was, and owing to this predisposition her character had kept pathologically hardening in the mold of her own tendencies, whether we wished it or not, it no longer mattered, we were going to be for the rest of our lives against each other, she against me and I against her, I’d be focused entirely on myself, she entirely on herself, concerned with our own interests and totally monopolized by these interests, we’d just play a polite charade with each other for hours, for days, for weeks, until all our differences, all the barriers between us, had come again quite visibly into the open between us, until Altensam, whatever it had become through the Eferding woman, however this mechanism of destruction came into motion again because of our mutual dislike, repudiation, this mutual hatred of ours, moving always not only to disturb us but to destroy us, so Roithamer, where everything repelled me as far as she was concerned and repelled her as far as I was concerned. Nevertheless both of us were always incapable of simply giving up seeing each other ever again, she’d write, inviting me home, to England, and I came from England to Altensam, as if something had changed, each time we’d said good-bye we did it in the expectation of never seeing each other again, of parting forever, because there was simply absolutely nothing uniting us, we had not a scintilla in common, except for disgust and dislike, nothing, yet we were not only unable to stick to our decision never to see one another again, but the intervals between trips from England to Austria, to Altensam, had actually become increasingly shorter in the last few years. And the ordeals to which we subjected each other, once I was back in Altensam, kept getting worse, in fact they were getting to be terrible ordeals because we had reached a high degree of natural ease in the art of tormenting ourselves, our mutual hatred went even deeper than that, and everything indicated the possibility of an even greater deepening of that hatred, our methods became more sophisticated with every one of my visits to Altensam. Still, it’s unimaginable, so Roithamer, with what a degree of mindlessness persons like the Eferding woman seem to be capable of existing, with what emotional callousness, considering that emotion and nothing else is all she has, her entire being set against everything, and takes the most antagonistic action every time. At first it was still possible for me to think that a certain shyness with regard to the life of the mind, to what is regarded as, after all, male intellectuality, had turned, in her, to outright disgust with everything intellectual, so Roithamer, but as time went on, and time had indeed accelerated the process once she indubitably had the upper hand in Altensam, her hatred had grown to the point that she had to hate not only paper covered with my script but every piece of paper, every kind of paper, she regarded paper as a foundation for mental activity, instantly aroused her hatred, it was as though her hatred of paper alone was enough to reduce her to total exhaustion every day, I often thought, pencils, pens, aroused an unimaginable hatred in her, not even to mention books, pamphlets, periodicals, she even hated newspapers, because newspapers were also printed papers which made them supremely dangerous and they were above all, as she thought, aimed at her, she’d hated papers all her life and had turned this hatred of papers, of all the papers in the world, into an actually boundless hatred of everything around her which was connected with these papers, and she’d been driven by this hatred all her life as by a mortal disease, or rather by her own, “her” underlined, mortal disease, on the other hand, as regards myself, I always had the feeling that I was lying in ambush for her, that I was setting her a trap, that I’d often given her cause to remember her hatred as a mortal disease and to show this hatred openly, that I set her so-called paper traps to catch her out in her hatred of paper, so that I could watch her open outburst of hatred, paper hatred, with malicious satisfaction, because there can be no doubt, so Roithamer, that I did take a malicious satisfaction in her hatred and all her extreme carryings-on, because her hatred was so extreme, her ways in general were so extreme, actually I’d let less than a couple of minutes pass before I started to criticize her, or at least looked her over critically, in other words, the moment I turned up in Altensam, and I always turned up abruptly, I’d already set her a trap, and when she fell into my trap, I criticized her for falling into my trap, I always lay in ambush to catch her in one or another of her repulsively feminine ways and then took her to task, not even two minutes went by after I’d arrived at Altensam before I’d picked on some trifle to criticize her for, because basically I disliked everything about her, or rather, because everything about her was nothing but repugnant to me, no matter what she basically did or didn’t do, whatever it was, I found it repugnant, no matter what she wore, for instance, I found it repugnant, whatever she said, whatever she thought, it was never anything but repugnant, that’s the truth, so Roithamer, to keep such facts to myself wouldn’t make sense, so I won’t keep these facts to myself, because these are facts that certainly characterize the Eferding woman and me, “certainly the Eferding woman and me” underlined. So I naturally always wondered how it could be possible for two people, who were in addition mother and son, not mother’s son but father’s son, leaving this out of account, however, how is it possible that these two people, who keep on tormenting each other constantly, with a truly unexampled ruthlessness, who feel compelled to torment each other to the very edge of madness, who do it every time and always do it again, and who keep hating each other more deeply and more ruthlessly, nevertheless go on seeing each other again and again? But the chances are that it was precisely these possibilities of mutual tormentings, this mutual hatred, this mutual readiness to be tormented, that kept drawing me again and again from England to Altensam, so Roithamer. Probably, so Roithamer, because I needed everything my mother, the Eferding woman, had in these last years turned into a horrible Altensam. And I did after all leave Altensam again at once each time, and took refuge, as I had every chance to do, in Hoeller’s garret, which began by being a books-refuge, a socalled books-and-papers refuge, for I had squirreled away in Hoeller’s garret every conceivable book and paper I could lay hands on and that could be of use to me, as well as all the books and papers I could do without, and I’d torn the pages I most valued out of these essential books and papers and tacked them on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, pages of Pascal, for instance, again and again, much of Montaigne, very many pages of Pushkin and Schopenhauer, of Novalis and Dostoyevsky, I’d tacked almost all the pages of Valéry’s M. Teste on the walls before I’d covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with my plans and sketches for building the Cone; to gain perspective I’ve always pasted or tacked all the papers important to me on my walls, even as a child I’d covered the walls of my room in Altensam with other people’s most important (to me) ideas, pasted or tacked on, so I’d first covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with the most important sayings of Pascal and Novalis and Montaigne, before I’d tacked them up and pasted them up with my sketches and anyway all kinds of ideas for building the Cone, and so I always could immediately clear out of Altensam and move into Hoeller’s garret and find refuge in Hoeller’s garret in those thoughts on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, the fact that it is possible for me to go to Hoeller’s garret where I always found everything I needed for my thoughts and reflections, all those thoughts of other men and through them, also all my own thoughts, every time, made it possible for me to leave Altensam without going to pieces, so Roithamer, the minute I’d arrived in Altensam I thought of nothing else but getting away from Altensam, because being with the Eferding woman was unbearable to me from the first moment, and so I went to Hoeller’s garret, quite often taking the detour over Stocket into Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer. Little by little I had stowed away all the books and papers I’d had in Altensam up in Hoeller’s garret, where they’d really be safe, for they were no longer safe in Altensam, all these exceptionally useful books and papers, not to say that they were probably indispensable to my life, I lived in constant fear that mother, the Eferding woman, would one day use all these books of mine as firewood, that she would stage a great bonfire of all my papers before all eyes, that is, before the eyes of my father and my brothers and my sister, one day, this was what I’d always feared, after all, but she had never done it, though my fear was justified, or else she hadn’t got around to it before I’d moved all my books and papers to safety in Hoeller’s garret, there, in Hoeller’s garret, I always thought in England, those books and papers are safe, now I needn’t worry from one minute to the next that they might be destroyed by my mother, the Eferding woman, Hoeller’s garret is where all these books and papers of mine belong, not in Altensam, where the atmosphere is antagonistic to them. And so the thought that I’d carried these books and papers of mine, not many but all the most important of them, to safety in Hoeller’s garret from my room in Altensam, while I was in England or wherever I was far away from Altensam, was always a good, reassuring thought. That my mother is capable of burning or otherwise destroying my books and papers, which I’d read and studied and worked through afresh again and again, that she is capable of suddenly destroying them, or of simply withholding them from me, specifically during my absence in England or elsewhere, has always been clear to me. While my mother and I had always tried, so Roithamer, during the first few minutes of my arrival in Altensam, to get along with each other, and had done all we could, even though it went against the grain, to make it work, we soon ended up doing it all only as. proof that we simply could not get along with each other, and so we had a chaotic situation, a situation no one could be expected to stand, we simply made existence a torment for each other, perhaps this had simply become a habit because by now we’d been together against our will too often, so the habit of mutual torture came to play the largest role in our encounters, but it was always, as I thought,