Correction: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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