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is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind which finds these mistakes of humanity, and a genius's mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes. In this sense, moreover, Reger said, the always unthinkingly uttered dictum of Seek and you shall find isfound to be true. Anyone searching in this museum for mistakes in these hundreds of so-called masterpieces will also find them, Reger said. No work in this museum is free from mistakes, I say. You may smile at this, he said, it may alarm you, and it makes me happy. And there is of course a reason why I have, for over thirty years, been going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and not to the Science Museum across the road. He was still sitting on the settee, with his black hat on his head, quite motionless, and it was obvious that for a long time now he had been contemplating not the White-Bearded Man but something entirely different behind the White-Bearded Man, not Tintoretto but something far outside the museum, while I myself was admittedly regarding Reger and the White-Bearded Man and yet was seeing behind it the Reger who had explained the fugues to me the day before. I had heard him explain the fugues so often before that I did not feel like listening to him attentively yesterday, and although I followed what he was saying, and it was most interesting, for instance what he had to say about Schumann's attempts at the fugue, I had been quite elsewhere with my thoughts. I saw Reger sitting on the settee and beyond it the White-Bearded Man, and I saw Reger once again, with even greater affection than before, trying to elucidate to me the art of the fugue, and I heard what Reger was saying and yet I was gazing into my childhood and heard the voices of my childhood, the voices of my brothers and sisters, the voice of my mother, the voices of my grandparents in the country. As a child I used to be quite happy in the country, but I was always happy back in town again, just as later and to this day I am far happier in the city than in the country. Just as I have always been far happier in art than in nature, nature has, all my life, been uncanny to me, while in art I have always felt secure. Even in my childhood, which I predominantly spent in the care of my maternal grandparents, and when, taken all in all, I was really happy, I have always felt secure and at home in the so-called world of the arts, not in nature, which I have always admired but always just as much feared, and this has not changed to this day, I do not feel at home for a moment in nature, but always so in the world of the arts, and the most secure of all in the world of music. As far as I can think back, I have loved nothing more in the world than music, I reflected, looking right through Reger, out of the museum and into my childhood. I always love these perspectives into my long-past childhood and I surrender to them totally and I exploit them in whatever way I can, may this perspective of my childhood never end, I always reflect. What kind of childhood did Reger have? I reflected, I do not know much about it, Reger is not communicative about his childhood. And Irrsigler? He does not like talking about it, nor does he like looking back to it. Towards noon more and more people come to the museum in groups, lately an extraordinary number from the East European countries, for several days running I saw groups from Soviet Georgia, driven through the gallery by Russian-speaking guides, driven is the right word, because these groups do not walk through the museum, they rush through it, hustled, and basically totally uninterested, totally exhausted by all the impressions which bombarded them on their journey to Vienna. Last week I observed a man from Tbilisi who had detached himself from one of the Caucasian groups and had tried to make his way through the museum on his own, a painter as it turned