Correction: A Novel (5 page)

the site of the Cone, namely, the dead center of the Kobernausser forest,
came to me in those first moments
while I was making notes and drawing sketches, the Cone must be situated in the dead center of the Kobernausser forest, I said to myself over and over, while I was already at work on the first sketches, the first notes, concerning the size and the height and the depth and the width of the Cone, the statics involved, since the building of the Cone is primarily a problem of statics, I thought, and I then spent all night sitting at that desk drafting sketches and notes, it was four in the morning before it dawned on me that I was actually exhausted, those sketches and notes, he told me that time in England, while he was describing Hoeller’s garret, were the basic sketches and notes for the Cone which I subsequently drew on repeatedly during the six years I worked on the Cone, those first sketches and notes were the most important, during all the time spent on planning and building they turned out to be the
most important of all
, time and again, upon the foundation of these sketches and notes, and their spontaneity, I then built the Cone during those long six years, years intensified by being aimed at this single objective, so Roithamer. And now here I was myself, settled in Hoeller’s garret just as Roithamer had described it, trying to get a clear idea of its interior, and as I sat on the bed or at the table or at the desk or on the corner chair, or paced back and forth, I had been pacing back and forth almost the entire time, because I believed I could gain an even greater intensity of concentration on everything I was considering, looking at, observing, and checking out as well, and I was not disappointed in my aim of gaining such great concentration on Hoeller’s garret, the object of my observation and examination, as I suddenly found myself pacing back and forth quite rapidly, I could hear even better, more intently, what Roithamer had said that time in England, and so I could understand it better and more intently, while at the same time my observation of the Hoeller garret’s interior had become even keener, little by little and under the spell of Roithamer’s characteristic cadences, I finally caught all the meanings in everything Roithamer had said, I remembered, as I heard him again in Hoeller’s garret saying all he had said that time in England, suddenly it all came back to me with all its full significance, and so I had the ideal opportunity for making comparisons and was more and more struck by how exact Roithamer’s description had been, while describing Hoeller’s garret to me in England as if he were inside it, he must have been seeing it in his mind, otherwise so precise a description would have been impossible, but I know how precise Roithamer’s descriptions always were, without being in the least distracted by any sound, the incessant rushing of the Aurach had never distracted me or Roithamer during his sojourns in Hoeller’s garret, a place so totally noiseless apart from the deafening noise of the torrential river, especially torrential at the Aurach gorge, so that it was possible for me to concentrate entirely on Roithamer’s original description then, and on my own present observations of Hoeller’s garret now, I had concentrated totally upon that description and this observation, no noises would have disturbed me in this effort, but luckily the whole Hoeller house suddenly went completely quiet just at this moment of concentration, which was odd because the Hoeller children had just come home from school and I’d just seen a number of the local foresters entering the house to see the taxidermist, I’d seen them from my attic window at the moment I began to concentrate on listening to Roithamer, on his description, my observations, on my own looking and noticing and reexamining of the garret with reference to his description of it, yet at that moment and in fact the whole time I was concentrating on this subject there was perfect quiet. So it was possible for me to check on all the objects in Hoeller’s garret one by one, as one systematically goes over a scientific experiment which must suddenly be checked out for one reason or another, there is always a reason for such testing. Because he was so self-absorbed, always intent upon his scientific work, and because his preoccupation and concentration made him appear to be totally wrapped up in himself and his scientific work to the exclusion of everything else, it was always amazing to find him so well informed, every time, in all fields other than his own, he was, for example, exceptionally knowledgeable about everything that seemed to be of no concern to him at all and need not concern him, such as, for instance, the world of politics, which he must have been following with the utmost attention since he could not, otherwise, have acquired so sophisticated a knowledge of politics and everything connected with politics as he had, the result of regular observations made, again and again I saw with what thoroughness he had kept himself briefed on the latest political events and was prepared to bring into the discussion at any moment such current political events, many of them not those everyone was talking about but those
operating under the
surface of the world political scene continually and decisively to determine
the political realities
and to relate them to his own current interests even if these happened to be at the furthest possible remove from the political events, he was always making remarks which gave evidence that he let nothing escape him which brought life or, on the contrary, stagnation into the political world, he was, as an intelligent man of course must be, a
daily
attentive and critical reader of every newspaper and periodical within reach and in every possible way kept himself informed about the political scene which, as he said, held the greatest fascination for him, once he even said that the art of politics was the highest-ranking of all the arts, a remark indicating that he regarded politics not as a science but an art, were he not, he said, who he was, he would have devoted himself always and with the greatest possible energy to the political art, but he did after all regard natural science and the study of its foundations as the primary task of his life, which is why he had not taken up politics or rather, as he always expressly phrased it, the
political
art, as I now can see, he was always most excited by politics, especially the always monstrous, even if in so-called peaceful periods quiet politics, he was always excited about the actually always world-shaking and world-changing and consequently world-destroying political events and was generally in a chronic state of excitement about the political factor as such, perhaps to an even greater degree than one might expect of him, occupied as he was with his own scientific work, in natural science; because he was a man who was interested in everything, politics was bound to interest him more than anything, even though his actual intellectual life was entirely concentrated on natural science and on nature,
natural science as my actual
science
, as he once said, he was always at a peak of excitement and readiness-to-explain resulting from his observations of primarily all the political events in the world, observations that sustain me, as he said, in my isolation which enables me to get on with my scientific work. And so it is self-evident that he would be tempted to elucidate his subject when he spoke about it and while he spoke about it, in clear language, in short sentences, using all his skill of phrasing while constantly intent upon simultaneously elucidating and reexamining his theme, always while conquering and reconquering his primary subject matter, natural science, during every moment of his preoccupation with this subject matter, since to think is to regain and recover, moment by moment, everything previously thought, to make it new, and so it is self-evident that he always had to consider politics, always specifically the actual political events of the time together with their political history and at least relate all that to his own thinking, since the thinker must think not only his own special discipline but everything else which is, after all, logically related to his own subject, as conversely everything else is related to his own subject, that is, all his own possibilities or impossibilities and probabilities and
im
probabilities are always interrelated with all the others. And so it is not at all strange that I have found many notes of a political nature in Hoeller’s garret, I had noticed immediately that many of the notes tacked or pasted on the wall were political notes, just as he had loved covering the walls of his rooms in England, also, with political notes primarily, he felt in his element in this on the one hand scientific, on the other hand decidedly political, interest in the inconspicuous as well as the conspicuous relationship of his thought and his intellectual labors and always, when he spoke of science, he was also speaking of politics and everything else, and when he spoke of politics he was also speaking of science and everything else, because the scientist, or the man we regard as a scientist, or the so-called scientist, who has given himself up to a science because he had to give himself up to a science, has to think not only about his own scientific subject, if he is to be taken seriously as a scientist, but must continually think about all the other fields as well, and then again in the light of all the other fields about his own field and the other way around, and his entire existence is nothing but such incessant testing in which he, the scientist, must incessantly examine what he is thinking at the moment, which should be everything, because unless one is thinking of
everything at each
moment
one is not thinking at all, according to him. Everything that is thought, all thought resulting in action, he said, is political, and we are involved in a totally political world and a totally political society which keeps this world in constant motion. The truth is that a human being is a political creature in every fiber of his being, do what he will, think what he will, deny it if he will, whenever he will. There were also indications of his love for the arts, music most of all, second only to politics as the art to which he was most receptive, as he said, and which he had eventually made his favorite art, indications of which I instantly noticed in Hoeller’s garret, the many notebooks, excerpts of piano scores, et cetera, also musical notations written in his own hand, musical motifs which he, who had perfect pitch, expected to be helpful to him in advancing his scientific work because, as he always used to say, music is the art closest to natural science and the nature of man; music, he said, was basically mathematics made audible, a fact enough in itself to make music indispensable to the scientist as an instrument toward all his objectives and discoveries and the achievement of ever-new knowledge and discoveries, which is why he, Roithamer, concerned himself, in addition to his specialty and natural science in general and all the related disciplines, above all with music as the art medium most useful to him, and I know that he often left Cambridge to spend several days in London in order to hear a particular composition by Purcell or Handel, because he regarded hearing such music as absolutely indispensable to making progress in his own field, what I think about and what I am working on I could never think about and work on without music, as he said, it is always music which enables me to take the next step in my scientific growth, by listening to Purcell or by listening to Handel, as he said, it becomes possible for me to progress more quickly than if I were
not
listening to Purcell or to Handel, he loved Handel and Purcell more than any other composer, he esteemed these two above Bach, and next to them it was Mozart and, probably because of his Austrian origins, Bruckner, for whom he felt special preference, on one occasion when we were joined by a third man, a musicologist from Oxford, I suddenly had the confirmation that Roithamer’s knowledge of music, which must unhesitatingly be termed a
scholarly
knowledge of music, was indeed knowledge on the highest level, I still remember the Oxford musicologist’s recurrent outcries of amazement—he had been booted out of Vienna by the Nazis just before the war broke out, a man whose
intellectual incorruptibility
(an expression of Roithamer’s) instantly convinced me of his superior competence, the most distinguished musicologist in all England at the time—

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