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 everyt
hing, 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
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