Correction by Thomas Bernhard

  * 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 d
evoted 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 rus
hing 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—