Correction

by Thomas Bernhard

  underlined, mother simply always tried, simply because she is my mother, not that she went out of her way for me, but she did try, just as I didn’t exactly go out of my way for her, but I did try, but these efforts were always instantly recognizable as mere damnable efforts for the sake of doing the right thing, “doing the right thing” underlined, because what she instinctively hated was never hateful to me, what pleased her displeased me, what pricked her interest had never pricked mine, where she was sensitive I was never sensitive, andsoforth, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman was instinctively the kind who’d repel me and who was bound to destroy Altensam, or at least she was instinctively the kind who was bound to hasten the process whereby Altensam must be destroyed and annihilated, such persons or characters suddenly turn up, like my mother, that Eferding woman from Eferding, they suddenly spring from their family origins into the world of others to destroy it and to annihilate it, no matter whether they realize this or not, the Eferding woman realized it perfectly. This attempt as a description or this description as an attempt, with all the imperfection, uncertainty, which characterizes all of these attempts or descriptions or descriptive efforts, fragmentary stabs at deviations in Altensam andsoforth, such as I’ve always made in order to understand Altensam, this particular attempt made only because I’ve heard about that so-called Mother’s Day, that’s a cue-word, Mother’s Day, started me off on this note. How, from my point of view, she was always bound to fail even in the most trifling of trifles, so-called irrelevancies, the disciplines and arrangements that had always been the disciplines and arrangements at Altensam, anyway she had no access whatsoever to the so called intellectual sphere, nor did she ever try to understand something she was bound to disdain, to hate, even just something, no matter what, of those things that concerned me and for which I dared to exist all my life, the things that had to be the actual meaning of my life and my existence, she pretended to understand but she understood nothing, though of course I too very often pretended to understand, in conversation with her, her concerns, without feeling in the least inclined to such an understanding or even able to understand, because I didn’t even want to have such an inclination to understand her, she understood, she often said, and understood nothing, when she said she did she was putting on an act, just as I was always putting on an act about all of her concerns, if only to endure long stretches of Altensam at all in her presence, for it was extremely hard for me even to exist side by side with the Eferding woman, even if I didn’t see her, as long as I knew for a fact she was there, she went so against my grain, all these efforts always because I still went on regarding Altensam as my home, even throughout all my time in England, but home is always and in every case a mistake, so Roithamer, “in every case”

  underlined. When the Eferding woman said that she understood she was putting on an act and this act was instantly recognizable as such, she was all emotion, and since I never wanted to have anything to do with people who exist and act only on an emotional basis, the so-called world of the emotions had always been suspect and always hateful to me, people like the Eferding woman, my mother, constantly pretended to understand but they only have a certain feeling without intelligence, which is repulsive to the other kind, my kind, of person, and even this unintelligent feeling of theirs is a fake, not a reality, this type of female has only a dim perception of emotion, and not even a dim perception of intelligence, so that actually they have neither intelligence nor feeling, and the act they put on of having feeling and intelligence is nothing more than sexual hypocrisy, “sexual hypocrisy” underlined.

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