Correction: A Novel (4 page)

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