Because my remark that Roithamer had probably got the idea of building the Cone from Hoeller’s building his home in the Aurach gorge had brought no reply, whether in agreement or disagreement, for such a long time, from the Hoellers, I felt blocked about saying anything else, yet it was after all impossible to keep sitting in silence at table with the Hoellers, merely eyeing the family room, and anyway I felt that the Hoellers were waiting for me to come up with something, something to say, but I, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite, was not about to come up with another remark for them, it was still possible, I thought, that even after so long a pause Hoeller might have something to say in response to my previous remark or even that Hoeller’s wife, who’d been most attentive toward me, might say something, but what really puzzled me was that the children, who were probably not always so quiet and whom I knew to be not at all tongue-tied, hadn’t a word to say, though they had long since finished eating and drinking and were now sitting there, elbows on the table, poised as if only waiting for their father to give the signal to rise, so they could jump up and run out of the room. The darkness outside was now total, suddenly I heard the roaring of the Aurach again, fatigue couldn’t have been the only reason for Hoeller’s not talking, so I tried again to get a conversation going by making a second remark. Everything’s so very quiet now in Altensam, I said, after the death of our friend Roithamer’s sister and after his own death, nothing but closed blinds, I said, locked gates, everything makes it look like a house of death, the whole valley has been darkened even more under the impact of the two Roithamers’ deaths, wherever you go, that pervasive silence, this speechless wait-and-see attitude of all the people, which simply must be linked with the deaths of the two Roithamers, it was foreseeable, meaning from a certain point in time onward, I said, whereupon they suddenly all listened to me even more attentively than before, and I said that Roithamer’s sister had been doomed, that splendid creature, who simply couldn’t bear the fact of the Cone, that her brother had made his idea come true, to build the Cone for her, meaning for her alone and particularly in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, Roithamer himself had fully realized, when he came back to England after the Cone was finished and presented to his sister, that the perfected Cone could not actually be the greatest, in fact the supreme happiness for her, as he had believed, could have believed, but that it actually meant her death, because there can be no doubt whatsoever that Roithamer’s sister was destroyed by the creation of the perfect Cone, from the moment the Cone was finished, when it was presented to her, as I recapitulated the story for the Hoellers, she was suddenly a different person, at that moment she fell prey to a terminal disease, to this day no one knows what this terminal disease was, people like Roithamer’s sister tend to go suddenly into a decline, all at once at a certain moment in their lives, a moment naturally favorable to such a terminal disease, and they can then be seen slowly sinking deeper into sickness, developing a pathological eccentricity, little by little falling victim to this disease quite in accordance with their nature, because in reality, so I said to the Hoellers, Roithamer’s sister never believed that her brother could make his idea of building the Cone for her come true, she had always considered it a crazy, an unrealizable idea, but then she had underestimated her brother’s abilities and his toughness and his unyielding nature, though she loved her brother above all others, and so she had deceived herself about her own brother, who was closer to her than anybody. Roithamer, I told the Hoellers, was a man who wouldn’t let anything in the world deter him from whatever aim he had once set his mind on, nor was he a dreamer, because he was every inch a scientist, as well as being consistent and incorruptible in every way, he was a natural scientist and the very fact that he taught at an English university made him every inch a realist, I myself, I told the Hoellers, had never in my life met a man with a more down-to-earth head on his shoulders, no character more precise in his thinking and in making his will prevail.
Furthermore, Roithamer so deeply knew his sister, and never ceased from deeply understanding her anew, that it was unimaginable that he should not have foreseen the effect upon her of his finishing the Cone and presenting the Cone to her. A man of such equally far-ranging and deep vision should not have overlooked this, that perfecting and presenting the Cone to his sister must result in her death. The fact is that Roithamer’s sister had consistently refused to believe even in the planning of the idea of the Cone, not to mention the actual realization and completion of it, had in fact, as the Hoellers knew, always refused to visit the site of the Cone while building was in progress, although her brother had kept inviting her to visit the site, to habituate herself to it, as it were; he had tried to visit the site in the middle of the Kobernausser forest with her several times a year, but he never prevailed upon his sister to come because, I now told the Hoellers, she was afraid, afraid in all kinds of ways, not only with respect to the Cone but afraid for her brother, meaning that she felt a growing fear that was becoming nearly unbearable for her, as I know, the ways in which building the Cone was affecting her brother, inwardly and outwardly, caused her increasing anguish through a growing suspicion that the project would undermine his health and could, in the end, because of everything involved with the Cone, kill him, and now I see, as I said to the Hoellers, that the Cone has in fact destroyed them both, first the sister and shortly thereafter the brother. All this I said while staring fixedly at the two death notices on the wall opposite, and my listeners at the still uncleared table in the Hoeller family room were most attentive. From a certain unforeseeable moment on, young men, mostly those getting on toward thirty-five, tend to push an idea, and they push that idea so far until they have made it a reality and they themselves have been killed by this idea-turned-reality, I said. I see now, I said, that Roithamer’s life, his entire existence, had aimed at nothing but this creation of the Cone, everyone has an idea that kills him in the end, an idea that surfaces inside him and haunts him and that sooner or later — always under extreme tension — wipes him out, destroys him . Natural science or so-called natural science (Roithamer’s words), I told the Hoellers, had served as a preparation for this idea, everything in his life had served only as a preparation for the idea of building the Cone, and then the outward spur for building and realizing the Cone had been Hoeller’s building of his house, on the one hand, I said, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite me, the idea of building deliberately in the Aurach gorge, while on the other hand the idea of building right in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, in the one case to assert oneself at last in the teeth of all reason and all accepted usage here in the Aurach gorge, in the other case the same process by other means, but from the same motive, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest.
A man has an idea and then, at the critical point sometime in his life, finds another man who, because of his character and because his state of mind answers to that critical turning point in the other man’s life, brings that idea to fulfillment, finally perfects it in reality. Such a man with such an idea Roithamer undoubtedly was and he, Roithamer, just as undoubtedly found Hoeller at the critical point in his life, who made the fulfillment of his idea in reality possible, I said. And in the last analysis Roithamer’s Cone exhibited some striking characteristics of Hoeller’s house, as conversely Hoeller’s house did, of Roithamer’s Cone. The nature of the case was the same in both. But while Roithamer’s Cone had been his destruction, after his idea and his fulfillment of his idea had first, for good measure, killed his sister, Hoeller was still alive, he lived on not only in his idea, as people say about a dead man, a man killed and destroyed like Roithamer by his idea, which he had realized and fulfilled, but Hoeller was living on as an actual living man in his idea and in the realization and the fulfillment of his idea, namely the Hoeller house in the Aurach gorge, and there could be no doubt that Hoeller would go on living for a long time yet because he, Hoeller, unlike Roithamer, was not the kind of man to be killed off and destroyed by his idea andsoforth, no, Hoeller would ultimately be destroyed, like every man, by something else, not by an idea. While I was looking at the death notices, also at Hoeller’s wife, who was listening to me, and at the death notices above her head, I was thinking that they were expecting me to tell them, even though they were not asking, they were not saying a word, still not saying a word to ask how this disaster could have come about, but they were expecting from me, as one always expects from a person who is believed to have inside knowledge of something as yet unclear to oneself, believed to know the underlying and deepest reasons for it, an explanation of what they don’t know