The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside the lime works one would have very little freedom to move around, very little elbow room, but in fact there was lots of elbow room inside the lime works. But then, every preconception, as well as every preconception of a preconception, was likely to be wrong, humiliatingly so, every time. Anybody who thought at all was bound to know that. The actualityalways turned out to be, actually, something else, quite the opposite, always, of the given actuality, in fact. That our very existence is pure self-deception and nothing else cannot be stated unconditionally. In the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, as in no other building I know of, and I know the largest and the handsomest and in general every possible kind of building, stone or brickwork structures of all kinds, you can walk forward and backward and on and on in every direction as much as you want without having to go the same way twice, you can progress in the most progressive way there. The construction as a whole aimed at total deceptiveness, so that the superficial onlooker would fall into the trap every time. The moment you enter the vestibule, Konrad said to Wieser, you see at once that you have been made a fool of, because the vestibule alone is three times the size of the annex, to take only one example, and of course the upstairs and the downstairs vestibules are the same size; the lime works, designed as a lordly manor, had for Konrad all the advantages of a kind of voluntary self-imprisonment at hard labor. (The vestibule leads through to the courtyard, which is paved with cobblestones, they tell me at Laska’s. Inside the lime works Konrad could walk about for hours without going crazy, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, even though the same kind of pacing the floor he did here, back and forth, this way and that, in buildings as large or even larger, possibly, would drive him crazy in a matter of minutes. His head, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, felt at home in just such a building as the lime works, he believed; his body, too. While his wife, oriented toward Toblach as she was, felt uneasy in such a building as the lime works, found herself constantly depressed by it, Konrad himself breathed freely and existedfully only in such buildings as the lime works that were naturally responsive to the highest claims of absolute originality, what he needed were rooms where you could take at least fifteen or twenty steps forward or backward without running into any obstacles, Konrad said to Wieser, by which I mean, you realize, long steps, the kind of strides I take when concentrating on my work, brain work, while, as you know, most of the rooms you enter, most of the rooms we have to live in, time and time again, to spend the night or simply to exist in, you can barely take eight or nine steps without running your head against a wall; it has always mattered enormously to me to be able to take those fifteen steps back and forth freely, Konrad said to Wieser, the moment he entered a house, he said to Wieser, he tried it out, to see whether he could take those fifteen or twenty steps in one direction. I immediately take my first steps in one direction without regard to anything else, and I count those steps; let’s see now, I ask myself, can I take fifteen or twenty steps this way and fifteen or twenty steps back again, and I check out the situation only to discover, more often than not, that, as I told you, I cannot even take eight or nine steps in a straight line, whereas here at the lime works, Konrad said, I can easily take my twenty or thirty steps right off, in every room, wherever I want to, without running my head into a wall. In large rooms like these I can breathe again, of course, Konrad said. But his wife found large rooms oppressive. I feel depressed in small rooms, she feels depressed in large rooms. My wife is of course conditioned by the cramped rooms in Toblach, she grew up in those small, cramped Toblach rooms, in the general