Correction: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Roithamer clung with all the love of which such a man is capable and as the highest expression of this love he had envisioned and undertaken and accomplished and completed the building of the Cone. But that a person like Roithamer’s sister cannot endure so climactic a condition has proved true, in that she is no longer alive today. But more of this later. That he must get out of Altensam, Roithamer had understood even as a child, clearly understood as though he had an adult’s head on his shoulders, and he had always kept apart from the others in Altensam as if in preparation for his removal from Altensam, from earliest childhood on everything about him had pointed to his eventual departure from Altensam, to his actually leaving Altensam completely behind him, because his kind of thinking was incompatible with Altensam and impossible without a separation from Altensam. It will have to be a radical separation, he had decided quite early in his life, and when he decided subsequently to give up not only Altensam but Austria, he actually achieved the most radical separation possible from Altensam and Austria.
    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