Extinction Read Online Free PDF Page B

Georg’s instructions. When my parents visited the grave a year ago on their way to Spain, they are said to have been so outraged that my mother swore she would never visit it again. She thought the epitaph a monstrous disgrace, and on her return to Wolfsegg she is said to have talked of nothing but the crime that her brother-in-law had perpetrated. I went for long, interesting walks with Uncle Georg in the country around Wolfsegg, as far as Ried in one direction and Gmunden in the other. He always had time for me. Thanks to him I know that there are more things in the world than cows, domestics, and public holidays that have to be strictly observed. I owe it to him that I learned not only how to read and write but how to think and fantasize. It is to his credit that I attach great importance to money, but not the greatest, and that, unlike my parents, I regard people outside Wolfsegg not as a necessary evil but as an endless challenge, a challenge to get to grips with them as the greatest and most exciting monstrosity. Uncle Georg initiated me into the secrets of music and literature and familiarized me with composers and writers, who now became living people, not just plaster figures that had to be dusted three or four times a year. I owe it to him that I began reading the books that seemed to have been locked away in our libraries forever and a day and have never stopped reading them, that I finally learned to philosophize; that I developed not into the sort of person who automatically became a cog in Wolfsegg’s financial and economic mill but into one who could properly be called a free agent. I have him to thank for the fact that I have never made the kind of brainless educational journeys, so called, that my parents went in for, taking me with them in my early years—to Italy and Germany or to Holland and Spain—but have learned the art of travel, one of the greatest pleasures in the world and one that I still enjoy. Thanks to Uncle Georg I have become acquainted not with dead but with living cities; I have visited not dead but living peoples, read not dead but living writers, heard not dead but living music, and seen not dead but living pictures. Instead ofsticking the great names of the past on the inner walls of my brain like so many dreary transfer pictures from an equally dreary history, he presented them to me as living actors on a living stage. Every day my parents would show me a totally uninteresting world that progressively paralyzed my mind, a world in which life was basically not worth living, whereas Uncle Georg showed me the same world as one that was invariably interesting. Thus, as quite a small child I already had a choice between two worlds: my parents’, which I always found uninteresting and merely tiresome, and Uncle Georg’s, which seemed packed with tremendous adventures and in which one could never be bored but wished to live forever, hoping that it would never end; the automatic consequence was that I wanted to live in this world perpetually, for all eternity. To put it simply, my parents always took everything as it came, whereas Uncle Georg never took anything as it came. From their birth my parents lived by the laws laid down for them by their predecessors and never dreamed of making themselves new laws to live by, laws of their own, whereas Uncle Georg lived solely by his own laws, which he himself had made. And these self-made laws he was forever overturning. My parents followed a preordained path, and they would never have thought of deviating from it for a moment, but Uncle Georg went his own way. To cite another instance of the difference between them and my uncle: they hated what they called idleness and could not imagine that a thinking person simply did not know what idleness was and could not afford it, that when a thinking person indulged in apparent idleness he was actually in a state of extreme tension and excitement. This was because theirs was true idleness and they did