people meant anything to me any longer. The nights I spent lying awake in bed without even any need to go back to England, what was I to do in England with Roithamer no longer there. The nights were absolutely horrible. There were times when I got up and went to the window when I came close to doing away with myself. But in the morning my head was always clear again. Toward noon I’d be depressed again, locked into my mood of growing despair. I didn’t know whether to go back to England or not, suppose I look for something to do here in Austria, perhaps a lectureship at nearby Salzburg University. Just a lot of crazy notions. Whenever I tried to read the books from my father’s library, I soon broke off reading every time.