Correction: A Novel (22 page)

“prematurely” underlined, and we’ve taken up the struggle against the dungeon, against the institution of this dungeon into which we were conceived and born, our lifelong struggle, struggle of despair, “struggle of despair” underlined, which is being held against us, first we’re imprisoned and almost wholly destroyed by our parents and now, after being released from our prison, having simply gotten away from it by reaching a certain maturity, we are rebuked for opposing our parents, quite openly opposing them. I never visited my parents, incidentally, I went to Altensam only to discuss Altensam and the problems of running it insofar as I was concerned with these problems, I never again felt the need to see my parents, neither my father nor my mother, when I went there it was only to see my sister, who was as if chained to her parents, to visit my sister, on such occasions I simply accepted the presence of my parents and that of my brothers who always sided with my parents as part of the bargain. They went on living for years, all those years I was already living in Cambridge, by and on my own initiative (“own initiative” underlined, then crossed out, then stetted), until they died, I never saw them again for at least twelve years before their deaths, they both died within a week, my mother immediately after my father, she couldn’t survive without my father, Altensam would have crushed her, she’d probably realized this, people die in such cases, as they say, of natural causes, the heart stops, but it’s actually a case of suicide. But by that time I’d already built half of the Cone and was engrossed in working up toward the tip and I hadn’t allowed my father’s sudden death followed immediately by my mother’s death to distract me in the least from continuing my work in building the Cone, surely these people who’d just died practically overnight were total strangers to me? is what I thought and felt, too. For the funeral, arranged by my brothers, I drove to Altensam, nothing had ever gone more against my grain than that funeral, actually a double funeral, for the first turned into the second almost without any noticeable transition, father’s funeral turned into mother’s funeral, so I attended my parents’

funeral, two weeks of tragic spectacle at Altensam, “tragic spectacle”

underlined. Two such people die and all we feel is hatred for these people.

Death changes nothing in our attitude, it comes too late to change our feelings for these people. Even later on, no change for the better, on the contrary, in time these people seem to be more and more responsible for our misfortunes. That I am alive and working today I owe to my having been able to extricate myself from my parents at the crucial moment in my life, had it been up to them my life would have been over years ago, even though they might not have consciously wanted to kill me off, they’d soon have killed me off. And my siblings too continue to exist only because they’d completely given themselves up to my parents. Survival by self-surrender, so Roithamer. We go to a grave where we have buried our parents, buried them in accordance with their expectations, a so-called prominent grave along the church wall, where all their predecessors on Altensam are already interred, but all we feel is hatred, we haven’t even a chance, we simply have it no longer or never had a chance of feeling the least sympathy with them. That’s why I no longer go to my parents’ grave either. Because to go on living with such a lie afterward could have only the most destructive effect on everything else. But of course a man can never really liberate himself from anything, he leaves the prison into which he was propagated and born only at the instant of his death. We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can’t cope with this world we’re done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that
we’re living in
our own world, not in some previous world,
one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us. Beginning with our earliest flickers of intelligence we have to explore intently our chances of making this world, that’s been put on us like a worn, shabby suit of used clothes much too tight or much too large but in any case a shabby and torn and ragged and stinking outfit handed to us, as it were, off the world’s rack, we must explore the whole surface of our world and its subsurface, and keep probing it deeper and deeper, so as to discover our chances of making this world, which is not our world, our own after all, our entire existence is nothing but concentrating on such chances and on how, in what way, we’re to change this world which is not ours, ultimately to change it, so Roithamer.

And the moment of this change, such a moment is followed by the next andsoforth, must always be the right moment, so Roithamer. So that we can say at last, at the end of our life, that we have lived
at least for a time
in our own world and not in the given world of our parents. But ninety percent of us die without ever having lived in a world of their own, only and always in a world that was ready-made, presented and adapted to them by their parents’

generation, never, please note, in no way and never in their own world, they live and work out their lives in their parents’ world, not their own. Unless ten percent is too high an estimate for those who live in a world of their own making, not that of their parents? Isn’t it actually a much smaller percentage who’ve had a world of their own to live in? We must, from the first signs of intelligence, make the effort to change the parental world into which we have been conceived and born, into a world of our own, each for himself and each entirely for himself at the very first signs of intelligence, so that this effort that takes years, decades, will bring results, admittedly by overexertion,

“overexertion” underlined, so that we can say, at the end of our existence, that we existed in a world of our own, so that we will not have to go to our death in the disgrace of having existed only in the world of our parents, because that would be the worst disgrace of all. We must use our heads from the very first to get away from our parents, birth is not enough, it does just the opposite, we must do it ourselves by our own unyielding effort, always strengthening our willpower, so that we can say, one day, that we have lived in our own world, and not only in the world of our parents. I remember that my mother always used to lock me up, in summer, in the so-called southeast turret room with its total exposure to the sun, when she’d been unable to make me submit to her will on some point or other, no doubt I was hard to handle, just as there’s no doubt whatever that my parents never shied away from brutality, so she’d lock me up in the turret room which never was unlocked all summer long except to lock me up in it, it was opened for no other purpose, nor were the windows in the turret room ever opened, the window bolts had been immobilized by rust for decades, so the windows couldn’t have been opened, that’s where she locked me up where the air, the hot, sunbaked air, had long since been suffocated and thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead flies lay about on the floor and on all the furniture, heaps of dead flies, in this turret room with its terrible smell, with those windows covered from top to bottom with fly shit by all those flies in all those years of their hectic death throes, this room left in an indescribable state of filth was where she locked me up for hours on end until she had me
begging
her through the locked door to let me out, because I was choking to death. I remember how she wanted to hurt me and did hurt me, by telling me again and again that I was the last straw, that I was evil incarnate, at an age when such words can already have the most deadly effect on a child’s soul. And father said nothing, he devoted himself to my brothers, not to me, he always treated my brothers as his successors, while punishing me most of the time by always referring to me, from the time I was only three or four years old, as a foreign element in Altensam. Even after their death my parents can’t be transformed into an idealized image for me, not even a bearable image, I’ve nothing to support me in such a falsification, so Roithamer. And father’s greatest punishment, or shall I call it his last move in his chess game against me, was to toss Altensam at me in his will, Altensam! though he knew how I felt about Altensam, that it filled me with loathing, nothing but loathing.

When he did that, however, he also handed me the means of showing my appreciation, in fact and in full accordance with my character, by selling Altensam, selling it and destroying it and using the proceeds for the purpose I’ve set my mind on. My parents would turn in their graves (this remark is crossed out). It’s like dissolving a dungeon, to dissolve Altensam, so Roithamer. Are my hatred and my aversion, these two weapons still in effect against my parents today, also in effect against my brothers? I ask myself.

Yes, but to a much lesser degree, so much less as to be basically insignificant, so Roithamer. While our eye is on our work and on the riskiness and vulnerability of our work, we spend most of our time barely trying to bridge over the next time span just ahead, and we think that getting through the time just ahead is all we need to think about, not our work, let alone the complicated work that claims our entire existence. To get through the time itself, no matter how, is what we think, what we instinctively feel we need.

Beginning in childhood. How to get on with it, that’s what we keep thinking constantly, and yet most of the time it doesn’t matter a damn
how
we get on with it, only
that
we get on with it. Because we have to concentrate all our mental and physical forces on just getting along, without achieving anything beyond that, so Roithamer. Work, to bridge over time, no matter what work, our occupation, whether digging in the garden or pushing on with a concept, it’s all the same. Then we’re obsessed with an idea though we’ve barely enough strength left to go on breathing, torment enough in itself. We’re obligated to (do) nothing, so Roithamer, “nothing” underlined. When we were children, how they talked us into believing that we had a right to live only if we accomplished some sensible work, how they assured us that we had to do our duty. All of it a case of irresponsible parents, irresponsible so-called authorized educators, irresponsibly plaguing us. Stuffed into the same kind of clothes regardless of our different personalities, our different characters, marched to church, made to eat, made to visit people, so Roithamer.

Mother’s fixed idea that we brothers must always be dressed alike and appropriately for Altensam, whatever that was, and her equally fixed idea, always, that all three of us should always think the same, act the same, believe the same things, do or refrain from doing the same things, but I always did something else and I always refused to wear the same clothes as the others, which led to daily anticipations of apocalypse. We weren’t alike, never, so Roithamer, but neither was I, ever, eccentric, it’s not true that I was eccentric, though they never tired of calling me an eccentric, it was their way of slandering me, because I acted in accordance with my nature without concerning myself with the others and their opinions, I was denounced as an eccentric, I, who simply tried to live always in accordance with my own, absolutely not eccentric nature, all I did was simply to be true to my own nature, day after day, but that’s how I was turned into an eccentric from earliest childhood on, and they also always called me a troublemaker, rightly, in this case, because I really always did trouble their peace in Altensam, I troubled their so-called peace all my life, in the end I made it my mission to trouble their peace in Altensam, so the term troublemaker really suited me more than anyone. That we were something special because we came from Altensam, that everything having to do with us and Altensam was something special, is a notion I always fought off, there was every indication that we, my parents, my siblings, me, everyone in Altensam, were ultimately something special, of course in the sense that everything in the world is something special, but nothing is more special than anything else, everything is so equally special that there’s nothing further to be said about it, so Roithamer. The ideas our parents had of us, and the hopes which our parents attached to these ideas of us and which were not fulfilled, ideas are not fulfilled, so Roithamer, not ideas all by themselves, “not all by themselves”

underlined. We’d had to learn to play violin, play the piano, play the flute, partly because mother insisted and partly because each showed some talent for one or the other musical instrument, but all four of us hated these music lessons equally, music began to interest me, to fascinate me, only after I no longer
had to
practice it, once I could choose freely I became for a time, in fact for years, totally absorbed in music, I’d started to think that I must study music on a higher, on the highest, level, I’d even started on such a course of study but then gave it up again, because the formal study of music would have put me off, the formal study of music did not endear music to me, on the contrary, it affected me the same way as the compulsory music lessons at home in Altensam. Disobedience at Altensam had always been punished by inflicting deadly injuries on the psyche. I’d always lived in fear of that sunny-side turret room, but this special torture was reserved only for me, neither of my brothers was ever locked up in the turret room. For them, a slap in the face would be deemed enough, but me they locked in the turret room, the worst punishment of all, or else they said things about me that did me in, did me in emotionally and mentally, the worst possible punishment, of course. We were constantly forced to do things we didn’t want to do. But we’d always been told that our parents meant it for our
own good.
Every day, very often, we’d get to hear how much they meant it all for our own good, they never tired of repeating that phrase, it was one of their favorite maxims, time and again, we mean it for your own good (speaking to one or the other of us) until I felt more and more intimidated and humiliated, they could easily bully us, our parents, we were so naïve. Such a beautiful house, so artistic, so cultivated, our visitors always said, what could anyone say to the contrary? Such delightful surroundings, every piece of furniture a work of art, all the interiors they ever got to see the most splendid anywhere, all the vistas from Altensam opening on the loveliest, most farflung landscapes.